When I was a young child I was race-unconscious. It wasn’t that I didn’t come into contact with people of other races. It was just that the ‘racial’ component of skin color wasn’t drummed into me by my parents, and it took a long time for a misfit nerd to pick up on the distinctions in my social contexts.
I grew up thinking that it was normal someone totally white to have Japanese grandparents (they adopted us, sort-of, it is a long story). My best friends in elementary school were Mariama (a black girl) and Stephen (A Chinese boy). They weren’t my black or Chinese friends (at least not to me). It wasn’t until fourth or fifth grade that I figured out that some other kids would say ‘black’ as some kind of insult. And even then it took me a while to realize the kids making the insults meant the term to imply something more than mere skin color.
My mom sometimes talks about “having a category” for something. Sometimes it is bad not to have a category for something: like the need to have a long enough outlook to plan for retirement, or the understanding that in a relationship you might need ‘my time’, ‘your time’, ‘our time’, ‘my friend’s time’ and ‘your friend’s time’. When I was young I didn’t have a category for race. I might describe someone by hair color or skin color, but I didn’t think of ‘blacks’ or ‘Asians’ as groups of people.
I mention this because I think that race is not an inherently useful category. It exists as a social category. It has serious ramifications for many people. I don’t deny any of that. But it isn’t a useful category. I mention this because via Foreign Dispatches I see that census officials are thinking of removing the ‘other race’ category because they think too many people are using it. Apparently they feel that they need to shoehorn more people into the traditional US racial classifications. I agree with Abiola:
I think Hispanics who are resisting such categorizations have the right idea: it’s well past time government bean-counters ceased being able to ask people to declare their race, and the whole idea just creeps me out from a civil liberties viewpoint. Try as I might, I can’t rid the whole business of that association in my mind with sinister creeps in trench-coats asking for papers stamped “Arier” or “nicht-Arier.” If the government needs information on the “racial” distribution of citizens, statistical data based on surveys will serve as well as information that can be tied to specific individuals.
Forcing people into narrow racial categories isn’t something the government should be in the business of bothering with. Race is not a useful enough category that we should force someone to identify themselves as ‘Race X’ if they don’t think they fit. It may not be a huge step toward racial equality, but there is power in denying the power of certain categorizations.
I have often felt the same way, but I never hit upon the idea of doing statistical surveys to measure illegal discrimination based on race. That really will answer almost all of my reservations about the prospect. Among the good properties of this idea is that it will allow the group doing to survey to define “race” in whatever way makes the most sense for the question they are trying to answer, rather than trying to guess what people meant when they checked “other” or “white” or “hispanic”.
The problem with your idea is that it’s reality-based. Asking the government to accept the truth of a statistical survey is laughable, when they can’t be trusted to know that Sweden has an army.
Thad Beier
Just to bear in mind:
The government in the United States has for a long time been more progressive on race than the private sector in a lot of ways.
Against that backdrop, calls for government to become uninvolved in race seem to be calls for the private sector to freely continue with its greater propensity for racism.
Now some go so far as to claim the reason they want government to become uninvolved is that they are afraid the Nazis are coming. For the most part, those people are not to be taken seriously. Maybe someone else will but I wouldn’t descend to treat such an argument with enough respect to offer a counterargument.
We are not now in a world/country/society where race does not impact a person’s life chances or where the life chances of the median Black person aren’t substantially different from the life chances of the median White person.
If you agree that is a problem – some people do not – then you will at least attempt to supplement your criticism any role of government in addressing that problem with some alternative.
Otherwise you will be written off as a rationalizing opponent of racial justice.
I’m not unsympathetic to the position, really. Still, as someone who has spent a lot of time reviewing census data — from 1930 and before — I have to say that the more information included, the better.
It’s a historical record, and one that will have uses in the future we cannot imagine. Until I hear of some kind of present misuse of data on race, I’m all for having the question there. Of course, anyone who doesn’t want to answer it is free to skip the question.
Both Sebastien and the previous commenters have valid points. I’d love to see government money spent on something more useful than compiling data on the racial make-up of its citizens.
At the same time, we still live in a society wherre young black men need to be taught how to deal with the police when pulled over, oft times for “driving while black.”
I’m not sure there’s a simple solution for this one.
I never personally confronted the “race” categorization dilemma until I had to register my children for school. Twice now, during the harried and emotional day of Kindergarten registration, I have been asked to categorize my children by race. I read the lists. I looked into my children’s faces. I refused to fill any little circle with the lead from my #2 pencil. On both occasions the school secretaries contacted me.
They said my form was incomplete and that the school and the government required this information. I said that I understood their point of view–the school was in a position to serve as the government’s accounting agent and there could be consequences for the school if they didn’t do this; that the government was counting people by race as part of its responsibility to insure anti-discrimination measures were being adhered to (although counting Kindergarten students by race is not an exercise that makes any sense to me on that account), but I would still not define my children by race.
The school secretaries were not happy. I told them to fill in whatever circle they wanted because no matter what circle they chose, it would be untruthful. Race, the whole stupid, xenophobic concept, is a lie. The only race on this planet is the human race and all the DNA evidence is in–in case you haven’t heard–we all came from Africa.
Now, I know there are those in the United States who are afraid that the gains we made during civil rights will all disappear without these counting mechanisms. I myself have supported affirmative action and other anti-discrimination measures when they were used to reveal discrimination so that it could be stopped. But we need some more progressive thinking here. There are some in every “racial group” in America that benefit by counting heads and opening or closing the gates to education and employment based on their counts. There are others that benefit by protesting that the gates don’t allow for the entrance of those on their other merits. If we accept the dogma that head counts by color is all we can do to end racism and discrimination then we’re thinking too small.
I happen to know that other parents have adopted my stance when confronted with the “race” question on school forms. Some parents deliberately select a different category for their children every time they get forms. Others select racial categories based on what category they think will be beneficial to their children. So how effective do you really think the head counts are?
I don’t think of race as a lie, particularly. There are in fact genetic divisions between negroid, caucasoid and mongoloid groups. Just as true, there are people ( great many people) who don’t fit into these particular groupings.
I do think, though, that race is perhaps completely irrelevant when it comes to dealing with people as individuals. Race as a distinction for scientific study may still have some utility. But I’m an engineer, so I can’t say so with authority.
I’ve heard similar statements before, and they express a commendable position — a world where everyone felt that way and we could all ignore the social implications of race would be a good world. Nonetheless, I’ve never heard anyone who wasn’t white take the position that ignoring race was either a good idea or possible now.
If you’re white, you can merrily ignore race and reflect on how enlightened you are, and you are unlikely to run into any actual racists who are going to make your life more difficult because they don’t like the color of your skin. If you’re black, the same thing isn’t true — racism is less important than it was 40 years ago, but it still exists. If all the enlightened white people are studiously pretending that race has no effect on people’s lives in America, we aren’t going to be a lot of help in dealing with the racism that’s still out there.
Neither the census nor the Kindergarten are collecting the data for use in dealing with individuals. They are trying to get an idea what society is like, in the aggregate. I’m sure we can all agree that race is a very blunt instrument — but, from a social science perspective, that is, trying to understand the composition of ommunities, it’s better than nothing at all. (Which seems to be the alternative).
Nothing in the Constitution required the census to be able to tell you, in 1880, whether one village in Minnesota is made up of Norwegian Lutherans, and another of German Catholics. Or whether in 1910 particular counties in Iowa had more people from the Old South, as opposed to New England. This is useful historical information, though, and I don’t mind in the least that my great great grandparents spent some little amount of tax money on that.
(The quantum jump in information collected was between the 1840 and the 1850 census. Not knowing any of the actual details, I presume the backdrop of immigration from Ireland and Germany played a prominent role in the change. That was in the latter part of the decade, however, and it may be that the changes were already in train.)
For those of you who haven’t spent any time with the old censuses, they’re just a wealth of information. For example, there was a Holsclaw* in the very first census of California. Thirty year old Jacob, from Kentucky, lived in gold country. In the 1860, there was a single family of Holsclaws in the state — in Gilroy, apparently having traded gold for garlic. The head of this household (Milton T.) was from Missouri, and, at 52, was too old to be a son of Jacob. (I could tell you where Milton’s parents were born — because he was still alive in the 1900 — but the anti-popup software my wife put on the computer is interfering. We’ll all live without knowing.) The then-baby of the Gilroy Holsclaws, California-born William B. Holsclaw, was still living in Gilroy, at the age of 70, in the 1930 census. Had a farm, on Holsclaw Lane, and a wife of 30 years who came from Canada, Scottish background. The details in the census are tips of icebergs, of course, but they are there, and centrally located, to be put to work in various and sundry ways. And these are not only personal stories, they are the story of our country.
Is race part of the story of our country? Looking back 100 years hence, will race be understood to have still been a part of the story of our time? We all know it will.
* I mean no offense to our own Mr. H. I have no idea if or how he relates to these people, and have only chosen his surname because it is rare enough for a 10 minute research exercise to prove meaningful.
Sebastian, I agree with you and heartily commend your rejection of race categorization. Liberals, such as me, sometimes refuse to credit the amount of progress made in our society on the subject of race, particularly if we’ve been around long enough to have witnessed the depredations of racism.
