..."I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today."
Martin Luther King Jr, I Have a Dream - Address at March on Washington
The Dream remains unfulfilled.
Yes white supremacy - once writ large in the law via slavery and Jim Crow segregation - was now removed from its' legalized pedestal with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and finally, The Fair Housing Act of 1968. The law became "race-neutral" and it now suddenly was illegal to discriminate on the basis on race.
These strokes of the pen, of course, could not remove the bigotry that lurked in human hearts and minds long steeped in racist archetypes; nor could this legislation remove the nearly 400 years of white racial preference and cumulative advantage in the accumualtion of wealth and property, education and housing, health and well-being, and all matter of social opportunitites.
Racism, as both white supremacist ideology and institutionalized arrangement, remains merely transformed with its' systemic foundations intact. Segregation in housing and education persists at levels beyond that noted in 1954 in Brown, racial wealth gaps grow, and racial disparities in criminal injustice proliferate at a pace that has led to the label "The New Jim Crow".
This denial of The Dream is doubly bitter, for not only does systemic racism persist indeed with ever widening racial gaps, but King's own words have been subverted to construct the denial. "They will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," is not yet reality but instead now the rallying cry for those who would deny the persistence of racism in any and all of its' manifestations. These words have been expropriated to legitimate the newest racist paradigm - "color-blindness".
One of the major challenges of the post-Civil Rights era involves confronting the notion that racism is now over. Many whites are content to believe that once de jure segregation ended - that once the "colored only" signs were taken down from walls - everything was magically equal on a now level playing field."Color-blind racism" explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics and allows whites to equate racism with prejudice, ignoring the institutionalized and systemic racial structures that sustain and reproduce white racial privilege.
Certainly progress has been made and since much racial inequality is now embedded de facto in structural arrangements, it is certainly more invisible. It is easy to identify the overt racist, but much harder to see the racial dynamics that persist in institutional patterns. And, for many whites, it is harder still to see the more subtly coded appeals to racism that they may even unwittingly engage in. This is the goal the color-blind paradigm - to disguise the persistent racialized patterns of inequality and reduce racism to mere prejudice of the most visible sort.
...Contrary to this popular belief, a large and well-established body of social scientific research empirically reveals that racial bigotry is the result of deeply rooted social and institutional processes referred to as systemic racism. Systemic racism includes a complex array of racially bigoted practices, unjustly gained political-economic power of European Americans, continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines, and racist ideologies and attitudes that maintain and rationalize European American privilege and power. Since European Americans are so immersed in the propaganda of systemic racial conditioning they readily accept the deceptive equation of racism with prejudice and believe "race" rather than racism is the reason for racial injustice. This view is fallacious because it ignores the fact that racial bigotry is not merely a product of intentional interactions between individuals but racialized social relationships developed over generations and manifested in all of society’s major institutions.
Though many European Americans can correctly surmise that many current disparities besetting communities of racialized "others" (i.e., Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos) are traceable to inequalities passed on from earlier generations that suffered under state sanctioned racism, they refuse to accept the fact that historical patterns of racism/"race"-based exclusion from social, economic and political processes did not simply disappear when legalized racism was outlawed. Long after many European Americans ceased to consciously and actively discriminate against racialized "others," there persists racist social patterns dictating where people live, which organizations they belong to, what schools they attend and so on – that were created during slavery and de jure segregation. For this reason contemporary social and institutional structures are products of racist foundations. As such, they perpetuate practices of the nation’s racist past even though many of the people populating these structures may not be overtly racially bigoted.....
Racial bigotry expressed in disguised forms is called covert racism as opposed to overt racism where racial bigots openly express their aversive sentiments towards racialized “others.”Sometimes the covert racist is not even aware of the fact that s/he is racially bigoted. Because it is now unacceptable to express openly racist views, European American racial bigotry has morphed into a systemic process of oppression that is less overt, far more subtle, and less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the hateful acts. Since systemic racism operates as an established and respected force in America, it receives far less public condemnation than openly expressed bigoted acts.
This is color-blind racism. A large body of research documents the paradigmatic shift from overt essentialist racist to color-blindness. This style of racism relies heavily on ideological frames and linguistic shifts which allow whites to assert they "do not see race", deny structural racism, claim a level playing field that in fact now victimizes them with "reverse discrimination" and appeals to the "race card", and argue that any discussion of race/racism is on fact racist and only serves to foment divisions rather than reflect/redress societal realities.
