Several recent diaries on race that have centered around the Wellman definition of racism have, sadly, descended into rather ugly 'blamism' flame threads, rather than encouraging a dialogue that might actually prove useful, rather than merely provocative. While I may well be one of the worst people to write on race relations on site, I feel obligated to at least give the ideas one more shot, since I was at first vociferously denouncing them, then later encouraging the person who most recently brought them up to try diarying again, from a different angle to see if actual communication could take place rather than people merely talking past each other and getting hung up on single facets of the ideas presented. I'm not crossing my fingers that I'll get any better reception, but who knows.
First and foremost: This is not a bash white people diary.
I'm a 'white people' myself, and I'm not writing this out of any feelings of 'guilt'. My ancestors in all likelihood did engage in slavery, but not of blacks in the States. Much more likely was that their victims were Scots, Angles, Celts, Teutonic types and other Scandinavians. From what little I can gather of my ancestry, my direct ancestors didn't arrive in the States til after the civil war, so were not directly involved in the US slave trade. Nevertheless, I still was born with the subtle advantages a light skin grants in the States.
That aside, let's start with the part that seems to have almost universally generated the incoming flames on the previous authors. The Wellman definition -
Taking this idea one step further still, David Wellman, in his book Portraits of White Racism (1993), narrows the definition of racism even further when he says racism is "culturally sanctioned beliefs, which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages whites have because of the subordinated position of racial minorities."
As can be seen, Wellman's definition of racism is one of the --ism definitions that is predicated upon mental structures, or, as he phrases it, 'culturally sanctioned beliefs'. As a result, in the United States, his definition can only generally be applied to white folks, since the overall society and associated cultural belief systems remain constrained by a long history of white males comprising to the 'in-crowd'. I think he chose poorly, though, to specifically say 'whites', since it immediately alienates a wide swath of the audience he needs to address, without adding to the meaning of the statement.
It certainly did raise my hackles initially, since it seems to say that 'only white people can be racist' in America, and can be viewed, if the reader merely takes it at face value, as a 'self-serving' definition that puts 'blame' entirely at the feet of whites, and states that minorities cannot, by definition, be 'racist'. Many Kossacks seem determined to take that reading from it and no more.
That is, however, a very narrow interpretation of the nuances involved. What it does not say is that the exact same behaviours and thought patterns of racial superiority that are commonly viewed as racism by the average person can not be held by both whites and minorities. They can. You can have a black guy and a white guy both standing on opposite street corners, shouting racial epithets at each other and both holding firmly to the belief that the other is inferior as a matter of course, because of their skin colour. (I'm going to skip to skin colour because 'race' is actually a rather pointless word according to genetic studies these days. Pretty much, we're all mongrels, and the only real 'race' is the human race. But we're stuck with words like 'racism' from our less scientific past.)
A better restatement, to my mind, would be
racism is "culturally sanctioned beliefs, which, regardless of intentions involved, defend the advantages the racial majority of a society have because of the subordinated position of racial minorities."
Which has the exact same effective value when applied to the laboratory of the US without immediately alienating the people who viscerally identify with the word 'white' and take the prior words as a direct racial attack.
So the next question becomes, if the point is not merely to say 'whites are bad' and 'blacks can't be bad', then what is the actual point of defining 'racism' in a way that is different than the one found in most dictionaries? Why not stick to calling both of those two guys 'racist' and leaving it 'simple'? That's generally how we've been taught, that's how it shows up in the dictionary.
And it's 'non-threatening'. We're all relatively thoughtful folks here. We know it's wrongheaded to think that skin colour can actually be linked to any innate superiority or inferiority of entire peoples. We find WW2 propaganda about the eeeevil Japanese race totally bizarre and can't believe anyone would believe such nonsense. We get pissed off when some idiot kid grins while holding a sign comparing Obama to a monkey. So why would we even consider changing the way racism is defined?
The answer to that lies in the attempt to change language to try and change the pervasiveness of unnoticed racial bias inherent in current US culture and social values. (And by unnoticed, I mean unnoticed by the vast majority of white folks, and maybe at times even subtle enough that minorities may or may not be able to point it out either, but are probably still aware of a feeling of alienation, even if they can't always articulate the specific problems.)
Just as there are now public service announcements to convince teens (and adults) that it's not cool to use the phrase 'That's so gay!' when they mean something is bad, Wellman and those who agree with him feel that while one can certainly address the overt bigotry involved in deranged people screaming racial epithets, doing so does nothing to reduce or alter, or even address the issues of behaviour and thoughts that are a part of our culture.
Things we don't mean to be offensive, things we do or say that we never intend to be offensive, that we would be aghast to even be seen that we were being offensive, but that we do and say anyway, simply because of a giant cultural blind spot relating to our position in society. But even more, things we personally don't even 'do' but simply take for granted without giving a first thought, much less a second one that go on in society around us that imply that 'we're part of the in-group' and 'they're outsiders'.