In addition to underlining Charles Hamlet’s point, remember this: The U.S. Government’s use of race categorization in the census is NOT derived from some sort of fascist impulse. In fact, the government of this country is the first in history to take race into account as a positive way of insuring civil liberties and, yes, the bounties of society, are more equally applied and distributed. It became, through legislation, the courts, and its other institutions, the agent for enforcing change in our racial situation.
Individuals, private entities, local governments, and the States (I generalize) had more than a century and a half to be left alone on this and to reach their own accomodation with race blindness and they neglected and refused to do so. The power of the Federal Government was appealed, too, and finally it responded. This time, without another Civil War. Believe me, we the people are lucky beyond belief that those destroyed by racial discimination waited around for so long. Worse could have happened.
But the fact that you and so many others are creeped out by racial categories is great news. Maybe we should get rid of them in the census and see what happens.
I would add that many, many of my friends, my family, my brothers, my sisters, my mother, still use racial categories as a matter of course every day. I notice, too, that fewer people do so as time passes. Good.
“This guy, he’s black, came up to me at work, ….”
“Blanche, who I think is Oriental, told me…
“He’s got a bunch of Mexicans coming over to cut my lawn …..
But that’s progress, too. It beats my grandfather, who I adored and respected but argued with when I was a teenager, saying “Somebody ought to shoot that troublemaker Martin Luther King.” Then he’d look at me and ask if I was one of those “Libruls” …. another cool category.
Yup.
I think it was William Faulkner who referred to slavery as our collective original sin.
Sebastian, you are proof of redemption. Just remember, you didn’t think of it first.
This discussion of race follows well tread path. What initially appears as an honest assessment of race is in fact the same old dodge whites have employed to deny so much of their complicity in a system of white racism. Race isn’t a useful category. When was it ever so? Government shouldn’t be in the business of creating racial categories and force people to pick. As if it is the government that forces white privilege on whites? What is presented on the surface as an honest effort to oppose racism actually only muddies matters. There is a confusion between the psuedobiology of race with the past and present social realities. There is a confusion and error in equating collecting data on racial composition with racism.
Race is not a biologically accurate way of capturing human variation and thus has never been a useful category. There are no naturally occurring racial groups – never have been. But biology and anthropolgy have been complicit in claiming an ability to categorize humans racially. This was no innocent mistake on the part of early science. Race was never a real category, never a thing, never simply an idea but an ideology and social practice constructed out of the European colonization of the globe. The particular western-modern-scientific meaning of race is inexorably wrapped up in the process of capitalist development and exploitation. To put it simply, race or racialization produce a horrible self-fulfilling prophecy. And the result has been a enduring legacy of oppression, inequality, and privilege for some as others experience disadvantage.
I think its premature for US society to declare victory over racism and move on. Four centuries of oppression aren’t so quickly healed. Particularly the popular brutality of white violence – torturing blacks, castrating and otherwise mutilating black victims, burning blacks alive, keeping bone fragments of lynching victims as souvenirs. These acts occurred well into the 1950s as part of white America’s love affair with lynching. Other realities of race – racism – are from becoming a thing of the past. Limited horizons, fewer life chances, higher incidence of illness, lower life expectancy, persistent prejudice, personal and institutional discrimination – these will current and common matters are far more real, far more pressing, far more disturbing than some socially white sentiment that the government shouldn’t collect racial data on persons. Worse still is how this sentiment itself may well deepen the problem as it soothes whites into thinking that the problems have all gone away. Hell, white already believe such even with the presence of racialized categories.
To be sure, the American population may find itself forced to choose a racial category. But concerns about the future of mixed groups belies the fact that the US has already become a people of with a combination of “racial” ancestries. How many blacks have European ancestry? How many whites have African ancestry? The estimates are startling.
We need to continue the counting if for no other reason than to measure whatever progress we’re making in reducing inequities.
And there’s an enormous difference between professing to not a racist and professing to be an antiracist. Many whites in the US settle for the former. Positive change only comes from the latter.
You know of no nonwhites at all that aspire for a day when race is, not beneath notice as you’ve suggested, but irrelevant? I think this says more about the people you hang out with more than it does about white people.
Lizard,
If you’re white, you can merrily ignore race and reflect on how enlightened you are, and you are unlikely to run into any actual racists who are going to make your life more difficult because they don’t like the color of your skin.
Fascinating. Are you saing that some races are more inclined to be racist then others? Isn’t that a racist statement in itself?
As someone who lived in Brooklyn since the age of 11 and has attended a high school that was 40 – 50% black, and had two best friends (twins) in college who were black – I say that you statement is nonsense! My friends freely admitted that black people are much more racist then whites (of which they experienced plenty due to not being black “enough”). In fact its acceptable.
I’ll give you one example – I had a problem in college where one of my suitemates (who happened to be black)had my property which he refused to return. One day, I caught up with him in the hallway and demanded him to return it. When he threatened to “kick my ass”, I pushed him against the wall and really got into his face – his threat never materialized. Anyway, we got called into the office of the residential director (who’s black), who asked me what the problem was – I told him that the guy took my property and wouldnt’ return it. Then he asked my suitemate the same question and he really had no defense other then he got a “bad vibe” from me. When pressured for details on that, he couldn’t say anything beyond that he got a “bad vibe”. Apparently that was enough for the R.D, because here’s where it got interesting. The Residential Director then proceeded to tell me how he makes more money then most of the people at the University, and yet some white ladies, according to him, held their purses just a bit tighter when he walks in the elevator. So, “as a black man” (yea, he said that) he “understood” and could “relate” (Yea, I quote) to where my suitemate was coming from. When I asked him what all that had to do with me, he just blinked and could not connect the dots or establish any kind of relevancy. The next day, my suitemate kicked my door and called me a “white devil”. My residential advisor (a senior student from my floor who;s black) heard it and felt that that needed to be escalated back to the R.D., who refused to do anything about it (which left my residential advisor in shock, actually). I told the R.D. that if it was me calling him a “nigger” there would be helicopters and news crews all over campus. He just blinked. Heh.
I simply can not imagine the residential director, if he happend to be white, mediating that kind of a problem between students and bringing race into it ie, “as a white man….”
And don’t get me started on high school.
Curse that pesky biology and anthropology for designing people differently in groups.
“Nonetheless, I’ve never heard anyone who wasn’t white take the position that ignoring race was either a good idea or possible now.”
What about Thomas Sowell? And arguably Frederick Douglas? Or (ducking) Clarence Thomas? If we are forced to categorize, they aren’t white.
I also want to note that the impetus for this post was the fact that census officials want to force people to categorize themselves into a label which the people themselves do not believe fits. That seems less useful in a long-term scale then allowing people to define themselves by race if they wish, and not if they don’t wish.
Well, I’m white – though I have been known to use the Other field and write “Pink”. 😉
FWIW, I agree that the ‘other race’ category shouldn’t be removed: people shouldn’t be required to shoehorn themselves into standard classifications if they don’t feel that they fit.
“Race” is, pretty much, a purely political/cultural phenonmenon – especially in the US. The divisions are therefore always going to be fuzzy, and while racism is still a reality (I disagree with whoever said that “blacks are more racist than whites” – really, not so) it will be (we can hope) less and less so as time goes on. I think the “Other” field may be a way of measuring that, as time goes on.
“I think its premature for US society to declare victory over racism and move on. Four centuries of oppression aren’t so quickly healed. Particularly the popular brutality of white violence – torturing blacks, castrating and otherwise mutilating black victims, burning blacks alive, keeping bone fragments of lynching victims as souvenirs. These acts occurred well into the 1950s as part of white America’s love affair with lynching.”
I certainly don’t declare victory. I am suggesting that people who don’t want to be sorted by race, not be forced to do so by the government.
Also, I want to point out that categorizing ‘white violence’ against blacks is probably not helpful to the discussion. What was ‘white’ about the violence? It was ideologically driven violence–spurred by an ideology that was racist. The racist ideology convinced certain people to attack other people on the basis of skin color. Nothing specifically white about it. It is the same confusion in talking about Arab violence against Jews. The problem is that you are really talking about a racist-religious-ideology which has captured the minds of many people in the Middle East. There isn’t anything racial about adopting the ideology, though there is something cultural about the racism.
Perhaps you mean there is something in US culture that is racist. That is certainly true–and more true with some US sub-cultures than others. But once again, this isn’t something stamped into the psyche of ‘white people’, it is something to be fought at the cultural level.
I think one way to fight it at the cultural level is not to force people to categorize themselves as a particular ‘race’. The category of ‘black’ or ‘Hispanic’ or ‘white’ isn’t useful anyway. Why not let people who think they aren’t any of them say that they aren’t any of them?
Sebastian, DeWayne,
If we are forced to categorize, they aren’t white.
Ofcourse they are! Haven’t you heard? Any black person who doesn’t lean left is a traitor to his race… Heh… Talk about racism.
These acts occurred well into the 1950s as part of white America’s love affair with lynching.
Interesting – “white America’s”. Way to generalize.
Particularly the popular brutality of white violence
How popular? What are the statistics?
persistent prejudice, personal and institutional discrimination
As someone who went to an inner city public school and I can say that the institutional discrimination is the one agains whites. Black students had their deadlines extended all the time, whereas white students knew not to expect such leniency. I am not going to say that it happened with all the teachers, but the fact that it was done by those few in the open speaks volume of the whole athmosphere.
