Its Time to Kill the Cartoon Racist
Unrealistic caricatures are hindering an honest conversation…
Imagine for a moment, what do you picture when you hear the word racist, being used to describe something or someone? Is it a Klansman burning a cross on a black family’s lawn? Is it some toothless trailer park resident who is fond of racial slurs? Is it neo-nazis giving the fascist salute? Do you think racists look like the people in the picture above? If that is what you imagine what it actually looks like, then you might not be getting the full picture.
It’s common for people to construct this caricature of what I like to refer to as the “The Cartoon Racist”. “The Cartoon Racist” is this exaggerated, obvious, evil depiction of something that is so ridiculous, so evil, so out of the norm, that it is easy to spot and label. Many Americans picture this as what a racist looks like. They frame racism as a conscious hate that is easy to frame in a simplistic good-bad binary. With this caricature, it raises the bar for what actually counts for racism in people’s minds that it obscures less obvious forms of it and allows some of society’s deepest social problems go ignored.
So, if all of that is a caricature? What does racism in America actually look like? It’s not Cletus the Klansman, who lives in Alabama in a trailer park, with no education and likes sprinkling every conversation with the n-word whose hobbies include crossburning and hate crimes.
Meet Karen, Karen lives in the suburbs in the midwest, she likes shopping at whole foods and works in HR, whenever she gets a resume from a qualified applicant with a name that’s a little hard to pronounce, it ends up in the garbage. A study by Chicago and MIT professors in which 5,000 fake resumes were created with similar educational and work backgrounds. Half of the resumes had “White-sounding” names like John and Emily and half had “Black-sounding” names like Jamal and Keisha. The resumes were sent out to real job postings, and the result was depressing. The “White-sounding” resumes had a 50% higher call-back rate than the “Black-sounding” ones. It also comes at no surprise that black unemployment has consistently been higher, often double that of white unemployment.
You see, Karen may not be a bad person, she may even have friends of other ethnicities. People, all people, have biases that they may not even be aware of. Due to socialization and subliminal messaging, everyone makes subconscious snap judgments against all types of people, myself included. The solution would be for the Karen’s of this world to try to realize their biases, and try to make a conscious effort to fight it.
Racism also manifests itself in community decisions, like where to put a hazardous waste dump? Are they going to put it near an affluent white neighborhood? Or are they going to put it in a low-income hispanic community? Decisions like that oftentimes compound themselves into negative social and life outcomes for people of color such as higher asthma rates for African-Americans.
Racism has also manifested itself in a way that has determined in which neighborhoods people live in. Take a look at the map above. It is a map of the Detroit Metro area with data taken from the 2010 census.. Each dot represents a person and is colored differently to represent different ethnic groups, with Whites being the blue dots, Blacks being the green dots, Hispanics being the orange dots and so on. It shocking to see the stark contrast of the neighborhoods. Their is a clear dividing line among race along eight-mile road. Why does it look that way? It certainly was no accident.
In the 1930’s under the New Deal, The Federal Housing Authority, or FHA was established. Under the FHA, mortgages were insured by the federal government, which encouraged lenders to lend to more people, especially working class people. However the program was effectively a tool of segregation. The agency rated neighborhoods risk level mainly by how what ethnicities lived there. If it was a white neighborhood, it was ranked green with little to no risk, and people were lent mortgages. If it was a non white neighborhood, it was ranked red with high risk and mortgages were not lent to residents. This was a practice known as redlining.
Although the practice was banned 50 years ago with the Fair Housing act, that practice has effects that are still being felt today. Homeownership is the primary means of acquiring family wealth in America. There is a stark racial wealth gap. With the median white family holding 12 times the wealth of African American families and 10 times that of Latino families.This inequality compounds itself with even more deleterious effects on communities of color, it leads to underfunded schools, inferior educational outcomes, to lower earning potential, to increased crime and incarceration.
Racism is much more than being mean to people who look different from you, it’s more than just unsavory beliefs. It is a pernicious, systematic social phenomenon that makes its way into many aspects of American life from economics, to politics, to culture. It’s time to kill the caricature of the cartoon racist so we can have an honest discourse about American race relations and take on the problem earnestly.
