It’s really hard for us to have a good conversation about racism for a lot of reasons, but mostly because we have a lot of false assumptions about what racism is and how it functions. I’ve mentioned elsewhere the false notion that you aren’t racist if you’re talking about culture—racism has always really been about culture. I want to mention three other beliefs here.
First, we should talk about racist actions, but instead we talk about whether a person is racist. We believe that racist actions are the consequence of deliberate decisions to be racist on the part of people who consciously decide to engage in an action that they themselves believe to be racist because they are racists. In other words, we think there are some people who are racist, and everything they do is deliberately racist.
Second, we think there is a binary between racist (really bad) or not (good).
Third, we also have a binary of shame v. pride—we tend to assume that you are either proud of yourself (meaning you haven’t done anything really bad), or you think you’ve done something bad (in which case you’re ashamed of yourself). This applies to your sense of your group—you can either take pride in your group (meaning it’s great), or you can think your group has behaved badly (in which case you should be ashamed of your group).
Imagine that someone says to you, “Hey, I think what you just did there was kinda racist,” or “America has a racist past,” or “The Confederacy was racist.” If you believe the three false assumptions above, then here’s what you hear: “Hey, you are a bad person who should wallow in shame because you decide to be racist every day and every way.” Or, “As an American, you should wallow in shame about the US and spend your whole life apologizing because America and Americans are entirely evil for their deliberate racism.” Or, “If you live in a CSA state or are descended from anyone who fought for the CSA, you should do nothing but wallow in shame and hate your ancestors because they were completely evil.”
You hear someone making a claim about racist behavior as an accusation of your being an evil person (or part of an evil group) who should be filled with shame, wandering around beating your breast, and hating yourself and everyone in your group.
You might believe that because you consume media that tells you that’s what SJW believe, and they might even find a quote from someone they say is an SJW that kinda sorta maybe could be interpreted as arguing that you are condemned to a life of shame. That’s because your media is engaged in inoculation.
There isn’t a binary of shame v. pride—to take pride in something, it doesn’t have to be perfect. And shame is not a particularly useful response to criticism (in fact, it shifts the stasis from what you did to who you are—which is sidetracking).
Racism is an instance of in-group favoritism—the tendency to think that members of your in-group are entitled to more than members of out-groups; that in-group members have good motives, and out-group members have bad motives; that the world (or your nation, culture, community) would be better were it only in-group members; that most of our problems are caused by the out-group; that the in- and out-groups shouldn’t be held to the same standards.
So, for instance, I live in an area that has a lot of cyclists come to time themselves for races. Many of them run stop signs, yell at pedestrians, and are generally jerks. I am not a cyclist. At a certain point, I found myself thinking that cyclists are all jerks. But, once I thought about it, I had to admit that every day I see one or two cyclists behave like jerks, and I see twenty or more cyclists. Every day, I see a much higher percentage of drivers behave like jerks, but I never came to the conclusion that drivers are jerks. That’s how in-group/out-group thinking works—your mental math is different about in- and out-group members, so you always think that your judgment of the out-group is grounded in empirical data—those two jerk cyclists—but it isn’t, because that data wouldn’t cause you to condemn your in-group (drivers). That’s in-group favoritism.
You take bad behavior on the part of an out-group member as proof that they are basically bad people.
Racism takes in-group favoritism and “naturalizes” it by associating that bad behavior with culture, “race,” ethnicity, or some inherent and inescapable character of a group. My irrational assessment of cyclists wasn’t racism not just because I never said or thought the word race, but because “cyclist” isn’t a category associated with an ethnicity, race, country of origin. Once that cyclist wasn’t on a bike, I wouldn’t assess them as out-group. Racism has two parts: it is in-group/out-group thinking that makes out-group an inescapable identity; also, it is the world in which privileges are (generally unconsciously) given to the inescapable identity of in-group.
Those two things are equally important. Trump’s racist tweets are a good example of the first; google image searching “beautiful hair” is a great example of the second. (That picture is above.)
Racism isn’t about people getting up and thinking about ways to express their conscious hate of that race. Racism is about relying on the cognitive bias of in-group favoritism; it’s about thinking that people like us are normal, and people not like us don’t merit consideration; it’s about how we explain behavior; it’s about our unconscious framings.
There isn’t some binary of being racist (bad, shameful) and not racist (good, pride). Racism isn’t about who we are; it’s, to some extent, about what we do, but even more, it’s about how unconscious biases on the part of many people have a particular outcome. No one got up in the morning and said, “How can I be racist today?” and decided to make sure that a GIS of “beautiful hair” was racist. But you can see the results show that how we think about beauty is racist.
Racism is a cultural phenomenon and, in my experience, very rarely a conscious hostility. It’s people who value standardized test scores when there’s no evidence that those scores are predictive of success in a field; it’s people noticing errors in resumes when they think the applicant is African American; it’s a teacher or school who treats a children of color differently from white children who did exactly the same thing; it’s a director who has few POC in their films; it’s our culture’s reliance on racist tropes.
Racism isn’t really about hostility as much as it is about forgetting and assuming.
That means that racism isn’t about a racist twisting his mustache thinking about how to be extra racist today. It means that racism is about how a culture works, and not necessarily the conscious intent of individuals. It means that an individual being racist is like an individual being greedy, or selfish, or irrational.
My husband makes fun of my family because, as he says, “They are always one step away from fame doing something mildly disreputable.” And, really, that’s true. One ancestor involved in the Revolutionary War was such a terrible commander that he got removed from active duty and was put in charge of a prison. When I joined a genealogy group, I found a relative who tried to make him out as a great man and hero of the war. It wasn’t. She was lying.
If you try put everything into the shame/pride binary, you either have to condemn him, which is odd, since he did support the Revolution, or you have to deny his being appallingly incompetent (her choice). Maybe just say he did some good and bad things, and take pride in the good things.
If you accept the shame/pride binary, and you accept that being racist is not good, then you either have to condemn your ancestors, or you have to deny they were racist. Because, let’s be blunt, not only would it be hard for most of us to say we have never been racist, we would have an even harder time claiming that no one in our ancestry was racist.
The world is not a fight between your in-group (obviously and always good) and everyone else (obviously and always bad). The world is a complicated place in which we are always failing to be as good as we would like, but in which we might be better than we are.