Don’t get me started on Jr. HS. I was a B student and was not able to get into any high schools I applied to with my grades (was forced to go to my zone school), meanwhile black kids who were socially promoted (were given just passing grades to push them out) got into good schools. Nice.
Jes,
Race” is, pretty much, a purely political/cultural phenonmenon – especially in the US. The divisions are therefore always going to be fuzzy, and while racism is still a reality (I disagree with whoever said that “blacks are more racist than whites” – really, not so) it will be (we can hope) less and less so as time goes on.
I agree with most of the above, but still say that blacks are more prejudiced. The whole idea of them being a perpetual victim makes them view all whites as racists from the get go. For example, if someone gives you an attitude for no reason, you think they are an a//hole. If you are black, ofcourse, its very easy to go down the path of the “no reason… other then me being black”, so that person is not just an a//hole, but a racist. I had this experience with a friend of mine. We went to the post office and the clerk was rude to him for no reason. Automatically, my friend thought he was racist – “Why else would he be rude to me for no reason?”.
I grew up in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world, so while I recognize “race” as a concept employed by Americans I don’t really get it at any visceral level. I do get cultural distinctions, though, so strangely enough I have no problem talking about “black culture” — which, amusingly, has many “white” participants — even though I think the racial category “black”/”African-American” is a stupid one.
I can’t be as dismissive of the sensitivty that some people exhibit about their own racial experiences. In many areas of the country, racists really are awful to people who are different ‘races’ than they are. In areas where this is prevalent, the people who are identified as part of the target race develop defense mechanisms which make sense in that context. When they move into other contexts, it is difficult to change the habits of a lifetime.
Abuse really can hurt people’s minds. I’m going to offer an analogy, which ought not be taken too far. I have a close friend who was sexually abused by multiple people in his extended family. He has turned out relatively normal, but he has some emotional defense mechanisms that were completely appropriate when he erected them (and allowed him to survive) but which hinder his ability to live a happy life now.
I think that a similar thing can happen with race, and Stan is picking up on that. What appears to Stan as an overreaction is (in many cases) an automatic defense which is unjustified at the moment, but understandable given the history. I understand that, and I don’t blame people who have been subjected to serious racism for being sensitive. But I also note that justifiable defenses sometimes have to be worked with later.
I agree that “other” is a bad category to define yourself into and that it probably results in some very skewed statistics.
But I don’t think getting the public out of race entirely is the solution. In France, the government does no data-collection on race. The result of this is that the government doesn’t really address racial inequities: the elite public schools are predominantly white, as are the senate and top-paying professions.
Public attention to race has in this country led to some real improvement in some areas. And the census is a powerful tool to that end–although I personally missed the last one and my libertarian parents have never reported our household’s race…
In general, when I think about policy questions, I think it’s a good idea to distinguish specific proposals from larger issues. In this case, while I agree that no one should be forced to declare their race, I also think there are good reasons for having (non-mandatory) racial categorizations on the census form. They don’t ask about either race or any more fine-grained version of ethnic origin in France (on egalitarian grounds), and that has made some quite interesting questions more difficult to answer. For instance: I gather that French families are likely to have more kids than than families in many other European countries. It would be interesting to know why. One hypothesis is that this phenomenon is driven by recent immigrants (now citizens) from parts of the world in which large families are more common. Another is that it’s due to something about French culture and/or family policies. It would be straightforward to figure out which broad type of answer was right if their census collected ethnic origin data; since it doesn’t, it’s much harder. And since the answer to this sort of question can have policy implications, that’s too bad. — Though, as I said, I don’t think anyone should be forced to stick themselves in a category if they don’t want to.
This is completely different from more general questions about the role of race in American life, though.
Now, what are the odds that Jackmormon and I would both bring up France independently? Hmm.
Slartibartfast’s comments illustrate the problem:
1) Slartibartfast mistakenly believes that race refers to real actually existing naturally occurring physically and genetically distinctive groups of humans. The groups are real its just the individuals who are different.
Wrong. Racial groups do not accurately capture the physical or genetic variation among humans. What Slarti expresses is not fact, not even a misinterpretation, not even myth but an ideology rooted in a (white) European exercise of power.
2) Slartibartfast and Sebastian take issue to reference to the history of white violence and rather suggests that this is an inaccurate and unfair generalization.
Wrong. They are hardly alone in their ignorance of Jim Crow or the extreme brutality and terror that whites used to punish and control blacks. Lynching itself is an American invention and mob violence was used with impugnity for perhaps 70 years.
What was particularly white about the violence? That it was done explicit in the name of white supremacy. Whiteness was part of the culture but also part of the structure of white everyday life. Whites have expressed contempt and disdain for blacks as a group, as a culture, and as neighbors, coworkers, competitors.
Whites have done a fairly thorough job in cleansing the past. Even now social studies textbooks make little mention of the reality of Jim Crow – what it was about and what occurred, so that students come to understand that the modern civil rights movement arose in something of a vacuum. Worse still is that even when students learn the horrors of slavery the effect is blunted because textbooks never really get around to explaining who was responsible for slavery. Students can get angry at slavery but never learn who to be angry at.
3) blacks are more prejudice and blacks gain more through the practice of discrimination.
Wrong. Prejudice never exists without context. And the history of prejudice in the US clearly makes it a phenom. that whites have had a pretty strong monopoly. The attitudes of whites – some clearly on display here -can run the gamut from white supremacy to more symbolic sentiments but it is also important to keep in mind that white prejudice is complemented by institutional racism.
4) Sebastian argues that the issue is largely psychological – prejudice.
No, psychologizing racism leaves untouched and unacknowledged that whiteness has and remains a potent cultural and structural force in US society. Have gains been made? Sure – it isn’t 1904 but 2004. But racial violence, racial oppression, racial inequality is still very much part of US society. The difference between now and, say thirty years ago, is the absence of many of the cultural and structural supports that improved matters – thirty years ago. Rather, what we have now is an aggressive white amnesia, not only about the distant but recent past. Affirmative Action has been demonized by whites as reverse discrimination – which is a horrible insult to the ways whites operated form so many centuries. And we yearn to quickly replace ‘color-blind’ policies which will have the effect of making racial inequities even more difficult for whites to acknowledge.
I agree that the Census will botch things if they do not allow for self-definition. In 1990 the other category comprised something like 10 percent of the population, making “others” one of the largest “racial” groups in the country. Self-definition would be preferred inasmuch as it would allow those who define themselves as bridging multiple groups to gain recognition.
I think tho characterizing this as an issue where government is forcing people into racial groups is petty and crackpot. Context is everything
Pesky HTML.
hmmm, a topic area with lots of landmines.
i think we should all aspire to a society where people are judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.
that said, i think we also need to respect people’s desires on how they associate into groups. Skin color may be an illogical grouping based purely on DNA, but is understandable in the context of this country’s history.
I think its a shame that the democratic party gets so much of the “black” vote. It suggests that those who identify themselves as “black” feel (a) that race is an important political issue and (b) abandoned by the republican party. But i could write the same two sentences exchanging “republican” for “democratic”, “evangelical” for “black” and “religion” for “race”.
The consequences of single party politics are nasty. it leads to corruption and fear-mongering instead of outreach.
but unfortunately fear is one of the best tools of getting people to the polls. oh well.
Francis
At this point, it’s irrelevant for me to reply any further, given that DeWayne’s going to interpret my thought-patterns for you.
Strawman. I specifically said that not all people are covered by the three main subgroups. It remains a fact, though, that the skeletons of people who belong to one of those groups have certain measurable physical characteristics that distinguish them from the other two.
Or, you could stop claiming to be clairvoyant and read what I actually said, DeWayne. Your choice.
Wrong right from the very first word. I didn’t say a thing about violence.
I think you may have misunderstood DeWayne. I would agree that biology and anthropology were for a long time complicit in racism–there was a lot of shameful pseudoscience crap purporting to give scientific proof that whites were superior to blacks, “bushmen”, “hottentots” and all the rest.
And it’s not entirely disappeared. See “The Bell Curve.”
It’s a lot easier to tell yourself you’re not aware of race, and to BE unaware of race, if you’re in the majority. It’s a lot easier for a white person to be unaware of race in Cambridge than in Roxbury, or in Park Slope than further along the 2-3 train.
Slarti…you’re right – it was someone else’s post about violence. My apologies.
Slarti…you’re wrong – and you keep missing what I write. There aren’t three, there aren’t four, there aren’t thirty-four racial groups. Skin color, eye shape, facial features, hair texture, body stature, blood type, skull size, skeleton, genes, dna do not vary according to racial groups. There never were such things as pure racial groups. It is simply an invalid way to talk about human variation.
Race has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with social and cultural forces of Europeans who colonized the globe. Science does play a role insofar as science developed a whole scientific enterprise around the false claim that race was real. Science was used to advance a political agenda and in doing enable Europeans to justify their imperial power as a product of natural (social) evolution and their colonial subjects as naturally unequal.
Francis: “Skin color may be an illogical grouping based purely on DNA, but is understandable in the context of this country’s history.”
Huh? Logic has nothing to do with it nor does DNA. Human skin pigmentation exists on a continuum – it does not cluster into discreet groups. The groups who were eventually labeled as races represent the groups at the farthest ends of European imperial power.
