A lot of times in the conversation about race I hear this:
"My ancestors came here after slavery was over, we didn't benefit."
"Black people need to take responsibility."
"Look at the (insert hip-hop caricature pathology here)."
"Asians succeed, why can't they?"
"(Insert black guy here, probably nation of Islam) hates white people, see, they're racists too!"
This is my answer.
First, hats off to those who have already covered some of these issues from more personal perspectives. Here and there's been at least one person who touched on issues of power here.
This is a look at the issue of race from an impersonal perspective. And we need that. Because until we get out of thinking about racism as a problem of the heart we won't get anywhere.
What do I mean? I'm going to say something here that will shock a lot of white people. Racism isn't about your feelings. I don't care how nice you are to black people or the local Latino guy who mows lawns.
Black people, Asians, Latinos -- none of them cares what you (white people) think.
Because it isn't about what you think in your heart. This is about consequences. Real stuff that happens.
There's a real-life story that illustrates this perfectly: Charles Stuart.
If you're from Boston, you might remember the name. He said he was carjacked and that a black man with a deep voice was the culprit, who shot him in the stomach after shooting his eight months pregnant wife.
What happened? If you were black, male and a resident of Mission Hill you were a suspect. Dozens were picked up for any reason the cops could come up with.
It turns out Charles Stuart killed his wife, and before he could be brought to justice he took a swan dive off the Tobin Bridge.
Now fast forward a few years. It's 1995. The Murrah building in Oklahoma City is a ruin. One hundred ninety five people are dead. Many of them children.
How many white people were picked up off the streets for questioning? How many white neighborhoods have had to cower as the police showed up breaking down doors? Do any white people reading this tell their children to fear the police? Do you worry that a black cop is going to stop your son and maybe shoot him for "suspicious behavior?"
Yeah, I thought not.
Under those circumstances, you can't say that black people especially have anywhere near the power white people do. And while some may hate white people, the fact is a black guy who said a white man shot his wife isn't going to see a lot of kids from tony neighborhoods in Brookline -- or even the poor white neighborhoods in Southie -- picked up for questioning.
That is why there is no such thing as a black racist. Racism isn't about your hurt feelings. It's about raw, naked power.
Lots of black people may be blisteringly angry with white people. First, they have a lot of pretty darn good reasons. But no matter how much they may dislike white people, they will never be in a position to hurt white people the way they can be hurt. It's that simple.
Without power, all the anger towards white people, all the animus, amounts to exactly nothing. That's why Louis Farrakhan may be able to bluster, but there won't be a whole lot he can do about it.
Black racists? It's like talking about the danger of a pit bull with his legs cut off. He can bite you if you stick your hand close enough, but it's otherwise just plain silly.
What if your ancestors came here after slavery was ended, or after segregation was ended?
Let me tell you something: there is a whole lot of stuff you get if you are from any country where the population is European, for no other reason than you have whiter skin.
When the recent immigrant from Britain, Ireland or France comes here and applies for a job, he or she gets a far different reception from the black or Latino citizen. The people who come here from Western Europe, as immigrants don't face anywhere near the hassles that people from Asia, Latin America or Africa do, and the cops aren't stopping them on the street. Now, pretend you are an American citizen of Latino descent and you are walking around in a border state near a police checkpoint. Hope you brought your passport.
In New York City the police have managed to shoot one African immigrant (Amadou Diallo) and sexually brutalize another (Abner Louima). How many Italians did this happen to? Oh, right. Italians supposedly have a reputation for mob ties, but the local cops seem to be able to refrain from killing so many. Russian immigrants seem to be able to avoid police bullets somehow.
Then there's the big elephant in the room: America wouldn't be the kind of place people would flock to without 200 years of slave labor contributing mightily to economic growth. New York City, Annapolis, Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans and Mobile all benefited directly from the slave trade and the goods that slaves made. They wouldn't be the cities they are today without it.
And then there was the post-slavery ethnic cleansing of African-Americans from certain neighborhoods in cities across America. If you live in a white suburb, odds are it was made that way by moving black people out (usually violently, as in Missouri) or by simply never letting them in. Levittown, Pennsylvania is a fine example of this.
Here's a neat little history of the kind of thing I am talking about. Dave Neiwert is someone every progressive should read.