And by 'our position in society' I don't mean 'hey, all the whites are powerful and all the minorities are the dust beneath our boots!' There are rich and powerful black people, there are dirt poor and powerless white people. I'm just referring to all the unthought-about little things we live with simply because they've 'always been there' because whites have always been the 'insiders' of US culture.
Things like the crayola 'flesh' coloured crayon, or the 'flesh' coloured bandaids. (Those have both been renamed, of course, but the 'default' colour of bandaids still approximates a generic Caucasian skin tone.) Do we gain any real material benefit from those? Of course not. But what it does do is reinforce the notion that people whose flesh approximates those tones 'belong' and others do not. Renaming the colours dealt with the overt racism inherent in the names, but did nothing to alter that 'stealth racism' of maintaining the 'default band-aid colour'.
Note that I stole those examples from a list I mostly don't actually agree with. Some folks have, in the past, trotted out this laundry list of 'white/male privileges' at this point. Again, that doesn't work so well, because it distracts from the issue of relative cultural power and belonging, and instead makes people think in terms of 'blaming white people', and therefore tends to piss white people off rather than lead them into pondering societal nuances.
I'll also skip that list because it gets tangled up in the question of just what a 'privilege' is. Privilege is actually a combination of two older words meaning 'private law'. To me, that implies that privileges are things you're specifically granted or take for yourself and have some desire for. Is it a 'privilege' to have something you don't want or need?
Being given free things might be considered a privilege. But what are they? What if you're repeatedly given something you have no use for, so that all you end up doing is throwing in the trash each day? To another person, who might actually desire that, you appear to be 'privileged' (not to mention an ass for merely throwing away what you've been given.) But you obtain no real, useful benefit from what you've been given.
If you don't care if your boss is the same gender or skin tone as you, is it a 'privilege' that most bosses in this particular country are your gender or your skin tone? Some people automatically say yes. They automatically assume that either you should desire such a thing or that whether or not it's intended, such a situation will benefit you no matter what. Given the variability in people's personalities, I don't buy that one. You can have warm, social friendly minority bosses and uptight asshole majority bosses. To my mind, the nature of the individual boss strongly overrides the abstract 'benefit' of being the same gender or race as your boss. So who your boss is and how it affects you is based on his individual 'overt' racism or lack thereof, not societal racism.
This is the balancing point for me. Something that is part of social interaction or thought processes that will generally not be altered or overridden by general human personality variance falls into this 'stealth racism' category. Whether your boss is an asshole or a saint, that bandaid on his wrist is still going to tend to be light coloured.
But even skipping that particular list which still blends 'overt' and 'covert' examples of racism, there are still going to be advantages to being who you are, or aren't. And the more closely you can identify to the cultural 'norm' or 'default', the more often you'll get to use those advantages, even if you don't even realize they're present. That's pretty simple. Most high schools even tend to mention the 'pink monkey' experiment, where you take an animal and alter it to look 'different' than the group to which it belonged. It suddenly is 'less in demand'. It gets left out of group activities, relegated to the fringes of the groups' society.
So blending in to the group is an evolutionary survival mechanism, and being 'different' tends to set you apart for the cheetah to get you. Thus, as 'white' is the 'default' for US society, thanks to sheer numbers over the history of the country, our social mores and institutions simply trend towards supporting the white viewpoint and making 'alien' the non-white viewpoint. Whether we intend for them to or not.
So finally, we circle back around to why, just maybe, we want to get the dialogue on racism expanded to include more than just the thoughts or actions of individuals, but refocused instead on those 'racist' things 'hidden in plain sight'. We're not a 'post-racial' society by any means, but we've done a pretty good job already of identifying and branding the overtly racist thoughts and behaviours.
Now we need to get subtle. We need to start thinking of racism as a societal issue, so that we can start nibbling away at the blind spot in society. Not so that we can 'blame the white guys'. Not so that the non-white folks can feel smug about 'not being racist'. But simply so that we can start to see just why there always seems to be an undercurrent of resentment that clings like a fog to race relations, even though we as individuals may not share any of the overt racism of the mouth-breathers at RedState.
Because if we can't see the problems, we sure as hell won't ever solve them. Electing President Obama was a sign that we've turned a corner on overt, intentional racism. And the more overt racists and their children who see that 8 years with him as President does not 'destroy the country' as they've feared, the less overt racism we'll see over time. But it does nothing to address the unintentional racism of the tribalistic 'us/them' issues facing the country.
We've still got to learn to see it first, in ways that don't merely stir up even more resentment. And that's tough, because 'racism' is such an emotionally charged word in it's present form. We invest it with all the pain and suffering and hate of hundreds of years of deliberate oppression, and so we automatically draw back in horror from it before we can even begin to look at the subtle nuances of viewing the world through the nearly invisible 'my group vs. outsiders' glasses.
So. Redefine, or accept an altered definition for racism that focuses more on society and the balance between groups, and less on the individual. Not to adjudicate blame, not to put white folks on the 'racial defensive'. Simply to shift our vision. To let us look with new eyes at the way our society has evolved, so we can raise our brothers and sisters up and share with them completely equally one day, not weighted down by the chains of memory and misunderstanding.