This CNN piece from earlier this week dovetails with some of what we have been discussing in my composition classes this semester — that racism can manifest itself in more subtle ways than the more overt race-baiting and hatred with which we normally associate the race discussion.
The piece opens with a discussion of what it calls a “classic study:
They showed people a photograph of two white men fighting, one unarmed and another holding a knife. Then they showed another photograph, this one of a white man with a knife fighting an unarmed African-American man.When they asked people to identify the man who was armed in the first picture, most people picked the right one. Yet when they were asked the same question about the second photo, most people — black and white — incorrectly said the black man had the knife.
“The more we assume that the problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the birthers, the tea party or to the Republican Party, the less we understand that racial domination is a collective process and we are all in this game.”
I write this not to castigate anyone in particular. We all engage in this kind of subtle and often unconscious bias — myself included. What does it mean when we say “some of my best friends are black” or that “we shouldn’t throw accusations of racism around lightly”? What does it mean to say something is “ghetto” or to call something “classy”? And doesn’t the meaning of the phrase “hip-hop culture” change depending upon how it is used? How about “the race card”?
This is ingrained — and unfortunate. And it has infected even the least prejudiced of us. When we talk about good and bad neighborhoods, we may be talking about crime rates, but often we also are talking — at least on some level — about race. When we describe black athletes as gifted, but white athletes as smart (this occurs far less frequently than it did in the past), we are using racially coded language.
“We need to reduce the level of guilt but increase the level of responsibility we take for it,” he says. “I didn’t choose to internalize these messages, but it’s inside of me and I have to be careful.”
Again, I could be wrong about this, but our use of language has embedded in it these codes — “ghetto” versus “classy,” “good” and “bad” neighborhoods, etc. And the language probably reflects our underlying beliefs. I wrote last week about the “classiness” meme as it related to criticism of the Obamas and made the point that the racism contained in the meme was subtle. Not everyone who posted it is racist, but the meme seems to have been designed, at least in part (that is a lot of qualifiers), to appeal to this racial undercurrent.
I think we need to be honest about it and admit that this inherent bias may be guiding some of our decisions and that it does affect our politics and even our policing. Was Officer Darren Wilson a racist, or the officer who shot Tamir Rice in Cleveland? I don’t think so — at least no more than most of the rest of us. But subconscious racial assumptions may have left the officers assuming the worst — and with disastrous results. This is why we need to constantly question our assumptions and our motives. None of us are so pure as to be immune from this.
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Hank Kalet 