September 24, 2007
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Racism
I don’t usually give a whole lot of thought to racism. You know, it all seems rather obvious most of the time. There’s a continuum of course from bias to prejudice to discrimination to racism and where to draw the lines on that continuum can be tough but also not that important. You can never eliminate bias altogether, but you can always try to push people further away from racism and more toward consideration of their fellow human beings. As long as we promote general virtues in everyone and encourage interaction between peoples of different races, racism will naturally decline.
Still, some times the discussion of racism can’t really be avoided, nor should it be. We certainly can by understanding our internal biases and each others progress further toward universal tolerance. The only way to do that is through discussion, and yes sometimes those discussions can get pretty heated and sometimes make us all very uncomfortable.
But what bothers me about the discussions we have is that there is a lot of purposeful historical blindness about it, at least in the U.S. And that drives me crazy. Any discussion that starts with us all presuming that we are all already so much above racism and prejudice that it isn’t even a real issue for us is bound to be a vacuous one. They tend to devolve into discussions about those ‘other’ people, either inherently evil people, or people who somehow missed the boat and are not as enlightened as most of us are on matters of race and equity. And usually the ‘others’ tend to be very visible public figures who by virtue of their publicity become easy targets. You even start to get that “If Only” mentality. If only we could get rid of the Don Imuses and Al Sharptons in the world and cleanup towns like Jena, well then of course racism will vanish in a puff of smoke and we’ll all live happily ever after.
So people on their Xangas in response to the Jena 6 questions would often say things like “I can’t believe it’s the year 2007 and we still have people acting like this”. And you know that struck me as a kind of crazy thing to say. You can’t believe its 2007 and racism is still as bad as it is? Really? I can’t believe it’s the year 2007 and we’ve gotten as far as we have. Really I am floored every time I think about it. On the issues of race and women’s rights the world is amazingly progressive. Astoundingly. I only wish we could do as much with issues of War, the environment, and equality based on sexual orientation.
Remember the US civil rights movement sort of had its climax in 1968. That’s when the second Civil Rights Act was passed. That’s when MLK was assassinated. The race riots were windling away by 1970 and even the Black Power Movement had mostly collapsed by 1975. There was still a lot of progress made toward equity racial and otherwise in the late seventies and early eighties but for the most part 1968 was the beginning of the end of it.
You know what? 1968. Not that long ago. 39 years. An eternity perhaps for a 15 year old today, but absolutely nothing for the grand scheme of the world. That means many many of the people you meet still today were alive when discrimination was rampant. Most of the people in my age group 25-30 have parents who were in their prime during the era of the Civil Rights Movement, and grandparents who lived during a time when racism was as common and unquestioned as breathing.
So it really should be no surprise at all that the average adult today has parents who were probably considerably more racist one way or another than they are. Parents who were involved in what must have seemed like a life and death struggle for their very way of life. Where do people imagine that racism went? Do you think those parents just suddenly woke up one morning and decided that they would no longer care about race and that they would teach their children to live the same? No of course not. The trend changed and the tide turned and it became less acceptable to be outwardly critical of race but the racisms didn’t go away. That generation didn’t disappear either. They just learned to try very hard to act better and for the most part they did try to teach their children to act better and be more considerate than they themselves were when they were young. That’s why we’ve made so much progress. That’s what is astounding about the world.
You see it didn’t have to be that way. White families could have nurtured hatred and intolerance in their children hoping that the next generation would find a way to restore the social status quo and put blacks in their place. They could have indoctrinated their children into secret organization devoted to white supremacy under the surface while outwardly pretending to be considerate and fair and just. Does that sound crazy? Well it shouldn’t. Because it happened. The KKK was a very real phenomenon. In the 1920′s in comprised 15% of the entire population. It very much contributed to the enormously large gap in time between the end of slavery and the establishment of equality under the law on the basis of race and color. But thankfully, it didn’t happen after the Civil Rights Movement, at least not that much.
And it could have been similar for black families. As it stands you probably wont meet a black person who hasn’t grown up hearing tales of injustice and intolerance from their parents and grandparents. They could hardly avoid it without being wholly silent about their history. Yes that influences them. Yes that contributes a great deal to the cultural divide in America today, as much as lingering racist sentiments amongst white people.
But what is surprising, really surprising, is that the stories are not told with malice nor is there in the way most black youths have been raised a sense of the need to fight back against the ‘evil’ of white society. In fact the baby boomer generation despite being massively active in fighting for equal rights in their day was probably least inclined to try and pass on that struggle to future generations. They saw themselves as building a world where their children wouldn’t have to live with the racism and intolerance that they did.
At the same time though there was a lot of tension amongst black parents in the question of what and how much to tell their children. They didn’t desire to influence their children or to train them in the ways of intolerance, but many were still and are still very suspicious of members of other races because of their own personal experiences and they felt a need to instill in their children a sense of caution too. They want to protect their children like all parents do. So they wanted their children to be open to a discrimination free lifestyle and yet not to trust anyone. They were very aware of the inequities of education and influence that still existed, the many dreams of the civil rights movement that were never really achieved. They hoped that the equality that Martin Luther King envisioned would come about over time, but yeah they were pretty skeptical and their children could hardly be expected to be so blind as to not see that skepticism in their parents and to not have some of it rub off on them. But their parents tried hard. They were silent about their misgivings for the most part and suppressed whatever prejudices within them as much as they could. So did their white parent counterparts when dealing with their children. Everyone was sort of holding their breathe hoping that their children would grow up without their own faults within them.
