Fighting White Supremacy Doesn’t End at Equality
While I can’t find the exact quote from the source that wrote this, I’ve seen a recurrent idea on social media regarding racism. There is this idea that we further divide people into racial categories by calling out racism that isn’t overt (often perceived as extinct by the people making these statements). Statements like this fit into the “color blind racism” concept discussed in “The Strange Enigma of Race in Contemporary America.” In an ideal world, then color wouldn’t need to matter. However, not calling out these incidents is dangerous and helps sustain these systems of white supremacy.
The idea that overt racism is even close to gone is asinine. Just in the last two years, we’ve seen countless murders of black Americans at the hands of the police. We’ve seen mass shootings where the motive was explicitly to kill members of a racial minority group. So the idea that racism is gone because we’ve made advancements in rights protecting minorities is asinine. We’ve improved, but we haven’t reached an equitable conclusion.
Colorblind racism exists as well. Systemic racism permeates many aspects of American life, from one’s ability to get a job interview to court sentencing. For example, studies have shown that job applicants with names commonly associated with black people are less likely to get jobs than people with names associated with white people. To build a more equitable society, we have to question why these systems work against racial minorities, and we have to work to make these systems more impartial. Pretending racism is gone won’t help anyone.
The US may have worked to improve racial equality throughout the years. However, equality and equity are not the same. We need to create a more fair society where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. If our society isn’t equitable, we’ll never live in the “colorblind” society that some believe already exists.
Black Lives Matter Organization. (2015). Black Lives Matter Logo. Wikimedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved October 18, 2022, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Lives_Matter_logo.svg.
