[promoted by BooMan]
America is haunted by the ghost of its racist past. The vast majority of Americans today are not racists and are justifiably upset if they are accused of racism.
Yet, despite the absence of racists, racism persists. Blacks earn less than whites–and not just because of poorer education. I’m talking about blacks and whites doing the same jobs, with the same level of qualifications. Adding insult to injury, white people’s money goes farther. They get loans more easily, get mortgages and buy houses more easily, live in neighborhoods where retail prices are lower, etc. Middle class blacks have far less in savings than middle class whites with the same income levels.
On another front, blacks use drugs at the same rate as whites, but get arrested far more often. Of those arrested, blacks go to trial more often. Of those who go to trial, blacks are sentenced more often. At every step of the criminal justice process, blacks are treated more harshly, and are given less chance at rehabilitation, instead of punishment. As an end result, blacks have lost the right to vote for felony convictions at rate 7 times that of whites. In fact, if there were no felony disfranchisement, Al Gore would have won Florida in 2000 by thousands of votes–despite everything done to steal the election.
I could go on and on, or I could dress this up with specific figures and links. I’ve done that in past. But I don’t think I need to do that here and now. We all know these things are true.
The point is not in the details here, but in the pattern–the pattern of racism without racists, the pattern of racist results without overtly racist intentions. This pattern persists in part because most people are unaware of it–and Katrina has suddenly made them aware, if only dimly, only partially, nonetheless, it has made them aware.
The cover for this form of racism is the invocation of equality, used as a cover for unequal treatment. “Equal opportunity, not equal outcomes,” is a favorite way of expressing this. But old-fashioned racism pretended to equality as well. “Separate, But Equal” was the way that Plessy vs. Furgeson expressed it. It was the official legal credo of segregation. It pretended to be egalitarian. It was a lie. So, too, is “Equal opportunity, not equal outcomes,” as seen in the pattern described above.
The fundamental logic of the two systems is the same. If one believed in “Separate, But Equal,” believed it was true in fact as well as right in principal, then it followed that all black failure was the fault of blacks themselves. Likewise, if one believes in “Equal Opportunity, Not Equal Results,” believes it is true in fact as well as right in principal, then it follows that all black failure is the fault of blacks themselves.
People have a tremendous capacity for self-deception–even when it directly harms them. Segregation survived for seven decades as the law of the land in part because blacks accepted it, and accepted leaders engaged in self-deception, they accepted the harms they experienced in everyday life (after all, it was preferrable to getting themselve killed for being “uppity”), until a credible movement to change things finally gained critical mass.
If black Americans had some complicity in their own subjugation (and that’s the “beauty” of subjugation, it gets inside the head, inside the very souls of those it subjugates, there is nothing at all unique to the African-American experience in this regard) then surely there is no special sting in noting that white Americans have some complicity in the ongoing racism of today. The difficulty lies in getting this idea across without rousing vigorous denials, centered in people’s honest conscious intentions.
Katrina’s aftermath has given us an opening. It has allowed thousands, perhaps millions of white Americans to act individually and collectively to help victims of Katrina, large numbers of whom are black. They have put into action values which are all to seldom connected with any real impact on the world. They have in a sense realized their own non-racism, if not anti-racism. And this makes it easier to talk about race openly, because we can acknowledge that, and say, quite honestly, “We know that you are not consciously racist. We can see that in how you have responded to Katrina.” And we will not be the least bit false or condescending in saying this. We will simply be acknowledging the truth.
At the same time, they themselves have witnessed the undeniable neglect, and unequal treatment of the worst-off black victims of Katrina. They don’t have to be given sets of abstract facts and figures to translate into something concrete they can relate to. They have seen it for themselves with their own eyes.
And so this is a teachable moment. It is a time that allows for an honest discussion about how racism, covered in denial, is still alive in America today–hurting all of us by dividing our nation, even though it obviously hurts black people much deeply and directly. And more than that, it allows for an honest discussion about what to do to break through that denial and eradicate that racism, once and for all. So that, in the words of Langston Hughes
- “America was never America to me,
And yet I swear this oath- America will be!”
People have a tremendous capacity for self-deception–even when it directly harms them.
That ought to be tattooed on everyone’s forehead at birth.
I’ve written and deleted several pages of “comment” to this diary, because it is such a complex and difficult subject for both blacks and whites.
I read shanikka’s comment over at MLW, and I hope she continues the discussion with you.
I think much of the problem is that many whites define “racist” and “racism” differently from most African-Americans and we end up talking past each other, with emotion and frustration preventing real communication.
For far too many whites, “racism” is something engaged in by KKKer’s, Aryan Nations, and White Power adherents. To suggest that “racism” – defined this way – has anything to do with them makes them angry and insulted. It’s as if you accused them of hiding a white hood in their closet. Of course, most white people do not think, believe, or espouse that kind of hatred, which is what I think you mean by “The vast majority of Americans today are not racists and are justifiably upset if they are accused of racism.”
