Samuel

There’s some interesting reporting at The Daily Dish over some hay that’s being made of late around right wing nut-job Glenn Beck and his racist roadshow. The short version of this is that Beck said some pretty racist things about the President (suggesting that the President is a racist and that he hates white people and white culture – whatever that means). It was a stupid thing to say, which is to say, it’s completely unsurprising for Glenn “Frank Burns” Beck.

So, the obvious consequence of this was that several companies, not wanting to be associated with an idiot like Beck, pulled their advertising from his show. Among these companies are some big ones, Wal Mart and Geiko. Still, no surprises.

But here’s the thing that I find shocking. There’s an organized movement among conservatives to boycott the companies that pulled their advertising from the Beck show. So, there’s actually an organization out there – red state dot org and no I will not do them the service of a link – that’s calling for this boycott. They call the companies that pulled their advertising pawns of the left, and act as though there’s some left wing conspiracy to silence Beck. But what the Daily Dish points out – and rightly – is that this amounts to a defense of Beck’s statements, since it was the statements that led to the advertisers pulling their ads.

And frankly, I’m kind of glad to see things aligning this way. The American Right Wing has a long history of using racism to move its agenda, and conservatism has been associated with racism in America from way back. It’s refreshing to see it out in the open where the chicken hawks can’t hide from their own prejudices.

The post that you’re about to read was difficult to write. I think about race. I get worked up about civil rights. If I had been alive in the 50s and 60s, I like to think that I would have had the courage to go on freedom rides. Even if I didn’t have the courage, I would have wanted to. I like to think that I have fairly well developed thinking about race. That said, it’s hard to have credibility writing about race and the experience of people from different races from a position of privilege like mine. White guys who grew up in the suburbs need to be extra careful when we talk about race, because we grew up learning a lot of assumptions that we deserve everything we have. (The same is probably true of girls and people who grew up in other than suburbs, but I am talking about my own experience, not anyone else’s). That said, I had a pretty strong emotional reaction to some things I read today and I feel compelled to share. Please know that my hope in writing this post is to contribute my ideas to a much, much larger dialogue. I do not by any means claim to have absolute truth, or even answers. It is not my intention to offend anyone, but I recognize that these are deeply emotional issues and that offense is taken easily.

I recently ran across an online debate about race. What I came away thinking was that, despite recent amazing symbolic gains, we have made very little progress in terms of people’s attitudes surrounding race.

The debate, without going into too much detail, focused on a tee shirt design that’s popular on the East coast. The tee shirt says “I Black People” on it. One camp of people said that the shirt was racist, pointing out that a shirt that said “I White People” would be quick to offend our liberal sensibilities. The other camp seemed to argue that the shirt was not racist, nor would be a shirt that said “I White People”. This position was based on the logic that love is good and loving people is good.

Neither group questioned the assumption that one shirt might contain a racist message while the other did not. All participants in this public debate failed to question the premise of a pre-existing state of equality between black people and white people. This is a mistake.

The reality of the situation is that there are deep inequalities in the social privilege afforded to white people and black people. By any meaningful measure of social success, be it infant mortality, average income, educational attainment, life expectancy, or rates of incarceration, white people are privileged over black people.

I will not go into trying to diagnose this problem here, or speculate as to the cause. There are many good books on the subject. I will, however, mention one measure on which I am convinced that white people and black people are 100% equal; innate potential. There is nothing wrong with black people that causes them to have fewer chances in life than white people; the problem is in society.

When we proceed from the notion that white people are privileged over black people in society, we come to some new conclusions about the two tee shirts mentioned earlier. We initially thought the messages to be equivalent – the only difference being the race of people the wearer professes to love. The actual content of the messages is in fact very different because of some subtextual messages that are universally (or at least near universally) understood. At the risk of running into some profound disagreement about particulars, I will try to give this subtext a voice.

The subtext of “I Black People” goes something like this;

“I recognize the historical oppression and suffering that Black People have experienced at the hands of this society, and am committed to moving toward a world in which people of all races are given equal life chances at birth.”

The subtext of “I White People” could go one of two ways. The first is;

“I refuse to acknowledge any contemporary privilege that White People enjoy, and am making a statement to that effect with the knowledge that it will be taken as racist and in the hopes that someone engages me in conversation about this topic so that I can profess my view of an egalitarian reality to them”

or;

“I acknowledge the privilege that White People enjoy in this society, and believe it to be deserved and the result of an inferiority that is innate in people of other races.”

Both of these messages are pretty deeply problematic. I hope I don’t have to explain why.
My point in writing this is to, hopefully, take a chink out of the armor of a wrong idea that seems to occupy a durable place in our society; that of ‘reverse racism’ or ‘reverse discrimination.’ When I was in grade school, I learned that the problem of race was entirely related to discrimination, prejudice, and racism. There was an implication that these things are always overt, and that a person who is prejudiced is aware of their preferences. No one bothered to mention that these things can be so subtle that the people who carry these attitudes are not even aware of their prejudice.

In reading the wonderful book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, I learned about something called an Implicit Association Test (IAT). This type of test can measure a person’s relative preference for people of different races, genders, sexual orientation, or even political persuasion. The one that interests me in particular is the black/white test. Without going into the particulars of how an IAT works here, I’ll just say that Gladwell reported that most people, regardless of their politics, race, economic background, or other demographic characteristics, seem to have at least a moderate preference for white people over black people. This suggests (at least to me) that society teaches us that white people are better than black people. You can take an IAT yourself by clicking on the link above. I did, and I was saddened but not shocked by the results. This article at the Washington Post has a lot more information about different studies that show how these implicit attitudes can impact life chances without anyone knowing that there is any prejudice going on.

What worries me more than anything in the face of all this is that now that we have a black President the people who were already saying (all evidence to the contrary) that there is already equality between races and that racism is all but over will now point to Barack Obama to prove their point once and for all. I hope that Obama in the White House helps move us forward toward a genuine discussion of race in this country, but I worry that his presence there will actually cement one of the most insidious racial attitudes we have; that we have achieved a colorblind society.