Since I’m a big white guy from the south, people often feel comfortable in confiding their secret racist thoughts to me. Sometimes it’s just a racist joke or two. Sometimes it’s a snide remark about Al Sharpton or Charlie Rangel or President Obama. Sometimes it’s just outright hate speech. Whatever form it takes, it leaves me feeling slimed.
But it shows that there are different levels (for lack of a better descriptor) of racism. Hate is the deepest, or most intense. The KKK and neo-Nazi groups have no monopoly on hatred, nor even on hatred that promotes active and violent application. It’s just the easiest to peg, and most people stuck at that level don’t even bother trying to hide it.
A slightly less intense level is that of condescension. It isn’t that they hate the targeted group…they just don’t think they have redeeming value. So when a member of that group is arrested for violent crime, it is met with a shrug and, “What do you expect?” This group would rarely, if ever, use an actual racial epithet – but the way they refer to the group in question makes it clear that it’s only because they are too polite (e.g. black people are referred to as “brothers”).
Slightly less intense is the group that sees individuals within the group as able to rise above their circumstances. In the south, we refer to this as being “above your raising.” A person who does well in life is viewed as a “good” member of the group – the exception that proves the rule of inferiority. For example, President Obama is a “good” black man because, as was once said about him, he’s, “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” (I want to point out that I’m not saying Joe Biden, who offered that quote, is racist – but it is the sort of quote this type of racist would immediately agree with and understand.) This is the kind of guy who tells racist jokes but has “black friends.”
The list isn’t complete, of course, but it does, I think, open a discussion of race that can go beyond simple racism=I-hate-black-people stereotypes. This is important, because Americans tend to use race rather than class when discussing social problems. Or, increasingly, we use other keywords to talk about issues of race rather than mentioning race (because it isn’t polite) which we are using to avoid discussions of class (because we are in a classless society – supposedly).
For example, when we talk of education, we talk about “failing schools” and “school choice.” But if we look at the demographics of the schools in question, we often find that racial minorities are over-represented at “failing schools” and the “choice” schools are often those where this is not true. So the issues are debated without ever uncovering the racial issues that are underneath them. And because the racial issue never get discussed, we never get to the actual core of the issue – the educational needs of the poor.
Are the educational needs of the poor different than those of the wealthy? Surely they are. I don’t have a data set to refer to, but my experience with developmentally disabled, substance abusing, and learning disabled people skews towards the lower end of the income scale. Even if this is not so, wealthier families are able to afford medical treatments and behavioral experts that poorer families are not. This means that our schools then have to deal with a lot more issues when they are located in a poor community rather than in a wealthy one.
Housing is another issue that is riddled with class conflict, papered over with race, and then discussed in code words. “White flight” accurately described the movement of middle-class whites into the suburbs a generation ago – but did it take into account the whites too poor to move? In those impoverished neighborhoods, does it matter if a family is black, white, or something else? High crime, drugs, and general decay impacts people of all races.
I don’t have any way to tie this all together into a neat package. It’s messy. It’s issue piled on issue piled on issue. But at some point, we have to start unraveling these intertwined issues. It is impossible to true move forward without doing so.
This is a very serious problem. Or, you could just sing this song.
I thought it was going to be “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” from South Pacific.
A couple of points:
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p>I can assure you that short guys (I didn’t say small, unfortunately) get a fair amount of racism confided to them. I’m willing to concede that you might hear more of it, though.
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p>And to your conclusion.
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p>I struggle with that. Sometimes I feel like the proverbial national conversation on race is detrimental. If you take the example of the Obama campaign, they successfully avoided the topic (though it was always there) until the Rev. Wright thing. That ignited “the conversation,” but, as always, not in a good way. It felt like Obama was really cornered.
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p>So what did he do? He stepped back, wrote what he really felt, and gave a historic speech that, in my opinion, will someday be seen as a watershed in the politics of race. So we got that out of it. And he won the election. It can no longer be said that a black man can’t be president. In short, we did move forward. The Gordian knot is still tied, but the world moved forward.
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In my view, the jury is still very much out on President Obama, and brought in the wrong verdict on the Jeremiah Wright fiasco. The right answer to the latter was for the nation and the candidate to proudly remind all of us that each religious tradition has its own unique style and content of worship and then move on. I was disappointed by Barack Obama’s willingness to throw Jeremiah Wright under the bus, and in retrospect the episode seems to foreshadow the aspect of Barack Obama’s public style that I find most disturbing. Yes, it lead to a real stem-winder of a speech. I want more than that.
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p>While it’s true that “it can no longer be said that a black man can’t be president”, this approach also leads to the following:
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p>- Clarence Thomas proves that “it can no longer be said that a black man can’t be a Supreme Court justice.”
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p>- Sarah Palin proves that “it can no longer be said that a woman can’t be the Republican nominee for Vice President.”
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p>In my view, such “symbolic” statements tread perilously close to perpetuating the very prejudice they seemingly refute. The utter incompetence of Mr. Thomas or Ms. Palin is unmitigated by their race and gender, respectively.
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p>I supported Barack Obama, in spite of my reservations about the Jeremiah Wright episode, because I felt he was the best candidate to choose from. I waffle about supporting the re-election of President Obama because I am profoundly uncomfortable with the unfolding priorities of his administration.
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p>His race is, to me, utterly immaterial.
it was actually Thurgood Marshall who proved that “it can no longer be said that a black man can’t be a Supreme Court Justice.” And, needless to say, Geraldine Ferraro is the one who broke down the woman-on-the-ticket barrier, though from the Democratic side.
That was sort of my point. Thurgood Marshall was, as far as I know, a well-respected jurist before and after his Supreme Court appointment, regardless of his race.
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p>I’m profoundly uncomfortable with claims structured along the lines of “[fill-in-the-blank] shows that a [fill-in-the-blank] can be [some-exalted-position].”
Marshall had served for a few years as a judge on the federal appeals court in NY before being named to the Supreme Court, but that wasn’t why he got the job. His real legacy is as the most successful civil rights litigator in the country’s history.
… what this means, or how to reply to it. It literally makes no sense at all.
And I’m sure it has nothing to do with my size.
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p>As to the larger point, I agree that Obama’s speech on race was wonderful, but it really did nothing to move the discussion forward. Nor did it peel back the issue of race to show that it is not just racial minorities who have been subjected to institutionalized oppression, but poor people (and working people) of all colors. In that respect, it was a failure because it simply reinforced the erroneous idea that the problem in America is simply racism and will be overcome when we all become better people. It is to social stratification in America what A Christmas Carol was to English stratification. And, ultimately, it falls short of delivering any real hope of a solution because it does not accurately see the underlying problems.
there exist racists, Surprise.
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p>OK now what.