Bottomless Racism
Dear Reader — I am white. I’ve enjoyed the benefits of white privilege my entire life. Let me tell you some stories about some people who have not.
Our story begins with Superbowl LI. Julio Jones of the Atlanta Falcons, widely regarded as one of the best receivers in football, makes a ridiculous catch on the sidelines and drags his toes in bounds. Clearly this has taken years of practice, plus the ability to improvise during the play. The announcers are quick to cite Jones’s athleticism, making no mention of his work ethic. Julian Edelman of the New England Patriots, a former college quarterback, also makes several amazing catches. The announcers are quick to praise his hard work in learning to be a receiver at the NFL level, having never played the position before. Most viewers would not notice the disparity in coverage. Certainly, the announcers are complimenting both players, and I have every reason to believe that the announcers are not racist by any reasonable definition of the word. But yet, the double-standard persists.
How is it that racism persists in people who don’t consider themselves racist, and are most likely not even consciously racist?
I’ve spoken with quite a few, shall we say, highly conservative people and reached the following conclusions that explain almost all of their attitudes and behaviors:
Premise #1 — Everything they have and everything they have achieved, they have earned by the sweat of their brow with no help from anyone else. This may be attributed to various qualities, but “hard work” is the most common.
Premise #2 — Anything they don’t have or haven’t attained is someone else’s fault, most often someone who was given an unfair advantage because they were poor or non-white. That’s right, the poor and non-whites are getting lots of free stuff, and that is undermining what the whites rightly earned.
Whether you believe me or agree with these premises yourself is besides the point. I ask you to simply perform an empirical experiment. Keep these in mind when observing the behavior of others. You’ll quickly realize that every hard-right Republican policy, every Trumpian mantra, every conservative voter’s belief, can be traced back to the combination of these two simple premises.
Let’s take some examples of both the famous and the common kinds.
Talk to anyone suffering from Obama derangement syndrome and it won’t be more than five minutes before you get to the root of their complaint. He wasn’t born in this country. His father was a muslim, so he is a muslim (as if there is something wrong with being muslim). He didn’t deserve to get into Occidental or Columbia or Harvard. He got elected because black people voted for him, and they voted for him blindly because he promised them free stuff. I won’t bother arguing these points, but I suggest you spend some time in the corners of the internet, and it won’t be long before you can witness these statement first-hand. You would not believe what they say about Obama. It is too horrific to reproduce in your company.
To any rational human being, Obama is one of the finest, smartest people to every grace the United States, but the bottomless racism of some people cannot allow them to accept that Obama is a *better person* than they are. There is no possible explanation for their hatred other than racism and bigotry.
Talk to such a hard-right (now alt-right, the movement formerly known as neo-Nazis) follower about, say, voter suppression for a few minutes. It won’t be long before they claim one or more of the following:
- Black people are too stupid to deserve the right to vote
- Black people only vote for Democrats because they get free stuff
- If Black people really wanted to vote, they could get an ID and stand in line ten hours.
Again, I have no interest in debating this idiocy. I just encourage people to talk to their hard-right acquaintances and see how long it takes to reach these “conclusions.”
You can play similar games with talk about Hispanic and Latino voters:
- They’re all here illegally
- They all vote illegally.
- They vote to get free stuff.
- Democrats are trying to get them to vote illegally.
These delusional views are used to push for significant voter suppression, but, again, that is another story.
So, let’s discuss, say, abortion and birth control.
If you speak with most (not all!) pro-life people, you’ll find them to be sincere but full of contradictions. I once spoke with a friend who is pro-life, and we had a productive conversation but it ended with him saying, “It’s just natural law,” by which he meant, “God’s law.”
But take the time to talk to a pro-lifer (I’ll use Rick Santorum as an example), and you’ll find some guano loco beliefs, such as:
- Premarital sex is a sin, so birth control is not an acceptable way to prevent pregnancy.
- People have babies to get free money from the gov’t
- The gov’t has the right to force a woman to carry a fetus to term but no responsibility once the baby is born, because it is her baby and she needs to take responsibility. (The same govt has no right to restrict the sale and possession of firearms, but being pro-life — i.e. anti-choice — is somehow not in conflict with being libertarian).
- Unwanted pregnancy is due to drug usage in the ghetto. It doesn’t happen to nice white girls unless they are raped by transient drug-dealers (yes, I’m talking to you, Paul LePage).