The attempt to see equivalence between evangelicals and blacks is more than ludicrous – it gives license to criminality. Christians conquered North America and forced pretty much everyone to accept Christianity. What kind of mental loop are you stuck on? Since when have Christians be repressed, suppressed, oppressed in the US? The founders were white christians, slaveowners were white christians, abolitionists were white christians…Evangelicals have had at least three of theirs in the white house in the past thirty years and theiry social agenda has become the conventional wisdom among many people in this country. And you could conceivably draw a straight line from the calvinist Puritans of the 17th century to the current crop of end-time waiting dominionist evangelicals.
There is a reason that blacks were drawn to the democratic party – it was the only mainstream political avenue that was available to them in the 20th century. Lets remember that blacks had long been republican and would have remained so if the republican party hadn’t become the 20th century home to a viscious white nationalism. Race remains a potent political issue – but I’d argue it hasn’t been blacks pushing this on the agenda. The interests of blacks have long been marginalized in this country’s political discourse. No, rather it remains whites who keep alive race. The last thirty years have been one long backlash against the mid-century changes in race relations.
I think its a shame that the democratic party gets so much of the “black” vote. It suggests that those who identify themselves as “black” feel (a) that race is an important political issue and (b) abandoned by the republican party. But i could write the same two sentences exchanging “republican” for “democratic”, “evangelical” for “black” and “religion” for “race”.
Rather, what we have now is an aggressive white amnesia, not only about the distant but recent past. Affirmative Action has been demonized by whites as reverse discrimination – which is a horrible insult to the ways whites operated form so many centuries.
My family came here in 1989. But do go on.
The founders were white christians, slaveowners were white christians, abolitionists were white christians…
Heh. Slave owners were black (not in America) as well. And they were abolitionists as well. Hmm.
Stan LS writes: “Slave owners were black (not in America) as well. My family came here in 1989. But do go on.”
Whitewashing the issues, eh? Does any of this particularly matter? How might any of this be relevant for a discussion on race and racism? Oh, do go on…
Sebastian,
What appears to Stan as an overreaction is (in many cases) an automatic defense which is unjustified at the moment, but understandable given the history.
But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t allow one group to be prejudiced by saying their behavior is understandable given the history and yet not allow another group to be prejudiced based on, let’s say, crime statistics.
DeWayne,
Affirmative Action has been demonized by whites as reverse discrimination – which is a horrible insult to the ways whites operated form so many centuries
I am affected by the Affirmative Action, am I not?
There is a difference between understandable and still acceptable. That was my point about my friend who waas sexually abused. He developed a number of defensive psychological patterns that were necessary for him to survive. These defenses aren’t serving him as well now. The point is not that it is impossible that he might encounter someone who might try to take advantage of him in the future. The point is that by treating everyone he meets as someone who wants to take advantage of him, he ends up hurting his ability to form relationships.
Understandable.
Not good for his current relationships.
I believe an analogous thing can happen with race. I am not saying that racism is dead. I am saying that it is injured enough that treating everyone as a racist is not particularly productive.
I’m also not against collecting scientific data, but I am for realizing that racial categorizations are arbitrary and unreal, so if someone believes they aren’t a perfect fit for a particular racial label, they are probably correct. As such they should not feel forced to label themselves in such a fashion.
DeWayne, forensic anthropologists disagree with you. I just threw you the first link that came up on Google, but there are lots more. If your point is that there’s no such thing as race, that’s provably wrong.
Stan LS: I am affected by the Affirmative Action, am I not?
You are affected by affirmative action, but you are also advantaged by centuries of oppression and by current racial attitudes, even if you are neither complicit in it nor aware of it (those who are disadvantaged do tend to notice more). I won’t pretend the results even out in every individual case, but I do believe that affirmative action, implemented thoughtfully, can help smooth over some of the gross inequities.
Chris Rock put it brilliantly. I can only paraphrase, but it was something along the lines of, “I don’t want to get picked over somebody who’s more qualified. But if it’s a tie, f*** him! He had a 400 year head start!”
If your point is that there’s no such thing as race, that’s provably wrong.
Well, *that* seems a little tendentious. This guy (a skeletal biologist) would disagree with you, as would this guy. Note that the second guy is a forensic anthropologist, but (while he argues that there is in fact such a thing as race) he says “So, yes, I see truth on both sides of the race argument.”
In my particular case, how is being oppressed by the British for centuries an advantage? Just curious.
Actually, my ancestors were disadvantaged by centuries of oppression. They found it very difficult to compete with free labor. The only people who were not oppressed by racism were the landed gentry. So I think it’d be more appropriate to have a ‘Ancestors were/were not landed gentry’ set of checkboxes.
I’d have to check the “were not”, although I’m confident that if I were to trace my lineage back far enough, I’d find Alexander the Great in the woodpile.
although I’m confident that if I were to trace my lineage back far enough, I’d find Alexander the Great in the woodpile.
He’s in *all* of our woodpiles. Same with Charlemagne. The Atlantic had an article about this maybe a year ago; I’ll see if I can dig up a link.
This oft-cited white amnesia – how prevelent is this, exactly? I ask out of curiousity, because the world I’ve lived in is so overwhelmingly liberal that nearly all the white people I know go on and on about their priviledge, the legacy of racism and slavery, and so forth – to the point at which they have managed to become completely and totally neurotic about race.
Which you might argue is fair, as most of the black people I know are completely neurotic as well. Likely far less than the level that Stan describes, but still.
I use the word “neurotic” because everyone likes to throw around “racism” to describe beliefs and behaviors that don’t nearly rise to the level of what everyone agrees are the horrors of racism.
“I don’t want to get picked over somebody who’s more qualified. But if it’s a tie, f*** him! He had a 400 year head start!”
I don’t know. 2,000 years of getting kicked around all over the world and my people are doing ok. Japanese-Americans got interned (many lost their property in the process) and they are doing well for themselves, today. Chinese weren’t first class citizens in this country, either, and they are doing well.
I think viewing oneself as a victim ends up as a self fulfilling prophecy. Bush nailed it when he referred to th affirmative action as “soft bigotry of low expectations”
I’d heard about it, but forgotten where it was written. And I’ve just about worn the Google-pigeons out for today.
Good discussion (heated)!
A little levity:
My Aunt B, a nice Jewish girl from NOO-York, married a black fellow, my beloved Uncle Ike, soo….. I gotta whole slew of black cousins, who been tryin’ to teach this arythmic white man how to dance correcty for decades now:)
I also grew up in Northern Cal, public schools, mixed neighborhoods, so we always had a lotta black friends and neighbors, so I reckon’ I’m pretty lucky (for a white guy) to have been steeped in (mostly) positive black culture during my formative years.
Sadly, though, the neighborhood has priced many working-class folks out of it, and as I went through excessive schoolin’ I lost most of my black friends along the way.:(
“Bush nailed it”
The current Republicans absolutely cannot go to China on this one.
It has to be the Democrats, and it will be a long, long time coming.
SomeRandomDork (Slartibartfast?): In my particular case, how is being oppressed by the British for centuries an advantage? Just curious.
Not having any knowledge whatsoever of your particular case, I won’t venture a guess. In any case, I figured it would be clear from context that I was talking about advantages gained from the oppression of others. If not, my apologies.
Stan LS: I think viewing oneself as a victim ends up as a self fulfilling prophecy.
That can happen, but never underestimate the effects of centuries of being systematically treated as chattel, followed by an additional century of being treated as merely subhuman in the eyes of society and the law, followed by decades of lingering cultural residue, which we are still experiencing today. The shockwaves of a crime of this magnitude will be felt for generations to come. We don’t have the luxury of simply choosing not to deal with it.
Truthfully, I did suspect that, but the humor potential wasn’t nearly as high. And not belonging to the “oppressor” group (and, in addition, more credibly belonging to the “oppressee” group) I was wondering how this could be relevant to me. Indeed, how it could be relevant to any but a vanishingly small fraction of the United States.
I’m not assigning agency to “oppression”, Slartibartfast. Stan is clearly not complicit.
DeWayne, while I appreciate many of the points you’re trying to make, the idea that the concept of race sprung unbidden from the brows of Dead White European Colonialists for the purpose of enslaving Ye Olde Mongrel Races is tendentious and dishonest. The lessons of the ethnic Japanese vis a vis the Ainu are instructive here, as are the relationships between many of the Australian aboriginal tribes.
If your point is that there’s no such thing as race, that’s provably wrong.
Answer: The growing consensus is that race has no real biological reality. This does not mean that there isn’t more or less physical differences among humans. Race, however, isn’t a particularly useful or accurate to capture them.
See http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm
This oft-cited white amnesia – how prevelent is this, exactly?
Answer: This discussion here is a good example. There’s two kinds of amnesia. One is willful on the part of whites who seek to deny or diminish centuries of incredibly brutal treatment of racial/ethnic minorities and in particular blacks. For example, lynchings of blacks took on a sickening ritual character, cutting off genitals, lips, ears, fingers, while the victim was still alive. Often these became souvenirs that people displayed. Burning people alive tied to a tree or a stake. We’re talking 20th century here. The other is the result of a cleaned historical narrative that simply didn’t consider incorporating any attention to blacks, except in certain cases, as relevant or significant. Americans are not taught a history of the violence or inequality, it is not part of the popular imagination, and we’ve had no real way to make it part of the American fabric.