I think though admirable, this was a mistake. Parents and grandparents, black and white, should have been more open talking with their children about how they felt and who they were. They should have acknowledged their racism rather than pretending that it had all gone away. I think our generation would have understood better than they thought and grown up stronger and wiser for it.
The mixed messages and repression of truth had a profound impact on the next generation. A lot of it was good because overtly racism started to seem like ‘a thing of the past’ and that’s why now you read on Xangas stuff like “I can’t believe that racism still exists in the year 2007″. It’s naive, but its sort of awesome that we can afford to be that naive. It’s cool that we don’t think in those terms any more. It’s cool that we look at people and we don’t assume, by and large, that that person we are talking to secretly hates us because of the color of our skin.
But there have been negative impacts too. For one, when black youths experience overt prejudice the disillusionment factor is very strong. They heard the stories for all that their parents tried to hide them and they read the history in school and then when they experience it first hand, yeah they start to think that maybe their parents were lying to them, and maybe the world hasn’t gotten any better at all and so maybe it’s a good idea to strike back in some way. When you add to that the nostalgia factor from tales of heroism and glory during the days of the civil rights movement and the fact that the children of those heroes will want to be a part of their own heroic tales of the fight for justice, you wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of young black people joining more belligerent movements fighting for equity or just fighting against the structures of power.
And there’s been some push toward that but surprisingly little that is visible and it has been declining over the years. The reason is, there just isn’t that much to fight about. Yeah everyone’s still got prejudices and biases that are pretty strong and there are plenty of racists out there, but people are keeping it all inside. People really are trying to be good for all that they screw up so very very frequently. And when people are doing their best to do right by you, however poor a job they might be doing, it’s a little hard to take the moral high ground and its very hard to get aggressive with them over it even if you believe deep down that they are just pretending and don’t even realize it.
So what we’ve seen instead I don’t think anyone could have predicted and that is this cultural bifurcation. A whole plethora of new traditions, new language, new social standards that evolved primarily amongst black society. And it happened strangely all across the country almost all at once, which is amazing. The seeds of this existed before, when black culture had to be underground because it just wasn’t tolerated in mainstream America. That’s why music is a big big part of this movement. The close knit communities within inner city lifestyle where many blacks lived also ended up contributing to it, as did the cultures that evolved in prison settings after drug traffic it the cities an the resulting crackdown put so very many black youths in prison. But it has spread and evolved over time and through the media to the point where ‘Black America’ almost seems like an entirely different world within the confines of the country than the rest of America. The children of the activist generation embraced all aspects of their heritage that was inherently different from what was the norm in the rest of the society. And they clung to it. Why? The psychology is complex, but my suspicion is that it has a lot to do with this dual message we were given growing up. The whole don’t be like us, but at the same time don’t trust *them* either. (I should note that this is note *entirely* an unpredictable phenomenon. If you look at large immigrant groups historically, Italians, Hispanics, some of them have strongly split with the mainstream American society for lengthy periods of time before integrating. Although blacks didn’t just immigrate the phenomenon is remarkably similar.)
The evolution of white culture is similarly impacted both by the emergence of this separate black society and the ways in which the next generation of white children were raised post-civil rights movement. I could say more about that if I was more familiar with it, but to be sure a lot of the roots of many of the social positions of modern conservatism are in the way this generation grew up too. The counter-culture to the emergence of the split black culture and the newfound commonality of the claim of ‘reverse racism’, the intolerance toward drug traffic and crime which certainly wasn’t at all present in the 60′s and 70′s. To understand the psychology of these changes, look to the past and remember that the racist days really weren’t all that long ago.
The other day I was walking through the park and I saw spray painted on the pavement “White Power” with a nazi swastika. I knew this was a new occurrence because I’d been there before and it wasn’t there. This was right near a university campus with a diverse populace where you’d think such attitudes would not be prevalent. But you can see that the ebb and flow of time in this. Counter culture countering counter culture and back and forth the repression of racisms followed by its re-emergence.
Still. I’m not worried. Nooses hanging in trees and all I am not at all worried. It has only been 40 years here in the U.S. Things are getting better and they will get better. We should really be celebrating how much we’ve achieved not bemoaning our pitiful modern state. In most countries in the world “hate crimes” on the basis of race, gender, or religion are seen and often codified into their laws as the crimes against humanity that they are. Practice lags behind of course, but that’s extraordinary progress. Sure we’ve got a long long way to go, and we can’t get complacent, but let’s take a moment every once in a while and be thankful that we’ve gotten this far.
Comments (1)
Hello Nephyo,
You worked hard to make your site simple yet elegant. I see that you have a wide variety of observations here!
I like to write articles about God and religion on my site to help people to really get to know God, especially in these troubled times. 14 When the good news about the kingdom has been preached all over the world and told to all nations, the end will come. (Matthew 24:14) (CEV) I hope you get a chance to look at them.