Okay, you say, some people have deeply religious beliefs, but that doesn’t make them racist. That is true. Many pro-life people are not racist, just like the announcers of Superbowl LI are not racist, per se. But when you drill down to their beliefs, there is definitely a racial component about how “those people” with an unwanted pregnancy are somehow immoral or irresponsible, which is equated with being poor and black. (Try having this discussion with someone, and you’ll see what I mean, really!)
So, let me give you an example that has nothing to do with religion or politics. Let’s assume for this discussion that having a job is good, that working at a job is good, and that such workers should be applauded.
So, I’m at a rest stop getting a burger and some fries. Behind the counter are about 5 or 6 workers, most of whom are black. One takes my order, and I wait near the counter. There is not a long line or long wait. A white couple next to me begins to comment on the workers… “Look at them just standing around. They’re so lazy.” When I receive my burger, it is lacking the bacon I ordered, and I tell the server I ordered bacon. She immediately goes about remedying the situation (getting me bacon), even though I had only been charged for a burger without bacon. She was pleasant and helpful. I was chill. There was no meaningful dispute, just a misunderstanding.
Again, the lady from the white couple near me chimes in uninvited, “I heard him order bacon. He definitely ordered it.” By which she meant, “The cashier is stupid or trying to cheat this poor white man out of his bacon.” (And no, I’m not imagining it. As a white person, especially an older white male these days, people seem to assume I am a Trump voter, and they try to ingratiate themselves to me by emphasizing their subtle racism.)
Two more stories, one from 20 years ago and the other more recently:
I was in a civil war antique store in the deep South. I was browsing old musketballs or some such silliness. In walks a black teen. The white clerk turns to another worker (a few feet from me, well within earshot) and says, “I’m on it,” and proceeds to shadow the black patron everywhere he goes in the store. It didn’t even occur to them that their racism might offend me. To them, I was just another white guy in on the “we have to keep an eye on the blacks” assumption.
More recently, I was in Grand Central Station and there was a twenty-something black man who happened to be blind. It was pretty obvious he also was unfamiliar with Grand Central. He was wandering a bit aimlessly, you know, being blind and all, while swinging his cane (the white kind that blind people carry) side-to-side. His cane nearly tripped a half-dozen commuters within a span of ten seconds, as it was rush hour and the station was packed. I asked if he needed some help and he seemed relieved. He asked if he could hold my arm for guidance and explained he needed to get to a particular train. Now, he was either the greatest actor since Meryl Streep or as blind as Stevie Wonder. I’m going with blind.
He was well-dressed, well-spoken, unfailingly polite, etc. I walked him over to the ticket counter. He knew what train and ticket he needed, and he asked for the discount for blind people. The ticket vendor actually asked him to pull out his “I’m a blind guy” card to prove he was entitled to the discount, because, you know, that’s a thing that black people apparently abuse with impunity. I, as his seeing-eye white person, was aghast. I was mostly aghast on my own behalf, as I interpreted this as if the vendor was questioning my judgment about my new friend’s blindness, and I wasn’t afforded the deference I’m usually given as white male.
And the list of such stories goes on and on and on. Try spending some time on NJ Transit and see how the conductors treat riders without a ticket who are black versus those who are white.
Look at the news coverage of the Charleston AME Church Shooting and you’ll notice that American history consists of hundreds of years of black people being nicer to white people than they are treated in return. Hundreds of years of black people being nicer to white people than they deserve, frankly.
White people in the Trump era are finally waking up to what black people in the US have known for far too long…there are a lot of crazy people who say and do crazy stuff, but it is usually directed at people of color, so you didn’t notice too much.
So, my advice, dear reader, is not to try to understand or explain the racism still rampant in America. Start instead by understanding Premise #1 and Premise #2 above. And know that racism in the US remains boundless and bottomless. There is no depth at which a racist will simply say, “I’m a racist,” and yet many of them say it implicitly every day in countless ways.
Don’t think you’re racist? I’ll tell you the day I realized I was racist…
I was trying to learn a programming language, and I bought the book by the creator of the language. I turn to the back cover, and to my shock, the author was (and still is) black. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that a black man could appear on the back of a computer book as the creator of a language I had admired. Of course, I realized my racism a moment too late, but at least I recognized it. Many, many, many Americans still can’t accept that Obama was president, solely for the reason that he is black. They can’t accept that a black person achieved something by simply being better than them.
This is the context in which “Black Lives Matter” obviously means “the lives of black people should be equally valued” and not valued more highly than white lives or blue lives.
This is the bottomless racism confronted on a daily basis by people of color.
Peace to everyone.
