Thanks for your response. I wish more people on all sides of these questions would engage with each other through reasoned arguments, like you are doing, rather than with the insults and recriminations that are way too common in this space.

You wrote: “Anti-Blackness runs deeper than economics; in fact, Black success has worked to achieve the opposite of what you state — it has, over generations, made people angry (particularly economically less successful whites), and whether or not overt, actors have sought to undermine Black success. Anti-Blackness comes from aesthetics. All over the world. In all cultures. Black is the bottom of the caste. In different parts of history, the justification for disliking dark-skin takes many forms.”

I would disagree with that, or at least, I would suggest it’s much more complicated than that. It is true that in many cultures, darker skin has been looked down upon historically because it is associated with being poorer because traditionally, people who spent more time working outside in the fields, etc., got more tanned skin, and so the pallor of skin became a marker by which people were judged, which then became a self-reinforcing prejudice, where people with darker skin were prejudged as poor, uneducated, etc., which, in turn, steered them towards undesirable occupations and also led them to be more likely to mate with each other rather than with their paler-skinned countrymen, which all contributed to amplifying the dark-skin-poor/light-skin-rich divide. This kind of prejudice is seen in places with no history of race-based slavery, such as India and much of Southeast Asia, where people often use makeup to look whiter. So to that extent, yes, there’s something to what you say.

At the same time, the perception of pale as rich and beautiful is rapidly changing. Standards of beauty are very different now than what they were 50 or more years ago, and people in many developed nations now aspire to have a “healthy tan” rather than a ghostly pallor to their skin. Moreover, while there have certainly been instances of retrograde white people feeling threatened by successful blacks, these are just reactionaries bucking the tide of history. If you’re already a racist and you see a black person in your midst who defies all your dumb stereotypes and who might be more successful than you are, your reaction to having your racist worldview and hierarchy threatened might be to double down on your racism, try to put that successful person down, attribute their success to affirmative action or some other nefarious doings, etc. Sure, that phenomenon exists. But these kinds of racists will die off. My concern is about generations of people growing up now and in the future. Are they going to grow racist or not?

We have all these silly “implicit bias” tests and studies making the rounds now, purporting to show evidence of subconscious racism in people who claim they’re not racist, and every time I see these things being described or reported, I just laugh, because, seriously, why is anyone surprised? The fact is that right now, because black people are disproportionately poor, they’re also disproportionately perceived as exhibiting all the pathologies generally associated with poverty: lower education, higher crime and violence, more “thuggish” behavior, dysfunctional families, etc. This kind of perception is very difficult to combat for a very simple reason: it’s true. Poor people do exhibit these qualities more often than rich people. The mistake people make is in making a causal inference — that these black people are like this because they’re black rather than because they’re poor, so that something about being black inherently makes them inferior. People make these kinds of inferences because everyone has an easier time, conscience-wise, blaming people for their own problems rather than blaming themselves for creating a society that tolerates these kinds of concentrations of poverty. The problem is that as long as black people are disproportionately poor, you can drum all the anti-racist propaganda you want into white people’s heads, but they’re still going to see the impoverished black guy walking down the street, looking shabby, speaking “ungrammatically” and behaving in a way that is out of step with what is considered to be “polite society,” and the result is all our anti-racist propaganda is going to go in one ear and out the other, because it’s going to bump up hard against a simple thing called reality. And, in fact, it’ll be even worse because these people will start feeling like we’re trying to trick them into denying reality, and they’ll revolt against that imposition. That’s why I’ve suggested that when black people are no longer disproportionately poor, but rather, are integrated amidst white people and other people in their workplaces, families and neighborhoods on equal terms, then and only then will anti-black racism start dissipating. I will quote a few paragraphs here from a recent Slate piece on gentrification (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/the_gentrification_myth_it_s_rare_and_not_as_bad_for_the_poor_as_people.single.html) to suggest that integration of this sort is a positive development:

In 2010, University of Colorado–Boulder economist Terra McKinnish, along with Randall Walsh and Kirk White, examined gentrification across the nation as a whole over the course of the 1990s. McKinnish and her colleagues found that gentrification created neighborhoods that were attractive to minority households, particularly households with children or elderly homeowners. They found no evidence of displacement or harm. While most of the income gains in these neighborhoods went to white college graduates under the age of 40 (the archetypical gentrifiers), black high school graduates also saw their incomes rise. They also were more likely to stay put. In short, black households with high school degrees seemed to benefit from gentrification.

McKinnish, White, and Walsh aren’t the only researchers whose work suggests that blacks often benefit from gentrification. In his book, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress Toward Racial Equality, sociologist Patrick Sharkey took a close look at black neighborhoods that saw significant changes to their ethnic composition between 1970 and 1990. He found that when the composition of black neighborhoods changed, it wasn’t because whites moved in. That rarely happens. For black communities, neighborhood change happens when Latinos begin to arrive. Sometimes these changes can be difficult, resulting as they often do in new political leaders and changes to the character of the communities. But Sharkey’s research suggests they also bring real benefits. Black residents, particularly black youth, living in more diverse neighborhoods find significantly better jobs than peers with the same skill sets who live in less diverse neighborhoods. In short, writes Sharkey, “There is strong evidence that when neighborhood disadvantage declines, the economic fortunes of black youth improve, and improve rather substantially.”

In other words, the problem isn’t so much that gentrification hurts black neighborhoods; it’s that it too often bypasses them. Harvard sociologists Robert Sampson and Jackelyn Hwang have shown that neighborhoods that are more than 40 percent black gentrify much more slowly than other neighborhoods. The apparent unwillingness of other ethnic groups to move into and invest in predominantly black communities in turn perpetuates segregation and inequality in American society.

The article goes on to discuss how, over the course of the past 35 years, the number of neighborhoods in which concentrated black poverty exists has increased, and this is not a good thing. (I think the article is worth reading in general because it questions the conventional wisdom on gentrification doing harm to black people and black neighborhoods.)

So, in any event, I think that the primary manner in which anti-black racism should be addressed is through this kind of economic and social integration rather than through repeatedly stressing race and browbeating people over the head with accusations of racism, which just reminds people of the boundaries that separate them, polarizes them and angers those who feel unjustly attacked in the process.