But given the attention we do pay to American heroes (or villains), the fetish of war heroes and war dead, etc., there’s some occurring here that can’t be explained with a ‘that was then, this now’ wave of the hand.
I love the way some of the commentary here has erred in the other direction – to make it seem as if everyone has an equivalent story of suffering in their (or their ancestor’s past). There’s no shortage of suffering, thats for sure. But its a little too convenient for whites who have collectively shared the fruits of centuries of exploitation. And who have collectively thwarted efforts by blacks and others to exercise their civil rights.
Again, there is a real injustice to reduce systemic racism to some kind of psychology or dismiss as victims who need to move on. Sebastian and others may not like it that the label of racism is used too much too often and applied to too many but that’s just too bad. At best, whites are recovering racists, to quote Joe Feagin. And lemme repeat: Americans often comfort themselves in thinking there’s only two positions on racism. One is either a bigoted white supremacists or one is not personally prejudiced. But there is a third position and that represents active opposition to racism. Antiracism still has shallow roots among whites.
Oh, anyone can express prejudice or personally engage in discrimination. But in a spin, not all oppressions are equivalent. Black racism is a contradiction in terms insofar as blacks don’t have the same kind of access to, but especially control over institutions or resources – power – that whites collectively do.
And for lingering pomos out there, yes I’m employing white and whitenss as a kind of essentialism. But in the struggle for racial equity, if not equality, pomos are an impediment that only reinforce white power.
“That can happen, but never underestimate the effects of centuries of being systematically treated as chattel, followed by an additional century of being treated as merely subhuman in the eyes of society and the law, followed by decades of lingering cultural residue, which we are still experiencing today.”
Apparently there really is a distinguishing characteristic of black people as a race–they live hundreds of years!
😉
Well, that lays it all out right there, doesn’t it?
DeWayne, I found most of your commentary incredibly racist and much of it offensive. You don’t have to be a ‘pomo’ to reject the essentialism of ridiculous terms like ‘whiteness’. The idea that an opinion can’t be racist if it’s not in service of existing power structures is an oldie but a goodie, and it’s just as asinine as it’s always been. When you subsume an individual into categories of belief, intent, guilt, power, wealth, suffering or anything else based on their race, YOU ARE BEING RACIST. That is exactly what that word is intended to mean.
So to demonstrate how deep my anti-racist ‘roots’ are, I genteely recommend that you take some time off and think very carefully about what race means to you and how much it guides your impressions of other people, and what that means.
Nah, but there is a distinguishing trait among whites: the propensity to bully
DeWayne,
I would argue that the popular permutation of it – which is demonstrated in this thread – is only a kneejerk reaction by white people being accused of racism based on this – despite the fact that they may have done little or nothing racist in their life.
I don’t think anyone here is denying that all of these horrible things are not part of our history, they are merely asserting that their hands are not bloody. To imply that they were seems to be opening a broad moral precedent that is rather untenable.
They aren’t taught it? It’s not part of the popular imagination? Are you sure about that – because clearly I’m coming from a different place.
It has shallower roots than it should, because a white person can completely circumscribe the outward practice of racism on principle, yet still get lectured as if they’ve done nothing of value at all. This is, I think, unnecessarily antagonizing white people who were, as far as I’m concerned, on the right track.
Meanwhile, there are the contridictory elements of current notions about racism that are making everyone neurotic – I’ve known white people who were all worried about being seen as condescending or meddling when they’ve worked with inner-city programs that help minorities. This has all spun completely out of control.
You (rightfully) bash the pomos, but here you endorse the pomoish notion of power delineating the moral and immoral. Racism, as was previously defined before it got broadened to ridiculous extremes, is hateful prejudice based upon race. Power doesn’t get added in there unless we’re all getting on the Foucault bandwagon, which I’d rather not.
Not to say that white racism isn’t going to cause more harm to its victim than black racism. Taken as a whole, it is. But this does not make the case that black racism is de facto impossible.
I don’t want to get in the essentialist muck. But I think that you’d do well to consider that a morality dictated primarily on the exercise of power isn’t liberating anyone – and is a component of the “victimization” notions bouncing around this thread.
Since Slartibartfast wanted proof and perhaps the American Anthropological Association maybe insufficient, I’ve put together some references that lay out much of our revised thinking in the physical and social sciences. For those who want some further online resources check out the background readings for the PBS series on Race:
http://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm
There’s a nice compendium in the Science section of short essays and interviews with Richard Lewontin, Jonathan Marks, Allan Goodman, Joseph Graves, and Stephen Jay Gould. The History section has material from Audrey Smedley and Barbara Fields. The society section has some good material from sociologists Dalton Conley, Mel Oliver, Thomas Shapiro and Troy Duster.
If one can rip themselves away from the keyboard, here’s a selection of books that are relevant:
Ashley Montagu, _Man’s Most Dangerous Myth_ Initially published in 1942, most recent edition, 1998
Paul Ehrlich, _The Race Bomb_ 1969?
Stephen Jay Gould, _The Mismeasure of Man_ 1981
F. James Davis, _Who Is Black?_ 1991
Audrey Smedley, _Race in North America_ 1999
Grace Hale, _Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940_ 1998
Leon Litwack, _Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow_ 1998
Philip Dray, _At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America_ 2002
David Roediger, _The Wages of Whitness_ 1991
George Lipsitz, _The Possessive Investment in Whiteness_ 1998
Jonas:
What is demonstrated in much of the comments is a tad too much of a ‘doth protest too much.’ attitude. White liberals seem to have two settings – fumbling so as to not be insulting and denials that one has never done anything racist. White conservative have the benefit of consistency and only dwell in the latter. Neither will get us very far. For the moment, tho its the latter sentiment that’s taken center stage, in the form a yearning for a colo-blind society.
It is odd that so many – I sense from your words, you too, seem to feel that its little more than a blame game. And, of course, the moderate position is that both parties share blame, both parties need to get beyond victimhood.
But I’m not interested in laying blame, per se. Nor am I pleading for sympathy for the victim.
And I think its awfully disingenuous for whites to make a grievance about black racism. In theory, not de facto, it can exist but one of the perks of white privilege is just how immune whites are to such a thing.
Again, not all opperssions are equivalent.
There is the undeniable phenomena of unjust enrichment that whites – collectively – have enjoyed over the centuries. Its funny how you work around this: not all of us have gotten our hands bloody, not all of us have personally engaged in racist acts, some of us who have done something of value don’t get credit and still get lectured. And the unjust enrichment still operates, still perpetuates white advantage. As a status, whiteness has its privileges. I think whites exist in a morally untenable position.
And it speaks volumes about the taken-for-granted privilege whites enjoy that they will be the ultimate judge of their responsibility and restitution.
You mistake my approach to morality with that of white society – power has long delineated a white morality relative to blacks. Its not me fixated on power.
The meaning of racism has indeed become confusing. I continue to employ it because it still captures a reality that cannot be adequately conveyed by terms such as prejudice and discrimination. Racism, and especially white racism, has a systemic nature that makes people complicit, regardless of their own personal attitudes…or actions. Things aren’t gonna change because some white people endeavor to act in a more sensitive manner. Thus power is indeed central.
“And it speaks volumes about the taken-for-granted privilege whites enjoy that they will be the ultimate judge of their responsibility and restitution.”
As opposed to your judgement, DeWayne?
Yeah, I’ll take mine, thanks. What principle is your judgement based on? The color of my skin? Nice.
Slartibartfast: Apparently there really is a distinguishing characteristic of black people as a race–they live hundreds of years!
Are you implying that our lives aren’t profoundly shaped by history?
Sidereal:
I don’t think you read my postings with any particular care otherwise I don’t think you would have levelled your charge. No, I don’t endorse giving others a free pass on expressing their bigotry simply because they occupy a subordinate or oppressed status. But I won’t also see it as equivalent to the actions/expressions of those in the dominant group. I think there are definite differences in the underlying causes of the Nation of Islam and the Council of Conservative Citizens or the Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan. Colin Ferguson was a cold-blooded killer and racism isn’t a justifiable defense to go on a shooting rampage.
You seem so so exercised that blacks can display bigotry? Pattern and context, slick, pattern and context. Amadou Diallo, Yousef Hawkins, Abner Louima, James Byrd – whats the commonality here? Matt Hale, Richard Butler, Tom Metzger, ol Strom, Trent Lott – whats the commonality here?
It was bound to happen. The problem with your comments is that they come off as little more than a childish whine, “they do it too, waaaahhh!”
You trivialize racism.
Racism, and especially white racism, has a systemic nature that makes people complicit, regardless of their own personal attitudes…or actions.
That isn’t morality or sociology. That’s theology.
DeWayne,
I can sympathize with your suspicion, but I would not be able to make it an intellectually honest accusation.
Yearning for a color-blind society is not wrong. Declaring it to be present-day reality would be. But if we’re going to cast aspersions on the very notion, I have no idea how any meaningful progress towards ending racism and oppression is possible.
“Immunity” from the effect of an immoral act does not imply that a greivance has not occurred. If someone shoots a gun at me and misses, is that okay because I’m not dead? Or is it attempted murder?