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/...
So, to those of you who came from Europe (and I mean any time since 1900) you probably got to live in that nice place in Queens because local blacks weren't allowed. You probably got that job interview because you didn't have a "black" name, voice or skin. The concept of being innocent until proven guilty means something real to you, whereas to many nonwhites it is too often a cruel joke.
So yes, you benefit from the past and present treatment of non-white people. No pass for you.
But what about Asians? Have they succeeded by just being hard workers and having some cultural difference from black and Latin people?
Well, no.
There's a long, sorry history of the treatment of Asians in this country, and the internment of Japanese Americans is only part of it.
But the overachieving Asian is stereotype is born of two things: self-selection and deliberate blindness.
First self-selection. Immigration from China and Japan was basically stopped for thirty years after the Chinese Exclusion Act. So by the time World War II rolls around, those people are basically Americans. Many Japantowns and Chinatowns across the Western U.S. were just starting to see some prosperity (granted, "prosperity" during a depression is relative) by the outbreak of World War II.
The internment did a lot of damage. But it wasn't irreparable, and the scattering of many Japanese around the country meant they could get jobs without discomfiting whites. One Japanese guy hired is okay, more than that and they are taking your jobs. Japanese neighborhoods on the West Coast never did regain their vibrancy, though, even as Japanese-Americans tried to rebuild their lives.
After World War II the situation changes. There wasn't a lot of immigration from the Pacific Rim until the 1960s and 1970s. People from India didn't start showing up in large numbers until the 1980s. And those people had a lot of built-in advantages.
The people that came from China, Korea, and the Philippines in recent years aren't unskilled workers. Most were professionals in their own country, and in many cases have a higher population of college-educated people than whites.
The Philippines produces many of the nursing caregivers in the US, and that job is often an entrée into the middle class, as well as requiring a college degree.
Most Chinese that show up here are professionals; the U.S. Census numbers show that fully half of the Chinese population in the US has been to college, and that is better than the white population. Half are in management occupations, rather than low-level service jobs.
That means educational achievement among the children can be expected to be similarly high. The same applies to people of any race or ethnicity: if the parents went to college, odds are the kids will go to college also.
So also with South Asians (people from India and Pakistan). Fully two-thirds have a college degree, nearly three times the rate of whites. Given that most were born outside the US, that's pretty staggering. Here's some more from the census bureau.
When a big chunk of the arriving population has a college degree already, it's a lot easier for the ones that come here without one to use that cultural capital to their advantage. Every Indian community has a few people who went to college one can ask about how to do things; that isn't as true among the Hmong, Vietnamese or Cambodians. Cultural capital here is stuff like knowing how to sign up for that SAT class, or how to ask for the right person for an admissions interview.
When you ask a black person about why they can't succeed like Asians, you're really asking why they can't magically figure out how to game the system the way most college-educated people can.
Black people were systematically prevented from getting into college for generations, leaving only the historically black colleges to take up the slack. There was no way that would ever be enough to produce the gigantic move into college that happened for white ethnics after World War II. Add segregated schools to the mix and it's amazing that so many black kids go to college at all.
Think about it: the generation that fought in World War II probably couldn't go to school, and was prevented from getting the best jobs. But they kept working, hoping that over time it would change. Their children were able to go to school in greater numbers, but still nowhere near that of whites. De jure segregation was ended, but the damage to school systems was still evident, and it took another twenty years for many districts to get funded at the same rate as their white counterparts, and even now most still don't. It took until the 1970s -- when I was in grade school -- for schools in Boston to desegregate, under a forced court order.
Now the next generation -- those born in the 60s and early 70s -- is expected to act like that all disappeared. And you're comparing them to a population of people that has more college degrees than white people do.
Um, no.
White people get stuff -- just for being white. And some of that stuff is the very rights we all hold dear.
When the white population is willing to stand up and face its own history, when a black man, or a Latino, can walk the streets and feel that calling the police is a good idea when he's in trouble, then we can talk about black racists and the dangers of La Raza.
And whether a few white folks feel hurt by the behavior of some black people, or threatened, is simply besides the point. If I hear another anecdote about how black students at X university self segregate I will scream.
So let's say it again: It's the power, not your feelings.