How I Think About Racism
Growing up and living in America over the past 60 plus years I have toggled repeatedly between optimism that we are leaving our racist past behind, and pessimism that we will never be rid of it. Every time it seems we have put it in the rear view mirror, it roars up and sideswipes us. We have gone in one head-snapping moment from our first black President to a President who is not only himself a despicable racist but encourages and raises up racism in others. All too many of my fellow citizens are either eager to follow, or don’t care enough to reject, this kind of leadership.
Pessimism on this point is ascendant now across the land. One cause is the growing realization that prejudice is often held unconsciously or semi-consciously, and manifests itself in patterns of discrimination in policing and education and housing and on and on. People who are convinced they have no racial bias often act as though they do, especially when they are anxious or stressed. There seems no way out. What are we to do with all this?
Clearly for much of our history a majority of Americans grew up in a society steeped in racism. White Americans—and not just in the South—were explicitly taught, or absorbed by example, endless lessons about the inherent inferiority of African-Americans (and Native Americans, and Chinese, and more). They might not have been taught that it was permissible to treat African-Americans badly, but it would have been strongly implied. Family, friends, community leaders, and local press reinforced this point of view.
It is important that for much of this time racism was instated from both the bottom and the top. It was something you absorbed from your peers, but was also deliberately fostered by rich and powerful leaders for their own benefit and to keep poor whites and poorer blacks from making common cause. Educated authorities drove home these lessons with warped interpretations of the Bible or pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy.
It is not a sufficient excuse for acting badly to blame it on a bad upbringing, but it is a factor that needs to be considered. If someone is a murderer or a thief, we often, and properly, put some blame on factors outside the individual’s control. We look to childhood abuse or neglect, or extreme poverty, or an undiagnosed mental or learning disorder, as mitigating circumstances.
What we don’t typically say is, “well, they were brought up in a community where their parents taught them that murder and thievery were OK.” For the most part such parents and such communities do not exist. But if someone has racist views, it is often the case that their parents—and the broader community well beyond their parents—DID teach them that racism was OK. And via racism people easily learn to tolerate and even advocate murder and theft directed at people they see as inferior.
It is difficult for most people not to learn lessons that come from family and peers, are reinforced by people in authority, and are in their own self-interest. It takes a particularly strong person to resist. We can look back today on previous generations of Americans and understand regretfully that many of them shared in the taken-for-granted prejudices of their time and place. (There are people who because of their learning and sophistication should have known better: see Jefferson, Thomas.)
Today though, if you have racist views you have them in the face of most of what you will be taught in school and hear from figures in authority. For several decades the ‘official’ view, from (most) government figures, newspapers and major media, religious and business leaders, has favored racial equality. You cannot easily plead ignorance and the rest of us cannot and should not easily excuse you.
It is nevertheless true that there remain many families and sub-cultures that think otherwise and teach their young the same lessons as their grandparents and great-grandparents. The grooves of prejudice are deep and close to the surface. How do we judge those unfortunate enough to be raised this way? How do we judge ourselves?
I said earlier that racism in our history was both bottom up and top down. I think today the continued surfacing of discrimination and prejudice is mostly top down. Even as the dominant narrative has changed sharply towards racial equality, it has been easy for ambitious politicians from Wallace to Nixon to Trump to exploit racial bias to gain power. Today the leading voices in the Republican Party base their appeal on thinly-disguised shout-outs to white male fears of losing dominance. Stopping by any means necessary the long term shift towards more power for minorities and women is their central message. Much of their criticism of ‘elites’ and ‘Washington’ translates into anger at new cultural and political norms mandating greater equality.
Faced with this repeated bubbling up of racism, one response is to go on the offensive, exposing and confronting every instance, big and small. We (white people) are encouraged to uncover our own unconscious biases and be ready to jump on every tasteless joke or unthinking stereotype.
Introspection is always valuable, and sometimes thoughtless relatives or friends need correction. But in my view we need to be understanding of, perhaps even sometimes overlook, the garden-variety racism that is floating around in many Americans. It can’t be argued away with confrontations and criticism. Shaming and pillorying every minor manifestation (such as relentlessly exposing ‘micro-aggressions’ on college campuses) is counter-productive and deepens our cultural divide. Instead it needs to be delegitimized by aggressively and persistently calling out leaders in politics, in religion, in business, in law enforcement who are deliberately fostering these messages. Those people and their self-interest have to be relentlessly exposed. They have to be defeated in elections, ousted from their pulpits, voted off their corporate boards. Racial bias in policing and the courts is especially toxic and must be countered. Racial appeals have to be seen to not work. Once those leaders are discredited, racism will not vanish, but it will lose its force.
Trump is extraordinarily damaging because it is top cover from people in positions of authority that gives permission to ordinary people to act badly. It is crucial to counter and expose his racism and defeat him and his supporters at the polls. And their racism and prejudice must be seen to be a key reason for this defeat.
Just as urgently, we must do something about the conditions that make it easy to activate racial prejudice. Families and communities that are in decline—losing jobs, losing hope for the future—are ripe for appeals to race. Raising them up is the best way to blunt prejudice and keep it beneath the surface.
Education that is honest about our American past, and the ways that past shapes us now, is the best long-term corrective. Certainly my baby-boomer generation was raised on many lies and half-truths: that slavery ‘wasn’t that bad;’ that the Civil War was really about ‘state’s rights;’ that once we ended legal segregation we would quickly see full equality. Steps such as the removal of Civil War statues are vital to spark re-thinking and to send a message about what is acceptable in the public sphere. If we do this, future generations will be less susceptible to racist appeals.
My concluding thought is that racism and other types of prejudice don’t come only from our peculiar American history. It is, I think, a permanent part of the human condition that we are susceptible to being suspicious of people who differ racially or ethnically. There is plenty of racial and ethnic prejudice in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America. Everywhere it is a potential that can be activated by stress, fear, and greed, and is urged on by ambitious men who see it as a vehicle to gain power and wealth.
This is not an excuse: every bad or immoral act arguably is rooted in some ‘natural’ drive; we expect decent human beings to resist and control these drives. What it means, I would hold, is that we should not hope to ‘eliminate’ racism or think that it is some unique failing of Americans or white Europeans. What we can do is weaken it by making it a losing strategy for acquiring power.