How I Learned that Racism is Real

The problem with racism is that it's not a problem. Correction: for many white people it's not. For various reasons, we never have to think about it, we are rarely confronted with it. Therefore it doesn't exist. But the other problem with racism is that it does exist. And it's still tearing our nation apart. Here's how I became convinced.

this book was my eureka moment

Growing up in a completely white Upper Peninsula, racism was as foreign as black people. We are as diverse as a hockey team.  Yet oddly, even though none of us actually knew a black person, judging by the way we talked, there was plenty of racism going on. The N-word was used frequently and jokingly - old people and young. In high school, black jokes were on the level of 'yo mamma' jokes and a favorite pass time. This is called demonizing the Other; hating what you don't understand. It's a dangerous form of 'passive' racism. Still, by the time I left for college, I didn't give it much thought. If someone asked me about racism, I may have said that racism was overcome by Martin Luther King or something textbook like that. Correction: I actually did know one black man in Menominee. I actually had hung out with him on several occasions, but partly because he bought us beer. Still, perhaps having this initial connection started everything for me.

In college I took an African American Literature class, perhaps by accident. I read Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston. The scales began to fall off my eyes. I began to experience the world as a black person in history. I became interested in Martin Luther King Jr. I fell in love with his teachings, his writings, his speeches, his life and martyrdom. I listened to the "Mountaintop" speech completely enthralled, emotional, heart pounding. But still, I was studying the past. I was only half way there. I had the historical context, but now I needed to start interpreting current events in the light of past events.

Then, I found myself watching the inauguration of Barack Obama in tears. It takes a lot for me to cry, but the historical, symbolic and real significance of the situation was overwhelming.

What really brought me to the precipice - my eureka moment, the tipping point - was reading the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This book is heavily based on facts and statistics, from an author who was skeptical to begin with. The statistics regarding black men and prisons blew my mind. It brought everything together. Other books followed. Racism is institutional, widespread, and debilitating for millions and millions of Americans every single day. It's no person's fault and it's every persons' fault. The truth had set me free and it didn't look good.

Now I witness events like Ferguson and Eric Garner and I understand. Racism is a complex thing, but once you understand it, you see it in the big places and in the small places. It's a disease that has many symptoms. The choking of Eric Garner without consequences is a symptom of a much larger problem. There is no doubt that we have made meaningful progress, but there is more to be done. I'm not going to talk about solutions here, but I will say this: white people and black people (and Muslim people and minorities) need to connect on a massive scale. We need to live together, work together, worship together, share power together. We never integrated.

Book Review: Dog Whistle Politics

http://www.kpl.gov/blog/Default.aspx?id=15032395980&blogid=1766

the Varieties of Racism

I've been reading a fantastic book (Dog Whistle Politics) on the coded racial language that politicians use to scare people and get votes (specifically, how Republicans are able to get poor white people so scared that they will vote against their own interests).

Hate
Actual hatred or animosity. The Klu Klux Klan, for example, when they were hanging black people from trees. Simple, obvious, crazy, gets all the attention; yet it's the least common nowadays. Do you know many people that actually hate black people? Didn't think so (or at least they won't admit it).

The sad thing about this form of racism - actual hatred - is that our Supreme Court has adopted it as the only kind of racism...good luck proving that your employer actually hates you because you're black. According to Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), this has made the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 impotent and meaningless.

Institutional
The American prison system is the best example (read The New Jim Crow if you want your mind blown). If you look at the shocking statistics of African American men in our prison system, you can only come to one reasonable conclusion: the entire criminal justice system is, so to speak, racist. Or, another way to put it, African American men are disproportionately represented in the prison system (and that's a huge understatement). But it's a tricky thing. One person is not behind this kind of racism, it happens slowly, and it's hard to track down. But it's effects are quite obvious; a racist tree will produce racist fruits; whether it's housing, jobs, or government programs.

Unconscious
If a white person walks by a black person on the street, typically something will happen in their brain that resembles fear. This is sad be true (I have read that several experiments were done on this). In America, we have been taught to fear black men; and so we do. It's nothing that we did, it's simply the air we breath, the culture we live in, what we learned from media, and the long history of oppression that we inherited. As Carl Young might say, racism is part of our Collective Unconscious. And that is a scary thing.

Nixon used race as a political tool, called the Southern Strategy

Strategic/Political
Perhaps the most insidious of all is when politicians use racism for political gain (again, utilitarian thinking rears its ugly head). According to the book I'm reading, both parties are to blame but especially the modern Republican Party, which was essentially built on a racial platform (called the "Southern Strategy"). Have you ever wondered why poor white people vote for a Party that gives tax cuts to the rich and slashes social spending? Whether it's the coded racial language of politicians, the race-baiting of right wing media, or the non-stop fear mongering about Muslims and terrorists - white people are scared shitless.

Natural?
Some people make the argument that we evolved to naturally discriminate against human beings that look different than our tribe. I'm skeptical, and I'm not sure if this is widely accepted, and I don't know how much science this is based on, but I do know it's out there. Some people explain the happiness of Norway and Sweden, for example, by pointing out the fact that they all look similar. People obviously point to their progressive tax code and liberal laws as well. Interestingly, racism seems to be infecting these countries as outsiders trickle in.

I suppose I can see an evolutionary advantage to being skeptical of "outsiders"--that is, people that clearly are not part of your own cooperative survival group--but race is a different concept all together.