On the other hand, African-Americans see “racism” as the subtle and pervasive discrimination, unconscious assumptions, and stereotypes that lead to the reality that you describe at the beginning of your diary. They are justifiably angry and frustrated that so few whites see it.
We have to find a way to get past this fundamental miscommunication though, or we are truly doomed. Thanks for trying to get the discussion going. shanikka doesn’t seem to be buying your distinction between “racists” and “racism,” but for what it’s worth, this white person thinks it’s a place to start. Both sides of this discussion need to start with trying to understand how the other side defines the terms.
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
I agree, and want to take this further. The difference in how whites and blacks see racism is itself a product of racism. My situation is this: I see racism in “black” terms, but I need to reach people who see it in “white” terms, or else I am only, in the end, posturing as more enlightened than them, and not really doing anyone any good.
How I move forward is by making a further distinction, between producers and consumers. Producers keep racism going by turning every discussion of racism into an attack on the good intentions of the consumers. This is the weakpoint we need to attack–the difference between producers and consumers. We need to focus on reaching the consumers at a deeper level than the producers do.
The best way I can explain it is with two references I just used over at My Left Wing, in respnse to Shannika’s latest comment. The first is Martin Lyther King’s speech, “The Drum Major Instinct” where he says:
That’s what King had to say about his jailers.
The second is Bob Dylan’s song, “Only A Pawn In Their Game”, where he writes:
This song was written about the mentality of Medgar Evers’ assassin.
As I said at My Left Wing, neither King nor Dylan was condoning the actions or attitudes of the poor whites they were speaking of. But they were reaching out to understand them, to build bridges that they might one day walk across.
I say, that day is come. That day is today. That day is now. But we must meet them on that bridge, not attacking them for still being on the other side. After all, that is where they were born. They were falsely taught it was promised land. We should be welcoming them out of Egypt land, not driving them back into it.
and I’m on board with it. Please don’t mistake my ensuing comments as discouraging.
What you are asking (white) people to do is to think critically about their unspoken assumptions. About their culture. About things that are and have always seemed to be “natural.”
This is hard, painful work even when a person WANTS to make that journey. A person who does not want to make that internal journey of dismantling a lifetime of surety will not go there, and will always be easy pickings for, as you call them, the producers of the racist system.
And as your MLK sermon points out, the producers aren’t even in the game to produce racism per se. They’re all about maximizing their own power, and they’ve found that the key to keeping the lower classes down is to divide them through racism. Racism is the producers’ tool just as much as poor whites are, just as much as black slaves used to be.
So to really undo racism, really entice people to cross that bridge out of Egypt, it isn’t even enough for them to acknowledge their internalized racist assumptions and open their eyes to the continued reality of racism. They’ll have to also get on board with the socialist revolution!
The reality you are inviting well-meaning people to join you in is not an easy or pretty reality. So what’s the motivation for going there? I often feel this way when I’m teaching college students; learning to think critically about yourself, your family, your hometown, your nation, your culture, your desires and aspirations — it can be a crushing misery. Why on earth should any student want to follow down the path I am leading them on? Ignorance is bliss, especially when it comes with automatic privileges. I hold the power of giving out As and Fs, and most of them still won’t go there if they can avoid it. What are you offering the willfully blind in exchange for their comforts?
My sister’s a college professor, so I know better than to offer you any easy answers about how to get students to do anything. But this is probably the one question she asks herself the most–what can I do to get them to question what they’ve always taken for granted? And I think that’s the best answer I can give you for your specific situation–just keep asking yourself that question.
That said, I have several thoughts that have general application:
(1) For Christians, there is the motivation to “get right with Jesus”–and it has nothing to do with gay marriage, or with Revelations. It has everything to do with the Sermon on the Mount.
(2) Christian or not, there is the power of parables. It is much easier to recognize injustice, if it is first presented in parable form, about some other person, not about the one you are talking to.
(3) Situational learning. People are embeded in their lives. But they can also find themselves embeded in exceptional circumstances. Teachers have made use of this in various ways, and I’m sure you’re familiar with some of these. The week after Katrina, elite white reporters found themselves embeded with poor black hurricane victims. Some remarkable learning took place. There are actually a lot more of these situations in miniature form than most of us realize. Learning to recognize them, and the teaching opportunity they represent is a skill we should all work to develop.
(4) Just be ourselves. Many of us go around most of our lives keeping ourselves in, censoring ourselves, not being outspoken about what we believe. You don’t have to be nasty or pushy, or inappropriate to let people know where you stand. We need more shining examples. And we need more shining examples that we already have not to get hung up on false modesty. Being honest about who we are also means sharing what a struggle it has been for us as well.
that sums up the problem really well. I know that as I looked at the REAL history of this culture, as I read about Sand Creek and Wounded Knee and Tulsa and the slave markets of the south, I ended up with a serious case of misanthropy.
Needless to say, it’s not a journey that many people want to make.
I work with nice white people who would never think of themselves as racist, but when alleged gunshots were fired on the helicopter, I heard over and over, “I just don’t understand those people; it’s like they don’t want to be rescued.”
