One of the reasons people often don’t try to talk about racism, especially persistent (but kind of low-key) racism, is that the conversations go so badly. And they go badly for two reasons I want to mention here (there are others).
First, it’s that the racism is low-key. By “low-key,” I don’t mean it’s innocuous, or not a big problem. I mean that the racist acts don’t necessarily fit conventional notions of what racists do: there might be a complete absence of racist epithets, an avoidance of even mentioning race, and the people engaged in racism might not be consciously trying to be what they think of as racist. Sometimes it’s done through unconscious passive-aggressive actions and comments, or even behavior that the person thinks is anti-racist (such as endorsing the deficit model of culture). There can be a conscious intent to be “fair,” “objective,” “have high standards” and so on, without the thought “Oh, boy oh boy, how can I make this decision in the most racist way possible?” And it’s persistent. It’s low-key like a low-key note that is playing constantly, that is part of every decision, and therefore tremendously harmful, but it is so constant that people don’t even notice it.
Because it’s constant, it seems normal, and so people can’t see it as racist. And, if you try to name it as racist, they’ll argue it isn’t because it isn’t the open hostility racist epithet kind of racism. Because they can imagine a worse racism, they deflect the criticism that what they’re doing (or enabling) is racist. It’s like saying that because I only robbed one bank, and I know of people who’ve robbed ten, I’m not really a bank robber.
That deflection of racism is the consequence of seeing racism as SO evil that normal people couldn’t possibly engage in it. There’s another odd quality that is the consequence of framing racism as something extreme—the assumption that it must always be at play (leading to the “some of my best friends are X” or “I get along great with this person who is X”). There are some interesting studies from years ago in which people watched videos of a doctor interacting with patients. If the doctor was ethnically out-group and the patient was ethnically in-group, and the interaction went well, then the test subjects (the ones watching the video) were unlikely to mention race. But, if things went badly, the watchers attributed the doctor’s bad behavior to race.
Racism isn’t a feeling; it’s an explanation.
And it’s almost always an explanation about motive. The reason that many white people on public assistance have no problem condemning POC on public assistance as “lazy” and advocating a reduction in the social safety net is that they don’t see themselves as scamming the system—they need the assistance but “those people” don’t. It’s the same behavior (being on public assistance) but judged differently because of the assumption of different motives—the in-group has good motives and the out-group has bad motives.
That’s typical of in-group/out-group explanations, but, when it comes to race, there are tragic consequences. White people on juries are likely to empathize with white defendants and be persuaded by arguments about extenuating circumstances, when they would assume bad motives on the part of POC defendants. And this is all unconscious.
How most people think about racism is so odd—in addition to assuming it has to be conscious, people often assume that it has some weird kind of monocausal quality. So, for instance, if your treatment of me can be shown to have been affected by anything other than racism, then it wasn’t racism. This is the “He isn’t racist, he’s just a jerk” argument. And he may be a jerk, but there’s nothing that keeps someone from being both a jerk and racist.
But, if a person is a jerk to a lot of people, and is a jerk to POC, many people are unlikely to call that bad behavior toward POC racist (“he’s just a jerk”). And they’ll argue it isn’t really racist without looking to see whether there is some kind of difference (it’s more frequent, harsher, has bigger consequences when POC are the object of jerk behavior). It’s a missing stair situation.
The Pervocracy describes a missing stair as:
Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there’s a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”
Some people are like that missing stair. [….] Just about every workplace has that one person who doesn’t do their job, but everyone’s grown accustomed to picking up their slack. A lot of social groups and families have that one person. The person whose tip you quietly add a couple bucks to. (Maybe more than a couple, after how they talked to the server.) The person you don’t bother arguing with when they get off on one of their rants. The person you try really, really hard not to make angry, because they’re perfectly nice so long as no one makes them angry.
The problem is that vulnerable people are more likely to have trouble avoiding the missing stair, and are more likely to get injured. The missing stair affects POC disparately.
It doesn’t matter if the jerk means to treat POC differently; intent doesn’t matter. Even if the jerk was equally a jerk to everyone, if there are greater consequences, regardless of intent, for POC, then it’s disparate impact. And that’s discrimination.
And it’s racist. And it’s racist for someone not to try to stop the jerk from being a jerk if their jerkiness has a disparate impact on POC.
I’m white and argumentative af, privileged, and very hard to intimidate, and even I have given up trying to talk to some people about racism because they are so committed to deflecting the issue to anything other than racism, especially anything other than systemic racism. And if I find it exhausting, then how many other people who are less privileged, less argumentative, and more vulnerable have also given up?