Race has never reflected any biological reality; it is indeed a social and political construct, which in the US and elsewhere has served to delineate "whiteness" as the "unraced" norm - the "unmarked marker" - while hierarchically devaluing "other" racial/ethnic categories. It is no surprise than that one of the first explicit articulations of color-blind racism was designed to serve political purposes. Race has long been user as divider of those who have common class and political interests, but the Post Civil Rights Era called for new tactics. This is clearly reflected in the so-called Southern strategy of Nixon et al and expressed by Lee Atwood as follows:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "N%$^&#, n%$^&#, n%$^&# ." By 1968 you can't say "n%$^&#"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N%$^&#, n%$^&#".
The "success" of this tactic lead to its’ widespread use in debates over
welfare reform,
affirmative action, and particularly
"law and order" criminal justice policy; all were guided by thinly coded appeals to white fears of
"welfare queens", high crime neighborhoods,
unwed teenage mothers, "crack epidemics",
juvenile super – predators , and more. In all these cases, the coded racial sub-text reads clearly. And, in all these cases, the resultant policies,
while purportedly "race neutral", resulted in disproportionate harm to people of color.
Make no mistake, the color-blind paradigm was and is a conservative political project even while being furthered, both maliciously and otherwise, by everyday people in everyday contexts. The rhetoric of "color-blindness" is at the root a series of right-wing talking points designed to provide cover for white racial advantage. The ultimate end goal of this agenda is to eradicate even the measurement of race thereby simultaneously eradicating any related evidence of institutionalized racism.
In the response to both conservative color - blind scholars and the politcal efforts of Ward Connerly and others, the American Sociological Association issued this statement on race in 2002. The Executive Summary follows -the bold is mine:
The Importance of Collecting Data and Doing Social Scientific Research on Race
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Race is a complex, sensitive, and controversial topic in scientific discourse and in public policy. Views on race and the racial classification system used to measure it have become polarized. At the heart of the debate in the United States are several fundamental questions: What are the causes and consequences of racial inequality? Should we continue to use racial classification to assess the role and consequences of race? And, perhaps most significantly, under what conditions does the classification of people by race promote racial division, and when does it aid the pursuit of justice and equality?
The answers to these questions are important to scientific inquiry, but they are not merely academic. Some scholarly and civic leaders have proposed that the government stop collecting data on race altogether. Respected voices from the fields of human molecular biology and physical anthropology (supported by research from the Human Genome Project) assert that the concept of race has no validity in their respective fields. Growing numbers of humanist scholars, social anthropologists, and political commentators have joined the chorus in urging the nation to rid itself of the concept of race.
However, a large body of social science research documents the role and consequences of race in primary social institutions and environments, including the criminal justice, education and health systems, job markets, and where people live. These studies illustrate how racial hierarchies are embedded in daily life, from racial profiling in law enforcement, to ’red-lining’ communities of color in mortgage lending, to sharp disparities in the health of members of different population groups. Policymakers, in fact, have recognized the importance of research into the causes of racial disparities. For example, the 2000 Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education Act directed the National Institutes of Health to support continued research on health gaps between racial groups, with the ultimate goal of eliminating such disparities. Moreover, growth among some racial and ethnic groups (notably, Asians and Hispanics) and the diversification of the nation’s racial and ethnic composition underscore the need for expanded research on the health and socio-economic status of these groups.
Sociologists have long examined how race - a social concept that changes over time - has been used to place people in categories. Some scientists and policymakers now contend that research using the concept of race perpetuates the negative consequences of thinking in racial terms. Others argue that measuring differential experiences, treatment, and outcomes across racial categories is necessary to track disparities and to inform policymaking to achieve greater social justice.
The American Sociological Association (ASA), an association of some 13,000 U.S. and international sociologists, finds greater merit in the latter point of view. Sociological scholarship on "race" provides scientific evidence in the current scientific and civic debate over the social consequences of the existing categorizations and perceptions of race; allows scholars to document how race shapes social ranking, access to resources, and life experiences; and advances understanding of this important dimension of social life, which in turn advances social justice. Refusing to acknowledge the fact of racial classification, feelings, and actions, and refusing to measure their consequences will not eliminate racial inequalities. At best, it will preserve the status quo.
As progressives, we must discuss race. We must take account of race to confront the long-standing injustice of racism, which has remained, up until this very moment, unwilling to die.
There is no other way.
As a nation, we must cast off the false conservative fog of color-blindness. For too long it has perpetuated systemic racism in policy and practice without name or shame or recourse.
The Dream must be deferred no longer.
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
Letter From a Birmingham Jail