American Racism: Passive, Active, Corrosive
The most shocking thing about the current state of racial affairs in the United States isn’t that there is a problem. Given the history of our country, racial tensions are almost inevitable. What is shocking is the denial of these problems. The “color blind” approach to racism has failed, because statistics and psychology prove that even when we aren’t conscious of it, we conceptualize people of different races differently.
As an illustration, imagine if a famous white person was killed in a routine traffic stop. It’s hard to picture, for many reasons. The assumptions that we have about white people interacting with the police are very different than the assumptions we have about a person of color, especially black men. The default (imagined) state of a white person is not resisting arrest but instead being cooperative. The default state of a person of color is threatening, something to be worried about. It isn’t always active, but we all carry assumptions with us, not as racists or bigots, but as Americans.
In order for the current treatment of African-Americans in this country to be anything approaching acceptable, a generous amount of mental gymnastics needs to be undertaken. Whenever attention is drawn to the killing of black men by police officers, a common counter-argument is that more white people are killed each year than people of color. This argument is specious, for a number of reasons. Primarily, it ignores, either ignorantly or willingly, statistics. In truth, black people are killed by the police 2.5 times more than their white counterparts. And when black people are unarmed, this statistic jumps even higher, to five times more likely.
Secondly, the white people killed by police are often unprivileged in other ways. In 2015, white people killed by police were more than twice as likely to be mentally ill than slain black people (32% to 15%.) They are also often homeless, like Kelly Thomas.
Thirdly, this argument places total faith in the police, elevating them to a position of infallibility, even though studies show that police officers suffer from some of the same racial biases that Americans at large hold. Insisting in this simplistic view of law enforcement removes any nuance and creates a dangerous precedent.
The most insidious thing about this logic is that it works in reverse as well. Not only is someone shot and killed because they are a “criminal” or “bad guy,” they are necessarily bad because they have been killed. When we accept this moral absolutism at face-value, it not only allows for but requires the accompanying character assassination of the slain. Victims of police brutality have to be bad because police are good. It’s the modern day extension of the concept of the “born criminal,” the theory that people who break the law break it for reasons that are inborn or genetic.
It’s an idea that was first popularized in the eugenics movement but appears not to have disappeared. Look at how protestors in cities like Charlotte, Baltimore, and Ferguson are routinely described as “animals.” Obviously, this is literally dehumanizing, but what’s more, it implies that these people are not in control of their own bodies and that they act irrationally and on impulse, like animals.
This stereotype is fatal. People like Tomi Lahren describing outraged black communities as “animals” reinforces the perception that black people do not have the same command of their bodies, and that they are somehow physically different from white people. When Darren Wilson gave his testimony before a grand jury in the Michael Brown shooting, he described Brown as looking “like a demon.” He goes on to say that while he was shooting him, Brown “was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting him.”
It’s the same conception in both cases. The same assumptions about black people that allow us to paint them as animals when they’re reacting fairly reasonably to a history of racism, oppression and cultural erasure that is older than the United States allows Darren Wilson to give Michael Brown superhuman powers. Wilson’s racist fear is a visible example of the danger that black men face because of white ideas about their bodies.
Unsurprisingly, the stereotype of the black body as animalistic originated in American slavery, when blacks were intentionally and systematically treated as, well, animals. The language of eugenics and racism has its roots in slavery, when black bodies were seen as vehicles only for labor and breeding. After the abolition of slavery, the artificial differences between white and black were propagated by scientific racism, which asserted that, among other things, whites were more intelligent because of a larger brain volume. This flavor of biological determinism has fallen out of wide use today, for a number of reasons. Firstly, brain size doesn’t really have much of a bearing on intelligence. Furthermore, much of the research that contributed to these theories has been challenged by later researchers.
As an aside, this is why people can talk about black “bodies” and white “people” in the same sentence without flinching. The white body is not racialized or essentialized in the way that bodies of color are, at least not along the metric of race by itself. Talking about the white body would be mostly meaningless, because it hasn’t been constructed in any meaningful way.
The modern version of this narrative is a complaint about “black culture.” You’ll hear this raised by talking heads like Rudy Guilliani and conservative writers like Ben Shapiro. It’s essentially the same argument that has been in circulation for the past half century, which is that there is something wrong with black people and that white people need to “fix” it. Be wary of this. It doesn’t offer solutions besides banalities and platitudes about “hard work” being the answer to all of Black America’s ills. It reeks of respectability politics and, what’s more, is completely infeasible in an America that has a massive wealth gap and shrinking economic mobility. Further, there is the evidence that, contrary to Bernie Sanders’ claims, poverty is not the worst part of racism; racism is.
In order for us to truly deal with the cloud of racism that continues to cover this country, we have to truly work. Firstly, we have to be willing to confront ourselves (myself very much included) in an honest way. It’s easy to look at the infractions of someone else and feel as though you have nothing to change. But it’s a lot harder to see yourself as being on the same continuum as someone you demonize and disagree with. Furthermore, it’s important to be knowledgeable about and understand the past. Almost any social issue in modern America has a historical correlate and recognizing what current injustices developed from allows us to criticize and nullify them.
But the intellectual approach is not enough. Action is critical. It can take myriad different forms, from protesting to voting for a political candidate that doesn’t tacitly endorse white supremacy (and not just in the presidential election). The point being that fighting racism is just that: a fight. It’s not passive, and the moral absolutism and “with us or against us” thinking that accompanies social justice is justified when the very thing you are fighting against is the status quo and its inertia. It can be done, but the very nature of the struggle means that it has to be active and constant.