Meanwhile, there are black folks who are by virtue of their success more or less de facto immune from the effects of white racism. I’d consider any racist behavior towards such people to still be wrong – whereas under your formulation, it’s no harm, no foul.
All oppressions are not equivelent. But racism as a practice should be considered a serious enough problem that it is not taken lightly because the harm involved is considered too small. Things can get out of hand with that attitude.
There is the undeniable phenomena of unjust enrichment that whites – collectively – have enjoyed over the centuries.
A just resolution to that “enrichment” is completely impossible. Meanwhile, the economic calculus of both slavery and racism could not be said to have benefitted anyone – it kept whites more powerful than blacks – but did not allow the sort of prosperity that is possible when one is not organizing your society in a completely backward way such as it was.
White advantage is not being perpetuated, it is diminishing. Not fast enough for anyone’s liking for certain, but you can not make the case that it’s just the status quo forever.
I don’t think you can morally condemn anyone on the basis of race. That’s why I am against racism. How you can lay any claim to being anti-racist is now clearly an absurd undertaking.
If white people can not redeem themselves through their thoughts and actions… well, congratulations, we’ve just built the same moral system that white people did for blacks – except this time it’s the other way around.
I’m going to guess this is your notion of justice, and that’s not a very pleasant thought.
The PBS thing was kind of a hoot. There is no one gene that distinguishes all members of one race from all members of another? This should be in the dictionary beside “strawman argument”.
And then he goes and blows his entire case away by making racial generalizations. Wonderful. No such thing as race, but my, those white folks are bullies, aren’t they?
“Yearning for a color-blind society is not wrong. Declaring it to be present-day reality would”
Yep, I agree. You, nonetheless missed the point. Reread the sentence. The complete sentence. The one with all the words.
“Meanwhile, there are black folks who are by virtue of their success more or less de facto immune from the effects of white racism.”
Thats not really a defensible position. In fact, thats a de facto bizarre statement to make. I suppose great wealth or high status might provide some protection. But I disagree that non-white, or female for that matter, aren’t still subject to a master status.
“All oppressions are not equivelent. But racism as a practice should be considered a serious enough problem that it is not taken lightly because the harm involved is considered too small.”
All oppressions are not equivalent. The next sentence suggests the opposite. I mean, sure, racism shouldn’t ignored or taken lightly. What I find so fucking weird is just how significant you and others here are worried about “black” racism. Like its a pressing problem that demands more atttention. This is the double whammy of white denial: “I’m not racist, but they sure as hell are!” There’s something disturbing about this expression. It’s, like, orwellian.
“…the economic calculus of both slavery and racism could not be said to have benefitted anyone – it kept whites more powerful than blacks – but did not allow the sort of prosperity that is possible when one is not organizing your society in a completely backward way such as it was.”
Yes and no. White racism has produced tremendous costs and wastes – to whites as well as blacks. And kind of psychological costs and effects do you think racism has had on whites? Its an interesting question. Kivel has an answer but I don’t think folks here would enjoy it.
Part of what you’re saying is that, to be perfectly rational, exploitation doesn’t help anyone and we’d all be better of with non-exploitative outcomes. True. But the history of white racism nonetheless pursued and sustained exploitative relationships. Du Bois called it the psychological wage of whiteness.
Is white privilege on the decline. Sure. Jim Crow has been dismantled, for the most part. Of course, the Pew Hispanic Center released some figures that indicates that the decline will continue a see-saw pattern. Wealth differences between white and black households have widened. Blacks were particularly hurt by economic hard times. White wealth has increased. I think they estimated that whites owned 14 times as much as blacks. And while for a great many white households their net worth is either zero or are net debtors, wealth remains a resource that blacks simply have little access to. The black middle class has shallow roots largely because of this.
“I don’t think you can morally condemn anyone on the basis of race. That’s why I am against racism. How you can lay any claim to being anti-racist is now clearly an absurd undertaking.”
Huh? Is this one of those rhetorical mis-reads? I’m clearly not morally condemning whites because they are white! I do suggest that whites, who enjoy advantages that come with whiteness, are hypocritical to deny their privilege and then condemn others.
Let me return the compliment. How you can consider yourself to be against racism while denying the significant role of power plays is likewise absurd. Remember, the goal of opposing racism isn’t simply to assuage one’s own conscience.
Because, naturally, all whites are priveleged. Gotcha. Nope, no racism (or even baseless generalization) here.
DeWayne: “on the part of whites”.. “whites are recovering racists” .. “a distinguishing trait among whites” .. “reaction by white people” .. “White liberals” .. “white society” .. “white morality”
sidereal: What principle is your judgement based on? The color of my skin?
DeWayne: “I don’t think you read my postings with any particular care otherwise I don’t think you would have levelled your charge”
Ooookay, Tex. Maybe you should write them with more particular care.
Your thesis seems quite clearly to be that no one can criticise your self-righteous racism because it’s not as bad as white racism. I’m sure you can see how morally bankrupt a notion that is. Aggravated assault isn’t as bad as murder, either. The adjunct thesis seems to be that I am unqualified to criticise your racism because (you assume) I share a pigment level with some other people who were horrifically racist.
I’m pretty confident that neither your reasoning nor your existing methods will ever meaningfully advance the cause of nonracialism, so you might want to re-evaluate them.
If anyone is interested in actually working through some of the issues involved, I’d recommend _One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race_ by Scott Malcolmson. Also, this article by Laurence Wright is quite good. I clip the last paragraphs
Dang. Sounds like good stuff.
That isn’t morality or sociology. That’s theology.
No. It’s nothing at all like theology. It just requires you to wrap your head around the idea that groups can have collective behavior which is distinct from the behavior of individuals within the group, yet which affects individuals.
I can sympathize with the critique of DeWayne that’s going on here, and it’s certainly valid rhetorically, but he’s up against a hard problem; talking about something that’s easy to observe in real life (once you know what to look for), difficult to articulate, and painful to contemplate. It’s hard to articulate partly because nobody likes to talk about it in the first place and partly because it has a tendancy to drag you into sloppy speech.
Nobody likes to talk about it seriously (lots of people joke about it all the time but that’s different) because it’s hard not to take it personally when somebody else talks about [insert race] folks being this way or that. It doesn’t matter that race is very nearly useless as a biological construct because it’s very real and significant as a social construct.
And even more to the point it’s just hard not to hold individual [insert race] folks responsible for what’s essentially an environmental factor created by the collective behavior of people of their race. Ya gotta grip the problem somewhere…
All of which leads to the category error of saying white folks when you mean “White Folks” and “Black Folks” instead of black folks. DeWayne’s doing it, sidereal’s doing it, Slart’s doing it. All this calling each other out on racism is just the same kind of mistake real racists make. And don’t get me started on gender issues…
One comment so I don’t get to seeming too fair and balanced, and with all due respect to folks like Laurence Wright: when you get in White Folks’ face about race issues, they get all offended because they just know, in their gut, that having a little old lady cross the street to avoid walking past you is canceled out by having a big black fella intimidate you off the sidewalk, and that Jim Crow must be on it’s last legs ‘long about now anyway.
But at the end of the day it’s not white folks having their communities redlined and their services cut, and it’s not white folks that get pulled over for driving late model cars down suburban streets. There’s a dozen Rosie DeVines for every Abner Louima, and how bad it is just depends what part of the country you’re in.
“And I think its awfully disingenuous for whites to make a grievance about black racism. In theory, not de facto, it can exist but one of the perks of white privilege is just how immune whites are to such a thing.
Again, not all opperssions are equivalent.
There is the undeniable phenomena of unjust enrichment that whites – collectively – have enjoyed over the centuries. Its funny how you work around this: not all of us have gotten our hands bloody, not all of us have personally engaged in racist acts, some of us who have done something of value don’t get credit and still get lectured. And the unjust enrichment still operates, still perpetuates white advantage. As a status, whiteness has its privileges. I think whites exist in a morally untenable position.”
I think that ‘whites’ in these paragraphs are a ficticious group that are united only in your mind. Much of what you are talking about was not done to enrich ‘whites’ it was done by people to enrich THEMSELVES. There is such a thing as poor white people, in fact there are many of them and they tend to be poorer than middle class black people.
I don’t deny that racism exists and is pernicious. I definitely deny that it is an explanation for almost all injustices in the world. You attack on unjust enrichment is, well, completely unjust. But lets take it one step further. If it is true that American white people have leveraged exploitation of black people into an unjust position, it is also true that modern-day American black people are perpetuating the same against the rest of the world. Your analysis can’t just stop at our borders. I think you analysis is incorrect anyway, but if it were true you should be honest about what it really means.
You recommend George Lipsitz, and in other posts accuse white people of all being bullies. I know George Lipsitz from UCSD. He is a bully of the first rate.
“It just requires you to wrap your head around the idea that groups can have collective behavior which is distinct from the behavior of individuals within the group, yet which affects individuals.”
And it requires that you interpret nearly all negative group behaviour as racially motivated–which I think is remarkably one dimensional.
“It just requires you to wrap your head around the idea that groups can have collective behavior which is distinct from the behavior of individuals within the group, yet which affects individuals.”
