Racism in America

¡Hola! Everybody...
Editing is the hardest task in writing... I am afraid the following isn’t a shining example... I started this series a while back, so it would be better if you go to the real intro (click here) and its follow-up (click here). The second link is especially important because I define my terms there.

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-=[ Racism in America, pt. III ]=-

DYSON: And if white guys were being mistreated this routinely and being murdered as they are, by policemen, this would not be acceptable. That‘s why President Obama needs to use his bully pulpit to explore race, not run from it, not avoid it, but to engage it.

MATTHEWS: I think he engaged it by getting elected last year.

DYSON: Not enough.

(cross talk)

MATTHEWS: You don’t know. He‘s off. He’s free.

DYSON: I got brothers in prison.

MATTHEWS: And they are -- well, tell them to get a good lawyer.

-- Chris Matthews and Michael Eric Dyson on Hardball discussing the arrest of Dr. Gates

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What follows in the next few entries could be loosely termed a literature review on racism in America. Plugging through such literature can have an adverse effect on your state of mind. As much as you think you know, one still comes away shocked at the persistence of racism. Add to that the overwhelming effort -- on all levels -- to deny its existence and it can get pretty much gloomy. A friend claims she knows when I’m immersed in the literature because she says my mood changes. LOL

It’s a trip... I am reminded of Dante’s inferno: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here... ” LOL!

All kidding aside, what I hope to offer is a critical theory of racism not only to explain and better understand it, but also to envision possibilities for change. Since at least the time of Marx, critical theory has attempted to uncover the dialectical relationship between systems of oppression and human agency.

The core problem of the racial dialog in this country (if we can even claim one), is that too often many Americans, especially white Americans, see racism as an individual matter, as something only overt bigots engage in. In this way, the racist foundations of all our cultural institutions are ignored or dismissed. A case in point is the interchange quoted above. What isn’t understood or acknowledged by Chris Matthews is that the arrest of a prominent African American academic doesn’t take place in a vacuum. As I will show in later entries, racial profiling, the uneven implementation of criminal justice policies, and negative black stereotypes all combine to create what is in effect an apartheid structure impacting almost all facets of the black experience in America. One cannot drive, shop, hail a cab, and apparently enter ones home while black. It happens and many white people either simply don’t understand or are apathetic to the enormity of the problem. That’s why Matthews can smirk and say, “Tell them to get a good lawyer.” He doesn’t get it. There’s a phrase, “Driving while black,” used to describe one form of racial profiling. I would say there should be another catchall phrase: “living while black.”

But I digress... Racism is much more than an individual issue. It is both individual and systemic. An extensive social reproduction process that generates both patterns of discrimination within institutions and an alienating racist relationship enables systemic racism. On the one hand, you have the racially oppressed, and on the other, the racial oppressors. These two groups are a function of the racist system, and therefore they have different group interests. The oppressed seek to overthrow the system, while the oppressors seek to maintain the status quo. In this way, in typical dialectical fashion, social oppression contradictions that compel change. Great inequality of resources across the color line eventually leads to periodic eruptions of resistance by African Americans and other people of color.

At this juncture conservatives believe that a color-blind constitution means public solutions to end social inequality between racial groups are illegitimate, the equivalent of “reverse racism,” or “racial social engineering.” This view adheres rigidly to the notion that government should be held to a strict standard of racial neutrality and that any attempts at legal redress to rectify racial inequalities is wrong.

I reject this position. If America is to achieve its full potential, I think it is the government’s duty to use public policies to root out abiding racial inequality. I think it makes sense to consider carefully how labor market discrimination, private institutional practices, and public policies have contributed to the accumulation of economic and social advantage in white communities, and the concomitant disinvestment of social and economic capital in communities of color.

Most people assume that white racism cannot account for abiding black inequality. Conservatives attribute persistent gaps in poverty rates and income between blacks and white to African Americans’ socially irresponsible choices regarding education, marriage, work, and crime, rather than to labor market discrimination. What accounts for labor market disparities, conservatives say, cannot be discrimination since they submit that discrimination has all but disappeared. What accounts for wage inequality is the differences between blacks and whites in pre-market factors such as schooling, work habits, life and job skills. According to conservative scholars, what may look like persistent employment discrimination is better described as employers rewarding “workers [who have] relatively strong cognitive skills.’

In the coming entries, I will show that the analyses of conservative scholars suffer from a myopic insistence on disregarding sets of data while focusing on data that girds their arguments. In other words, their work is seriously flawed.

In the coming days I will show racism impacts criminal justice, health, employment, education, and yeah, sports.

Eddie