No. I am not saying that the 'typical white person' is a racist, any more than Obama did. And I suspect that everyone who was listening knew exactly what he was saying--That we invariably pre-judge strangers by their appearances.
We all do it. Black, white, Asian, whatever. Because prejudice (in the sense of pre-judgement) is a survival skill we are taught very early on.
And prejudice (in this sense) does not necessarily mean racism.
What do I mean? At the risk of tiptoeing through my own political minefield, let me explain.
Imagine yourself as a white person walking down an inner-city urban neighborhood when a group of young black males swagger towards you with the arrogant braggadocio of youth. They have their pants hanging low, ball caps on crooked, and are acting as if they own the sidewalk. (or, if you prefer, imagine yourself as a black person walking down a small town in rural Georgia when that same pack of males, only this time white with mullets, wearing NASCAR shirts and blue jeans and sporting confederate flag tatoos).
Now, unless you are an 'atypical' person, you are going to feel uncomfortable. Not because the individuals you see are of one race or another, but because of the sum total of the cues you have picked up. Which are (among others):
- Young males in a group.
- Aggressive behavior
- Dressed in a fashion you associate with thuggishness
- You're out of your environment
- Your race is different than theirs
These clues tell you that this encounter may lead to some sort of peril. And of them, the race of the strangers is only one part of the evaluation you are making of the situation.
Now, your brain tells you there's every chance in the world that they might not even notice your presence at all. Or care.
But you don't know this. And the unknown can be scary.
What you do know is that your very presence in front of that group of men could possibly be a flash point for unpleasantness.
You may find yourself doing something uncharacteristic--like crossing the street before you meet them, or ducking into a storefront. A reaction that 'comes out the wrong way'.
And while you do it, you ask yourself, "Am I a racist?"
But is this sort of behavior really racism? Or is it a manifestation of the realization that strong racial tensions exist in our society, and you are stepping into a situation where your mere presence could elicit a reaction due to the contempt strangers of another race may have for you, or the mutual distrust between strangers that is heightened by this racial divide.
You have pre-judged this group of men, found there to be a chance of unpleasantness that you wished to avoid, and you acted on that judgment.
You exercised prejudice.
Now ask yourself: Would you have done the same thing if the group walking towards you was still of the other race but was wearing business suits? If they were elderly women? If they were dressed as tourists and were snapping pictures?
If you are a 'typical' person, these latter scenarios would hardly raise an eyebrow. The visual shorthand we use to evaluate the safety of a situation wouldn't be triggered at all. The race of the other group wouldn't cause you discomfort.
But we don't like to admit, even to ourselves, that we would have used race to judge the first group of young males--that while the same group of males of your own ethnic group may very well have raised a few flags of caution in you, it was the racial difference that really makes the situation seem more dangerous.
Now there is an incredible variety of situations we find ourselves in every day--and they range in every possible spectrum from the simplistic example I posited above. And in many cases the social analysis you make is far more complicated and harder to describe. But in the end, in dealing with strangers, we invariably judge them by their appearances, because we have learned through our experiences that this is an effective way to keep ourselves out of trouble.
We would never begrudge anyone who won't let their kids play in a park where a creepy-looking guy in a trench coat was hanging out in for exercising prejudice. Nor someone who locks their car door when stopped at a traffic light and a disheveled man staggers down the sidewalk shouting at people who aren't there.
Prejudice, again in the sense of pre-judgement, is an essential skill that we all learn. And sometimes it overlaps uncomfortably with racial tensions. And especially so the more ignorant you are of the other.
But it is when the only clue a person needs to pre-judge someone is the color of their skin that you enter into the realm of racism. Racism is when this characteristic blinds a person to all other cues, and when this prevents that person from ever knowing the other for who they truly are.
I, like Barack, had the great good fortune to be raised in Hawai'i. (In fact, I could stretch it to even say, truthfully, that we went to school together, but that would imply some level of familiarity which does not exist.) In Hawai'i, racial tensions do exist, but they take on a much more multi-polar dimension that seems to greatly reduce the intensity with which they are felt as compared to on the Mainland. Perhaps the best evocation of this condition is in an essay penned by another schoolmate of mine, Allegra Goodman:
Six years before she taught my class, Mabel Hefty had taught a boy named Barack Obama who grew up to name her as his favorite teacher for her ability to make "every single child feel special." To Mrs. Hefty, special did not simply mean loved--special meant singular. This was a particularly strong message to her diverse students. Mrs. Hefty's students were Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, Korean, Tongan, white, and, more often than that, hapa, a combination of many races and traditions. On the surface, our classroom looked like a melting pot. A girl with honey blond hair, cafe-au-lait skin, and green eyes might say proudly, "I'm part Hawaiian, part Portuguese, part Chinese, and part Irish." And, yet, despite this melding of cultures--indeed, because of it--we were all struggling to define ourselves and find a place in the world. What did it mean to live in Hawaii--especially for those of us who had no native Hawaiian ancestry? Were we immigrants? Invaders? Americans?
[snip]
To envision a world where racial identity is more fluid, where men and women are more mobile, and where segregation is a thing of the past is not to envision a post-racial world. Obama knows this, as anyone who has lived in Hawaii must. The lovely tropical home of so many diverse people is not beyond distinctions--it is all about them. Tensions simmer between native Hawaiians and newcomers. The rich layered cultures of Polynesia, Asia, and America bump up against bigotry and ignorance, often voiced in racist jokes and sometimes expressed in physical violence.
It is a world both more harmonious and more discordant than the world in which I now live: The mainland United States.
Everyone who grows up in Hawai'i, where there is no single dominant ethnic group, has friends from all of the Islands races. And some that are all of the island races.
It is this deep realization of the superficiality of race that comes from living in such a society that seems, to me, to pervade Obama's words and actions. But he also learned another lesson that all Hawaiian children learn--
They also know that in the wrong part of town, around the wrong individuals, their race may be cause for ridicule, shame or aggression. That what is so invisible in one instance can become the only thing that is seen in another.
This is what Obama was getting at when he said his grandmother had reactions like a "typical white person". She sometimes had to use very little information to judge others and that this complex situational calculus can sometimes cause unfortunate reactions. If he were referring to his Kenyan grandmother and her reactions towards whites or the dominant Kikuyu tribe, he may have referred to her as a "typical Luo". Because it is typical behavior. It would be bizarrely atypical for a person not to factor racial differences into these (often unconscious) evaluations given the existing racial tensions that exist in their culture.
Would it have been more felicitous if he had referred to her as a "typical person"? Sure. But of course, the context was her past reactions to minorities, so the formulation was a natural one.
But everyone who heard him utter those words, in the context of the conversation, knows exactly what he was talking about. And they know someone they love who they would describe, if they could bear the honesty, in the same way.
And for most of us, that person would be ourselves.
Barack Obama, 1974.
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