I’d call it ‘aggregated from’ more than ‘distinct from’. Besides, in this context it’s a meaningless distinction. Yes, there are cases where well-meaning individuals will aggregate into a sinister collective, but what’s the individual well-meaning behavior here? Treating everyone that comes into a job interview or a powerpoint presentation or a bar to buy a beer with respect and dignity and paying no mind to what color they are? And teaching your children to do the same? That’s what I try to do. And there’s no paradoxical aggregation of that. If everyone did that, racism would be dead.
“it’s hard not to take it personally when somebody else talks about [insert race] folks being this way or that”
No $#%$. That’s because X Folks just means all you folks. You personally. The idea that White Folks is some kind of broad term that actually doesn’t include any individual people you think are white is ridiculous. Maybe that’s why we shouldn’t talk about [insert race] folks being this way or that.
“sidereal’s doing it”
cite, please. If I ever did it I’d smack myself.
“when you get in White Folks’ face about race issues, they get all offended because they just know, in their gut, that having a little old lady…”
I’ll go out on a limb and assume that this is one those times where White Folk isn’t actually supposed to include any of the people you’re talking to who you’d consider white. In which case the correct formulation is Ignorant Folk. Or Folk Who Need To Think About It A Little More.
I don’t deny a horrific legacy of destitution and suffering wrought on African Americans first by slavery, then by the pseudo-slavery of Jim Crow, and then by the institutional inertia that keeps existing groups in control and other groups out. And I fully understand why many believe that it’s possible and reasonable to jimmy that inertia along with artificial constructs like affirmative action and MOB quotas. But if you think everyone who disagrees is some kind of degenerate crypto-slaver, or that that legacy is best met with your own brand of foul antagonistic racist rhetoric, or that using terms like X Folk is remotely constructive, you are not part of the solution. You are part of the problem.
IIRC, if you look at polling, white people collectively are utterly clueless about race, overestimating the effect of affirmative action and underestimating the effect of racism to a ridiculous degree.
I was and may still be fairly clueless myself, but the polls are ridiculous. I will try to find a link.
My perceptions of all this changed when I had a job where I and several coworkers were utterly convinced women and men were treated differently, but it was very far from something you could even speak to a supervisor about, let alone prove in court. And I’m sure my bosses, who decribed themselves as “feminists” to me, would have about fell over if they realized we all thought this.
Katherine: IIRC, if you look at polling, white people collectively are utterly clueless about race, overestimating the effect of affirmative action and underestimating the effect of racism to a ridiculous degree.
Agreed.
It’s quite irritating to see someone with whom you should agree argue so badly that they make your “side” look like a bunch of idiots. While I feel that I may, in fact, agree with som (but by no means all) of the conclusions DeWayne is drawing, I find it almost painful to admit.
I must, therefore, attempt to at least salvage some sense from an argument that has been badly abused in this thread.
“There are in fact genetic divisions between negroid, caucasoid and mongoloid groups.”
Two points here.
Firstly, there is more genetic variation between individuals within a genetic group than there is between them. That is to say, any two given (unrelated) blonde Swedes are statistically more likely to share more genes with a random black African than with each other. This indicates that the differences and markers, while there, are relatively insignificant in terms of dictating actual groups.
Which leads onto the second point, that categorising people by “race” according to a certain set of genetic markers is entirely arbitrary. One could also categorise people by other genetic markers, ones that we cannot see with the naked eye, and draw the boundaries in entirely different places, even in places that would confuse us were we to merely observe the surface of the human beings involved.
There is no reason to pick the particular set of genes that define “race” as the set we use to split humans into genetic groups, other than the cultural predisposition to do so. While seemingly innocuous, the omission of the context I have eleborated on above and the hyping of these differences as if there were something special has been used, and recently, to perpetuate the old eugenics ideas in a new academic setting. While most molecular biologists are clued up enough to recognise junk science for what it is, most members of the public are not — and, indeed, why should they be?
It is, therefore, understandable that people like myself, who have come across such arguments and fought them hard before, should become irritated at such statements, even when put forward by people with no racial axe to grind. The omission of the context, that the distinctions can be drawn only by arbitrarily preselecting a given group of genes to study and ignoring the rest of the genome, can make the statement seem more interesting and more powerful than it really is. As it is, the “racial” difference in genetics is little more than another cabbage. While it may be an interesting dinner party tidbit to throw out the percentage of genes we share with cabbages (85%, off the top of my head, but feel free to correct me), it is of little practical relevance to our understanding of either humans or cabbages, unless you’re a molecular biologist.
Having said all that, I tend to side with Sebastian’s sentiments in his post. Since there is no scientific basis for distinguishing between the races, the only basis is cultural. And since it is cultural, it can — indeed should — be changed. (also, because it is cultural, once it is changed it will always have been this way, just like the English have always had fish and chip shops). But, the practical and pragmatic considerations mentioned by people in the first half of the thread are also valid – if we don’t know how people self-identify, we don’t know how a given society is doing.
Personally, I don’t fill out ethnic information at all. Not because of any deep moral convictions about race, but because it’s none of anyone’s damn business. People get more information about you on application forms than I’m comfortable with anyway. Banks don’t need to know my skin colour. But knowing that people do identify themselves as a certain race, and knowing that we, as a society, have a need to change our cultural attitudes about these perceptions, I think we need to wait for everyone to stop filling in these forms of their own free will, rather than abolishing them.
But we should keep the “other” option.
with all due respect to folks like Laurence Wright:
radish,
I just pulled up the Lawrence Wright article in googling for the title of the Malcolmson and it looked apropos. Do you have any other cites that lay out his views and what are your objections to them? I took the article to be basic reporting, with Sawyer’s views being the focus.
It seems to me that as long as there is a limited pie, these questions cannot be solved. A necessary component is for us (nation and world) to have enough prosperity to grow our way out of this problem and we have to grow in such a way that we create win-win situations. The brief by the Armed Forces supporting diversity as a goal is something that comes to mind. As long as it is perceived that there are limited resources, someone is going to complain how those resources are divvied up.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing counter to that. However, I’m going to retract that statement and substitute something that’s probably equivalent, but verifiable: there are physical distinctions that divide along racial boundaries. If you don’t believe that, just go read some course material in forensic anthropology. I’d anticipate that the physical differences are caused by genetic differences that form some sort of pattern of sequences in the DNA, but I don’t think DNA sequencing has gotten quite to this point yet. It might be interesting to understand where these structural changes are encoded, but it might never be useful or instructive in the sense that some grand revelation in science will occur because all of a sudden we have some amino acid sequences identified that make my daughters, for instance, more mongoloid than caucasoid. It’s also quite possible that these patterns are made up of a minority of the DNA, which would provide for the possibility that normal variation in hight, build, hair straightness, body chemistry, ad nauseam can result in much more scatter in DNA differences than do the structural differences.
I’m going to note, AGAIN, that I’m not saying that all humans fit into one of these three types. Just so DeWayne won’t mistake me again. And, once again, I’m not representing that any of these differences imply anything relevant to individual behavior, intelligence, worthiness, etc.
As for the Swedes vs. Africans comparison, I’d want to see a cite. If there truly is such wide genetic variation between unrelated individuals that it swamps anything that might code for appearance and structure, then I might buy that there’s not substantially higher correlation in DNA, for instance, between unrelated Swedes than a Swede and a random person from anywhere else. IOW I’d want to see the data. If genetic variation between individuals swamps race, the correlation coefficient between a random Swede and a random African ought to be the same as a random Swede and a random other Swede. Not larger, as you seem to imply.
Slarti, I think that what’s been definitely demonstrated is than in Africa there is far more widespread genetic variation between different groups of human beings (all of whom would simply be classed as “Negroid”) than there is anywhere else in the world. Apparently a relatively small number of human beings left Africa a (relatively) short time ago, and, all visual variation notwithstanding, the genetic difference between a Swede and an Australian aborigine is apparently rather less than there is between an !Kung and a Matusi.
I haven’t got time right now to go look up the data: this represents my memory of what I read two or three years ago.
I don’t know if this is what Jes was talking about, but it is another log on the fire. Dawkins on race
If there’s more widespread variation in Africa than elsewhere, you’d expect Swedes to have much more in common with each other than with a random African, wouldn’t you?
The Dawkins piece looks interesting, and I’ll probably read that later today. Certainly the idea that “race” is a highly fuzzy distinction isn’t a new one, or one that’s being contested in this discussion.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be accusing anyone of contesting race as a fuzzy distinction, just thought it was interesting that Dawkins tries to split the difference here.
Slarti: If there’s more widespread variation in Africa than elsewhere, you’d expect Swedes to have much more in common with each other than with a random African, wouldn’t you?
Depends on the Swede… 😉
DeWayne,
Abner Louima
Uh, the guy who convicted for that act – his gf was black. You’ld have to prove that it was based on race.
Yousef Hawkins
Uh. I lived in Bensonhurst at the time the shooting take place. There was a party. A girl felt disrespected. She said she’ll be back with a friend of hers who’s from Bed Stuy (black neighborhood). Yousef was walking by and they figured he was the friend. But, ofcourse since the killers were white, and the victim was black it just had to be racism, right? There’s no other way.
As for NYPD, I had friends who were beaten while getting I arrested. I, myself, was almost arrested once for trespassing (went to see my gf who attended a different HS) and in the process the cop (who was white) told me that i am going to need a f’ng ambulance once he’s done with me (luckily, I was saved by the assistant dean who has contacted my school, figured out that I wasn’t a trouble maker and was back before anything happened). Why I’ld need an ambulance I don’t know to this day.