Had someone fired from a window of the twin towers, my co-workers would never have reacted that way, because they don’t see non-people-of-colour as a monolithic group. They would have been horrified that the victims were already in danger, and now they’re threatened with a crazy sniper, too.
The inability to see black people as individuals is racism, but, as you say, name calling will bring nobody over. All I could do was suggest how frightening it would be to have gunfire to contend with on top of so much suffering, grief, pain, loss and abandonment.
The learning opportunity is for the whole race of us – the human race. It’s easy to see racism in the people that advertise it, but it’s real hard to find it within yourself. I grew up a privileged white princess and see so many more coming up now. It doesn’t necessarily come from parents, it’s the world we see. Our work now is to change our culture so we stop teaching it to the children. Change the expectations we build. Make the small changes in your own life, and confront the perpetrators of evil. It really is about “The content of our character.”
Many Americans are still racist. They aren’t the kind of racists we see in the old black-and-white newsreels, or gathered at a Trent Lott fundraiser at a Citizens’ Council meeting.
Let’s define our term. What is a “racist”? Racism is a form of prejudice, which simply means to prejudge. These prejudgements can come from personal experience, upbringing/schooling or religious convictions. Racists are simply people who prejudge a person or group of peoples’ actions based upon the perceived race.
Plainly, the eagerness w/ which many whites lept to believe the lurid tales of rape and pillage in the streets of NOLA are rooted in an inherent racism. There is no requirement of intent to be racist. It’s burned into us by generations of stories and media images. We hear about Watts, about South Central after the King verdict, but how many people know of the rapine and pillaging mobs of white service men who terrorized the city of San Francisco on VJ Day 60 years ago? How about Rosewood, or the white mob that destroyed the black section of Tulsa? As I highlighted here, people, regardless of race, will generally band together in the midst of tragedy: the looting comes in the aftermath, and is generally class-driven, not race driven. Yet still, white talk radio and the mainstream press quickly believed the worst of their black fellow citizens. Why is that if not for racism?
Every time a bank officer or insurance agent enforces the tilted actuarial tables to redline a black citizen or business, they are acting in a racist manner. It might make us feel better to call it “institutional,” but the agent or officer KNOWS what they are doing, what they are perpetuating.
It is sad that we don’t want to look in this mirror and face our original sin as Americans, to face the way we still perpetuate it, even if we are doing it with active intent. When our political culture shrugs are rampant disenfrancisement, we are perpetuating racism. When we blame deteriorating schools on the children within and their overworked, stressed out parents, we are perpetuating racism. When we blame suburban kid’s choices on “hip hop culture” or “thug culture” … we are practicing racism.
We can’t move past this and be a fully integrated society until we confront and understand this truth about ourselves.
My 16yo stepson and I were discussing these issues at breakfast the other day. He’s seen me completely, utterly melt down in rage and despair and frustration over the conditions in NO and the media coverage. In his own youthful innocence, he was very slow to grasp that the government was criminally slow to respond, and not easily convinced by my insistence that a part of that crime was fueled by racism.
What I’m trying to teach my stepson is that we live in a racist culture, and that culture is inside our heads in ways that make us all, unavoidably, racist in our thinking, our assumptions, our kneejerk reactions. But we need not be bigots, which I define as racists who are proud of it. We can work against our own and others’ racism in ways both small and large.
But the hardest thing of all to tackle is the vague indefinable “I know it when I see it” aspects of racism. Because you can’t make someone see racism. I’m having this debate with a good friend on another board — she insists that the only color that mattered re. Katrina was green — money, social class. She will not grant my contention that if the Convention Center occupants had been mostly white, the armed guards on the bridge out of town would not have turned them back. It seems so obvious to me, and to many others, that a large, desperate crowd of African-Americans is seen first and foremost by power structures as a security threat and only in distant second as a humanitarian crisis. But people who won’t grant that racism still exists can always justify people’s racist behavior as due to some unrelated, accidental factor. And you can’t force them to see what they are blind to.
I think what the discourse on post-Katrina events needs most of all right now is all the articulate, angry, black voices we can find to tell their stories and connect the dots deliberately and insistently. I hear “white liberal guilt” strains of racism all over the place right now — have my own chorus of it going in my own head, since I am a white liberal who feels a great deal of self-contempt these days. And I see MSM images of destitute, walking-wounded, shell-shocked African-Americans, usually expressing gratitude for being warmly welcomed to a new city and given food and clothing. I don’t see many articulate, angry people of color speaking to broader forums yet.
It seems to me that a great many people stranded in NO were not homeless, jobless, penniless. They were largely working poor, proud to be gainfully employed in skilled and even professional trades. I’ve seen so many TV interviews with evacuees who lost absolutely everything, including loved ones, and the first thing on their minds is finding a job so they can get their kids out of the Red Cross shelter. These are not helpless people, and yet we continue to talk about the ways that the hurricane has revealed endemic, generational, inescapable poverty living in our midst. We’re not unpacking what “poverty” means in twenty-first-century American cities. It’s still being used as a codeword that is interchangeable with “black” or “minority.”
Anyway. That’s my two cents, and then some.