As progressives, I am comfortable assuming that we are all opposed to racism and would like to see it abolished. But I also think most of you will agree with me when I say that having a conversation about the topic and coming up with HOW to get rid of it is often frustrating. I would expect that most of you, like me, have entered those kinds of conversations only to see them end with anger, misunderstandings, accusations, and defensiveness that only seem to make the problem worse instead of better.
I think there are many reasons why this happens - not the least of which is that talking about racism requires self-reflection...something that is very difficult for us to do. But I also think that its partly a result of a lack of common understanding about the words we use and how we use them. While I claim no expertise on this issue, I'd like to write about some of the things I've learned from people along my journey to have this conversation and then hopefully learn from some of your reactions.
I believe that the first word we need to tackle in a conversation about racism is the word "race." A few months ago, our own Deoliver47 tackled this issue in a diary titled Teaching about race in the US. Part 1 (and I'm still looking forward to Part 2..hint, hint). In that diary, she shows us the history of the US census on the issue of race - then shares some pictures and asks us to identify the race of those in the photographs. The point I believe Deoliver is making in that diary is that race is a construct that has no bearing in genetics, but was instead developed to justify the causes of slavery and colonization.
Another great collection of information about this can be found at the website for PBS's series Race: The Power of an Illusion. In the readings supplied as background for that series, a list of Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Race is included. Here's # 7:
Race and freedom evolved together. The U.S. was founded on the radical new principle that "All men are created equal." But our early economy was based largely on slavery. How could this anomaly be rationalized? The new idea of race helped explain why some people could be denied the rights and freedoms that others took for granted.
While the construct of "race" was used to justify slavery (and genocide), the effects of racism have long outlived its legality in our culture. So we are left to define what "racism" means today. People often confuse racism with prejudice. Given the history of race in this country, I believe that is an inaccurate conflation. The truth is that we all prejudge everyday. Sometimes that works for us and sometimes it doesn't. But there is a missing ingredient in the idea that prejudice is racism...and that is the reality of our history and institutions that connect racism to people of color and the positioning of those who practice racism. At a workshop I attended years ago by the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond, racism was defined this way:
prejudice + power = racism
To understand this definition, you need to look at the institutional aspects of racism that have developed over the centuries in this culture. Sometimes those come in the subtle form of white privilege as was demonstrated when Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was criticized for taking her own family background into account on the bench and Justice Alito was praised for the same thing. But sometimes its not so subtle - as when we see the overwhelming disparity for people of color on every data measurement from poverty to health to education to involvement in the justice system. That data tells a story - one we still struggle to understand - about our historical and institutional discrimination against people of color. That is the "power" in the above definition of racism.
But of course, its not just institutions that are racist...people act out of racism as well. We all got a good dose of that last year from the machinations of the teabaggers and the birthers. Its relatively easy to spot the racism of things like this.
What's not so easy to recognize is the subtle racism of friends and allies. Usually that comes from a place of white privilege that allows us to be blind to the very real experiences of people of color in this country. As I said in that linked diary:
That's the crux of white privilege...thinking that what we've lived and experienced is a valid way to measure what other people have lived and experienced. And because whiteness has been the default for so long in this culture, many of us are not used to the idea that there's so much that we don't know and need to learn. Until we do - we're likely to hurt people and cause them pain out of our ignorance. I don't imagine that most of us mean to cause that kind of pain...but we do.
The real question then, as I see it, is not are we racist? The real question is what do we do when we are confronted with the fact that we have just done/said something that is racist? Alot of the time, what I hear is a defense based on something like this statement "I am not a racist!" To me, that is a deflection of the issue at hand as Jay Smooth explains so clearly in this video.
So to me...if we want to have this conversation, we need to stop talking about whether or not someone is a racist and start talking about the things we do/say that are racist. If we can do that - we might just be able to talk, listen, and learn instead of shouting past one another.