Ofcourse, if I was black I could blame it on racism.
DeWayen,
Nah, but there is a distinguishing trait among whites: the propensity to bully
Heh. Cause if the Africans/Native Americans were more technologically advanced then whites, at the time, they would’ve never colonized Europe? Right, right.
There was never any slavey in Africa before the white men went there. Right. Right.
Native American tribes lives in peace and harmony with each other before the white man came to America. Right. Right.
I think we’re fated to have this same conversation, at regular intervals, for the rest of all time.
It seems to me that it would be useful to recognize that absence of disadvantage is not itself advantage. The fact that I have only rarely been oppressed on account of my race does not make me an oppressor.
It’s also useful to recognize — and it’s been said plenty — that a great many “white” people bear no responsibility for slavery. An easy example is my own better half, an immigrant in 1983.
Many who are descended from pre-Civil War “whites” also have no personal responsibility. My own ancestry is Yankee. And some Quebecois. And no, none of my Yankee ancestors was involved in the slave trade, and yes, I know this to be true. The one who was of age at the time did fight in the Civil War. Enlisted, wounded, re-enlisted, wounded again, permanently disabled. Died young.
Am I any more responsible for the conduct of slave-owning Southerners than I am for the conduct of slave-selling Africans?
Damn. I was going to make a correction of a minor and inconsequential typographical error far above, then ended up getting too worked up to remember it. I make the correction only because one should always be careful about polluting the data stream, and one never knows where even the most inconsequential bits of info will end up. Milton T. Holsclaw was 32 in 1860, and 52 in 1880.
sidereal, sorry, I was being sloppy. You previously stayed clear fair and square. My apologies.
And I wasn’t disagreeing with your critique of DeWayne — I was just pointing out that conversations like this one are almost always skewed by this really basic logic error, which you had not previouisly made, but which boils down to getting all huffy about the use of terms like “X Folks” (capitalized) because not all x folks (lowercase) are a certain way. The emergent behavior of X Folks as a category has meaningful consequences for x and non-x folks as individuals regardless of whether any particular x person “engages” in that behavior. If you can’t discuss X Folks as a category you can never attach your experiences to a pattern.
White Folks are clueless (thank you Katherine) about race in a way that Black Folks are not. Black Folks can “play the race card” but White Folks can’t. What does that mean for individual white folks or black folks? Stan LS honestly thinks that Volpe having a black gf suggests he is merely a sadist and not a racist (until “proven” otherwise). Stan really seriously thinks that, and hell, maybe Volpe is just a sadist. But how do you want to talk about racism without talking about White Folks or Black Folks? Per the strictly individualized worldview the backdrop of racism is irrelevant to relations between individuals other than the ones involved in a particular, explicitly racist exchange.
Where does that leave Rosie DeVine? Where does that leave the little old lady who crosses the street to avoid a man who (unbeknownst to her) is actually one of the gentlest, most selfless people in town? What do we say to them about race? That there’s no pattern to their accumulated experience? That Rosie shouldn’t be more afraid of white cops than black cops? That l.o.l. shouldn’t be more afraid of black men than white men? That it’s just a matter of particulars that in both their worlds white folks pretty much all have it better than black folks? We’d be lying through our teeth.
You’re right to resent the assertion that White Folks are hypocrites because not all white folks are hypocrites, but most black folks are never pulled over DWB either, so why should they resent that? It’s always just a particular racist cop, right?
How do you talk about it without ruffling feathers? That’s the problem you’re up against, and you can’t go very far without running into it. When I talk about White Folks not only am I not talking about any of y’all, I’m not even talking about individuals in the first place. I’m talking about pictures instead of pixels. I don’t care that the picture is sort of distorted and fuzzy and a weird greenish color and has a bunch of pixels totally out of place, because it’s plenty clear enough to call it a spade…
DeWayne’s only “racism” is (presumably) a category error. Just like Stan’s only “racism” is (presumably) cluelessness. Cue Vietnamese colleague to tell me I’m oversimplifying…
McDuff, ayup.
Stan LS Ofcourse, if I was black I could blame it on racism.
Naturally. It’s one of the perks. Of course most places you also would have been more likely to actually need an ambulance and you would at least have known “why” you’d need an ambulance… YMMV
liberal japonicus, that was not sarcasm, I honestly wasn’t dissing Lawrence Wright, and neither do I have any familiarity with or opinion about his work.* I just meant that while I have no problem with what he was writing about I find it sort of tangential. Tweaking checkboxes is, well, important, but it’s not exactly justice rolling down like waters. Racism isn’t usually a matter of conscious decisions but of how people identify — how they “present” in ordinary social, commercial, and bureaucratic interactions, day in and day out…
People don’t “think” about race. Green-eyed cafe au lait in New Orleans can’t hardly make it through the day without deciding a half dozen times what “race” they are, and that just sorta depend who they’re talkin’ to. But those aren’t calculated decisions. Wheels within wheels.
* as evidenced by the fact that I would happily have misspelled his name a second time if you’d done the same 😉
A timely article on race in the NYT.
Via InstaMegan.
I think its instructive to look for patterns in people’s responses. It would seem that one position defines racism as individuals’ prejudicial attitudes and perhaps discriminatory behavior, generally intentional, and are directed at other individuals who are wrongly seen as members of a group. That’s the Phil Ochs, “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” critter who is smugly self-satisfied that so long as one is clean in thought and action, then one is free of the taint of racism. Indeed, to suggest otherwise is, well, to indulge in racism!
What this position doesn’t acknowledge is human social groupings are real, that groupings are more than aggregates of individuals inasmuch as humans are social as well as cultural, there are discernible patterns that are characteristics of groups, unintended and de facto outcomes result from actions undertaken by members of groups, and generalizations are valid insofar as they have empirical support (as opposed to stereotypes), etc…
Witness the devolution of the clueless
Jonas Cord:
A just resolution to that “enrichment” is completely impossible. Meanwhile, the economic calculus of both slavery and racism could not be said to have benefitted anyone…
White advantage is not being perpetuated, it is diminishing. Not fast enough for anyone’s liking for certain, but you can not make the case that it’s just the status quo forever….
I don’t think you can morally condemn anyone on the basis of race. That’s why I am against racism.
This oft-cited white amnesia – how prevelent is this, exactly?… nearly all the white people I know go on and on about their priviledge… to the point at which they have managed to become completely and totally neurotic about race.
Sebastian Holsclaw:
… I want to point out that categorizing ‘white violence’ against blacks is probably not helpful to the discussion. What was ‘white’ about the violence? It was ideologically driven violence–spurred by an ideology that was racist. The racist ideology convinced certain people to attack other people on the basis of skin color. Nothing specifically white about it….
…think that ‘whites’ in these paragraphs are a ficticious group that are united only in your mind. Much of what you are talking about was not done to enrich ‘whites’ it was done by people to enrich THEMSELVES. There is such a thing as poor white people, in fact there are many of them and they tend to be poorer than middle class black people….
I don’t deny that racism exists and is pernicious. I definitely deny that it is an explanation for almost all injustices in the world….it is also true that modern-day American black people are perpetuating the same against the rest of the world.
Sidereal wrote:
When you subsume an individual into categories of belief, intent, guilt, power, wealth, suffering or anything else based on their race, YOU ARE BEING RACIST….
That’s because X Folks just means all you folks. You personally. The idea that White Folks is some kind of broad term that actually doesn’t include any individual people you think are white is ridiculous. Maybe that’s why we shouldn’t talk about [insert race] folks being this way or that.
I don’t deny a horrific legacy of destitution and suffering wrought on African Americans first by slavery, then by the pseudo-slavery of Jim Crow, and then by the institutional inertia that keeps existing groups in control and other groups out.
Slartibartfast wrote:
I don’t think of race as a lie, particularly. There are in fact genetic divisions between negroid, caucasoid and mongoloid groups. Just as true, there are people ( great many people) who don’t fit into these particular groupings…. I do think, though, that race is perhaps completely irrelevant when it comes to dealing with people as individuals.
…there are physical distinctions that divide along racial boundaries. If you don’t believe that, just go read some course material in forensic anthropology….
I’m going to note, AGAIN, that I’m not saying that all humans fit into one of these three types….And, once again, I’m not representing that any of these differences imply anything relevant to individual behavior, intelligence, worthiness, etc.
StanLS :
As someone who went to an inner city public school and I can say that the institutional discrimination is the one agains whites….
I…still say that blacks are more prejudiced. The whole idea of them being a perpetual victim makes them view all whites as racists from the get go.
Slave owners were black (not in America) as well.
You can’t allow one group to be prejudiced by saying their behavior is understandable given the history and yet not allow another group to be prejudiced based on, let’s say, crime statistics.
I am affected by the Affirmative Action, am I not?
Ann Coulter:
“White liberals have been indulging their fantasies of violence against conservatives lately — physically attacking conservatives, ransacking Bush-Cheney headquarters (though not any NRA headquarters, I note). The white wife of vice presidential candidate John Edwards recently warned of riots unless Kerry is elected.”
An uncharitable conclusion of all this might be best left to Dick Cheney: “As we say in Wyoming, you can put all the lipstick you want on a pig. At the end of the day, it’s still a pig.”