The Social Construct
Why is it still so difficult to talk about race?
DISCLAIMER: I am a black man born in 1992, the product of two parents who hold professional degrees from Northwestern University—the same institution of higher learning where I am currently receiving my training. My family comes from the South Side of Chicago, but I have never lived there. I love rap music and I have no criminal record. In most contexts, I am a minority within a minority, living at the intersection of blackness and the middle-class. In the state of Florida, I am a suspect and I can be murdered on the street by a white man due to a loophole in state policy. I am learning each day what to make of these factors.
On March 15 a Massachusetts resident named Kyle Hunt organized a White Man March as “an international day for independent pro-White activism,” or what I like to call, a day for white supremacy. The cause was met with little support and considerable mockery of the protest signs that seriously featured quotes like “DIVERSITY=WHITE GENOCIDE.” The Twitter handle @YesYoureRacist, which exists exclusively as a watchdog for racist tweets, pointed out one of the more disturbing comments in the bunch:
What scares me is not these people’s ignorance of their privilege but the idea of a White Man March with a significant marketing budget and support from Fox News. It was only 25 years ago when Lee Atwater made Willie Horton the face for urban crime and scared enough people into voting for George H.W. Bush. Comments like the one above make me skeptical about how much has really changed since then.
One thing that’s for certain is that the liberalization of white racial attitudes in America over the last 50 years has made openly talking about race more of an uncomfortable matter rather than a progressive one. Though much of the open aggression toward minorities is now publicly condemned, covert forces of oppression against minorities have been designed into the American system to sustain a power dynamic that perpetually disadvantages those people of color.
Stokely Carmichael coined the term “institutional racism” in 1967 to redefine the issue as the calculated control of minority populations through mainstream societal structures. In his book Black Power: the Politics of Liberation in America, he writes of the lack of an “American dilemma” in the context of U.S. race relations:
“‘Respectable’ individuals can absolve themselves from individual blame: they would never plant a bomb in a church; they would never stone a black family. But they continue to support political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies. Thus acts of overt, individual racism may not typify the society, but institutional racism does—with the support of covert, individual attitudes of racism.”
Such a dilemma still doesn’t exist in the 21st century. A 2008 study on racial attitudes conducted by the Black Youth found that 71 percent of African-Americans said that racism was still a major issue in this country while only 33 percent of Caucasian people agreed. This represents the clear divide in the way we think about racial issues. As a black man, I carry my race with me everywhere I go: in the workplace, in the classroom, at the local convenience store, in my car. It’s a reality of my life that I live and battle with on a daily basis. If I was a white person, whose racial identity has never been cast as other, I would have a considerably more complacent perception of reality.
It’s a difference of experience that is difficult to translate into words, mostly because the concept of racism has become so elusive. It’s terrifying because power of racism today is that it operates under the guise of “post-racial America,” when in actuality, these liberal attitudes have really only accomplished three things:
- Created a public forum to push the issue of diversity in our schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods without addressing the root causes of disadvantage and segregation.
- Diminished the role of individual acts of racism as a means of expressing white dominance such that interracial couples can lawfully date without being subject to harassment and lynching is no longer a socially accepted public spectacle.
- Made the word “racist” one of the most offensive terms in the dictionary, particularly as a racial pejorative for white people.
The United States has created a history of condemning racism, but not challenging its very institutions. It’s the same force that restricts the President of the United States from fully exercising his “blackness” when announcing a mentor program to create more opportunities for minority youths. In his address launching the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, not only did Obama fail to address the undying legacy of racism in this country, he didn’t use the word once in his near 40 minutes of talking. Even the leader of the “free world” is subject to this challenge.
We’ve gotten really good at coding our language and deflecting genuine conversations about race. How do we cope and find a way to live in this context? How do we reverse history? How do we bridge this gap between people? What will the next 100 years look like? I want to use this writing as a venue for conversation about a shadowed topic. I want to remove the veil that has covered up a long history of oppression. I want to crack the code that exists in the context of language and communication with one another. I want to help break the silence. This is part one in a series of deep conversations about race that serve to open up public discourse. Feel free to share your thoughts in this forum.
Extra: Reverse Racism summed up by comedian and political theorist Aamer Rahman
