This diary was originally a comment in response to a diary by True Blue Majority, which described approaches for communicating with racists.
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I’m not sure how you define success in addressing racism with this approach:
I’m not calling YOU a racist, I’m calling your behavior/words/actions/voting racist. Do you see that you are making the same arguments racists make?
It may be that you observed people behaving in less racist ways when they were around you, because you made them aware of your views. How many stopped behaving in racist ways generally? How many later came to you and said ‘You we’re right, I didn’t see it, I didn’t want to believe it.’?
I’m skeptical that softening the semantics (‘I’m not calling YOU a racist’) produces as much openness to hearing our message as many progressives wish, and in a very important way, I think it is actually harmful to our efforts to oppose bigotry and discrimination— it sends the message to the bigot that they are not responsible for what they do, or the harm they cause others. It’s not you I’m upset with, it’s only those things you do. Where in this formulation is a sense that adults are responsible for their choices, their actions, and the effects of these on others?
There are many ways in which bigotry and discrimination can be compared to abusive behavior. Would we say to the abuser ‘I don’t want you to feel bad about assaulting your partner, I just want you to consider why I might not agree with you assaulting your partner’?
I mean this quite seriously— bigotry and discrimination always involve some form of verbal, emotional, physical or sexual violence. It causes real harm to real people. One cannot be innocently complicit in violence or abuse, nor can one disavow responsibility.
Without recognizing that bigotry is shameful, harmful to others, and deserving of our contempt, the bigot can continue to believe they are not the problem. But they are the problem. Bigotry in the abstract is not what we’re fighting, it’s people who hold bigoted views.
Bigotry and discrimination are perpetuated by bigots, they don’t exist as some amorphous cultural phenomena, disconnected from the individuals who perpetuate them, or tacitly support and facilitate them.
I wrote a diary shortly after the election about this very issue:
’Racism without Racists’: pretending the election wasn’t about white supremacy won’t help.
A crucial perspective on race and racism in America comes from Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America (Fourth Edition, 2014)
His observations about the transition from the overt racism of the Jim Crow era to the invisible framework of racial dominance—in his terminology, structural racism, are eerily prescient, and all too relevant in the days and weeks since Trump’s election:
In the third edition of the book I argued that Obama’s election was not a miracle, but an expected outcome that reflected the sedimentation of the “new racism” regime that had emerged in the 1970s (for more on this regime, see chapter 2 in this edition). Specifically, I stated that Obama’s election did not represent “racial progress” or signified a rupture with either the racial order or the dominant racial ideology at play in the nation, namely, color-blind racism. This argument was important, as Americans at the time (somewhat less so today) believed Obama’s election had magically taken us to the racial Promised Land of honey and milk.
The second sociopolitical reason for reengaging readers is my belief that it is imperative to explain the coexistence in America of crude and vulgar antiminority sentiment and actions alongside the ideology (and its corresponding behaviors) I label in this book as color-blind racism. To anticipate the comments I will offer in chapters 2 and 11, (1) racial orders are never “pure,” as elements of the past (and even of the future) often coexist with the dominant ways of conducting racial business, (2) coercion has always been central to the maintenance of racial domination,1 and (3) despite the rise in racist violence, the practices I label as typical of the “new racism” period are still the dominant ones in America (more prevalent and central). (pp. xiii-xiv)
There has been much discussion of the travesty of normalizing Trump by the media, but less discussion of normalizing Trump voters, whether asking us to consider their ‘legitimate grievances and concerns’, or imploring us to recognize that ‘most are good and decent people’.
The alternative, of course, would be to question just how good and decent the 90% of reliable Republican voters who voted for Trump actually are, if the words ‘good’ and ‘decent’ are generally presumed not to include racism, misogyny, religious bigotry and homophobia. These good and decent folks continue to support policies and politicians—as they have for decades—that directly contribute to harassment, discrimination, violence, suffering and death of anyone who is not white, male, Christian and heterosexual.
Fundamental social and political change occurs when individuals make the change occur, and take personal responsibility. Telling bigots that they are not the problem, allowing them to slough off any responsibility to recognize how they have caused harm, and not communicating to them that they must work to atone for this, and rectify it, actually hinders progress