Like a black person — racism in the languge

Yes, we hang our clothes in the backyard — what does that say about us?

We ran into a neighbor last night who complained about a broken clothes drier. I won’t get into the full complaint, which involved other members of his family. What struck me was how he framed his complaint. The drier was broken and, while they fought among themselves about a new one, his family had to “hang clothes from the back of the house like a black person.”

I was dumbfounded. I should have responded, called him out on it. I didn’t — out of shock, cowardice, a need to maintain neighborly relations, take your pick. He didn’t necessarily mean anything by the comment, but the comment carried a lot of weight and is part of a larger cultural narrative that whites have relied on since before slavery to elevate whites and justify the denigration and oppression of brown-skinned people.

I doubt my neighbor considered this narrative when he spoke, thought about the history of race in America or about the ways in which language structures our reality, defines, it, creates the basic rules by which we interact. I doubt there was any specific animus, either. But it’s important that we unpack the layers of meanings in play here so that we can understand how casual racism underpins the broader way in which race organizes our society.

Several things are in play here. First, let’s consider the specific remark. He was “hanging clothes from the back of the house like a black person.” Not a poor person, but a black person — the stereotype of the poor black family from down South, perhaps, or the image of clotheslines spanning poorer urban (read black) neighborhoods. And, remember, this was a complaint built on the assumption that he and his family were above hanging their clothes out in the yard. Put another way, black people hang their clothes outside; we (I.e., white, perhaps middle class) do not. The absurdity of this should be apparent — I write this after hanging wash on the line in my yard. And so should the racism, which is built on false class and racial divisions that my neighbor apparently buys into.

A second layer exists, which implicates my own feeble and impotent response. My wife and I are white. My neighbor is white. This shared identity — or lack of racial identity — is important to understanding his comment and allows us to delve deeper into the assumptions he made and the way race may affect his larger thinking. I don’t know him that well — this was probably only the second time I’d talked with him — so I can’t say what he holds in his heart. But I doubt he would have made the same off-hand comment were he talking to an African American. Assuming I’m right — I can’t be sure because my only point of reference for his behavior was this brief conversation — we have to ask why. My assumption — and I can only assume — is that he knows on some level that his comment would be viewed by blacks as racist. Again, I don’t know for sure that he wouldn’t make the same comment to an African American, but he certainly had no trouble making it to my wife and me.

I should have said something but, for whatever reason, I didn’t. I didn’t need to. I was not the target of this casual racism. I could avoid the subject, comment on it later, and move on. Were the comment to have been about Jews, I doubt I would have stayed silent, so I can assume that, were I black, I would have responded differently than I did.

Whites and blacks have a different relationship to racist language. For many whites, casual racism is a part of their DNA, as is the assumption, perhaps a subconscious one, that all whites understand and buy into these racist canards. It’s part of what makes Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric such a powerful statement, or,why my friend and mentor Jeffrey Renard Allen‘s essay, “Urgently Visible: Why Black Lives Matter,” is so significant. Both lay bare something the existential dread African Americans are forced to deal with in even the most mundane of situations.

For African Americans — and other minorities — this kind of language, when used by the white majority (and sometimes by other minorities), has an existential quality — it is a threat, part of the foundation of the structure of racism that manifest itself in numerous ways. I’m not talking about the use of the word “nigger,” which thankfully has been struck from use by all except the most racist of whites. (I won’t weigh in on its use among African Americans, which is complicated and tied to questions of power, authority, and reclamation that I am just not equipped to address.)

My concern here is the seemingly offhand use of racial stereotypes and language that too often is dismissed as lacking animus but which maintains an elaborate set of stereotypes that endorse and maintain the underlying systemic racism that continue to influence housing patterns, policing, education, etc.

Consider the post-election analysis, which has focused on how the Democrats have lost “working class” voters. Thomas Edsall, for instance, is usually one of the most astute observers of American economic and social trends. In a post to The New York Times website the other day, he explores the urban-rural and professional-blue collar splits — all but ignoring race as a factor. In doing so, he makes the same assumptions that too many policy analysts are making — that working class equals white, which marginalizes the black working class and consigns them to invisibility.

Basically, language matters. The working class is a vast polyglot of races and ethnic groups, but it has been deracinated in our post-election efforts to save the Democrats from themselves. “We have to help blue collar Americans,” read white workers. Helping workers as a broader constituency, uniting workers across racial, ethnic and gender lines — well, that’s not on the table, which is just fine with the people who’ve been the prime beneficiaries of our economy for decades.

Edsall — and much of the commentariat — has fallen into the standard trap. We assume white as a default. Whiteness is the norm. Whiteness equals American. It’s why the history of assimilation in the United States is, to a large extend, a history of race. At varying times in our history, the Irish, Italians, Poles, and other light-skinned others, have been excluded from whiteness. These immigrant groups were the great unwashed, with foreign, inferior customs and behaviors — that is, until there was a need on the part of the majority to assimilate and incorporate these groups. Italians are now white, which means they are not black, which in turn allows the descendants of the first major wave of Italian immigrants to view themselves as superior to darker people and later newcomers.

It also has allowed a shift in the national race conversation from a segregationist, overtly hostile explanation of racial difference as being based on genetics to one in which darker races are inferior because of cultural and economic causes. Blacks are uncouth because they are poor, because they have been degraded, because they come from Africa, the Caribbean, and so on. Ibram X. Kendi, in his recent book Stamped from the Beginning, describes those with this approach to race as “assimilationist racists,” who embrace “biological racial equality,” but “point to environment — hot climates, discrimination, culture, and poverty — as the creators of inferior Black behaviors.”

For solutions, they maintain that the ugly Black stamp can be erased — that inferior Black behaviors can be developed, given the proper environment. As such, assimilationist constantly encourage Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideals (3).

See the debates over baggy pants, tattoos, respectability politics, etc. (And yes, Kendi argues, blacks can be racial assimilationist — see the hectoring of black youth by Bill Cosby, Barack Obama and others.)

The point Kendi makes is this: There are disparities among people and many of the causes detailed by assimilationists are factors in these inequalities. But viewing an entire race as inferior — whether because of genetics or some other external reason — is racist. “Behavioral differences,” to the extent that they exist, are present among all groups. The issue, therefore, is not collective behavior or even the behavior of the oppressed minority. It is the oppression itself, which in the United States “has made Black opportunities — not Black people — inferior.”

When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination (11).

What this means is that we need to address the oppression — which is endemic in our power structures and enabled by our language. And we must focus on opportunities.