Ed Kilgore’s entire TPM column on race, racists and racism is worth reading but this paragraph gets to the heart of the matter, politically speaking:
Like a lot of bad ideas and bad behaviors, “racism” is not a purely subjective phenomenon. There are arguably racist political strategies, racist messages, and racist policies that can be advanced by non-racists. Determining what is objectively racist is a matter of judgment, empirical evidence, and ultimately opinion. To use an example: during the 2012 presidential campaign the Romney/Ryan campaign heavily ran an ad accusing the president of “gutting” work-based welfare reform. The factual case for the ad’s allegations was incredibly weak, and it’s not as though “welfare reform” had been an issue earlier in the campaign, or indeed in any presidential campaign since 1992. No amount of white-wash can eliminate the strong impression that this ad was intended to persuade white voters that the first black president was walking back his party’s commitment to make welfare beneficiaries — perceived as primarily minority members — work. But does that mean Mitt Romney is a racist, subjectively speaking? I doubt it very seriously, but in the end, who cares?
In politics, what people do matters more than what they say. That’s even more true when what people say is an explanation of their own motives. (“I’m not a racist because….”)
That’s not the point. The point is—and Kilgore makes it better than I can (really, read the whole thing)—some actions are racist; the interior motives and beliefs of the actor don’t really matter.
Besides, given our history over the last, say, six centuries (since the Portuguese began sailing south of the Sahara to western Africa), proving whether someone “really is” (or is not) racist is, in the end, irrelevant.
Racism is in the cultural air we breathe. It’s quite literally impossible to have grown up in, or lived a number of years in, the United States and not have absorbed into one’s skin some of the racist particulate matter in that air.
There are no coal-fired power plants in Maine. Yet, if you were to analyze lung tissue from any long-time resident of that state, you’d find microscopic pieces of the exhaust from burning coal. That’s because Maine is downwind from the industrial Midwest, where for over a century most power has come from burning coal. Even with scrubbers to comply with the Clean Air Act installed on every coal plant, pollution from those plants comes out of flue-gas stacks built hundreds of feet tall so as to disperse the remaining pollution more widely.
Those stacks work. Well enough that trace amounts of the particulate exhaust from burning coal in, say, Montgomery OH get dispersed 1,000 miles away and end up being inhaled by children playing tag on a schoolyard in Bangor ME.
Republicans (or anyone) protesting that “I’m not a racist” is, in the end, about as relevant as a lifelong Mainer protesting “I’m not polluted”. We’ve all inhaled the cultural air polluted by racism. It’s what we do about it that matters.
Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com
