THE R-WORD
the last good racist?
Former Village Voice/Time Magazine writer Ta-Nehisi Coates recently voiced something that has been bothering me for a while now. Writing in Slate about Geraldine Ferraro's claim that Obama's success is largely due to race, Coates notes how despite a plethora of unambiguously racist comments - from Don Imus to James Watson to Michael Richards - this seems insufficient to actually sustain a charge that speakers of such invectives are, in fact, racist.
In other words, one can spew racist comments with aplomb but god forbid anyone should actually be described as a racist in the process. Coates writes:
- "The bar for racism has been raised so high that one need be a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party to qualify. Had John McCain said that Hillary Clinton was only competitive in the presidential race because she was a woman, there'd be no dispute over whether the comment was sexist. And yet when the equivalent is said about a black person, it's not only not racist, but any criticism of the statement is interpreted as an act of character assassination. "If anybody is going to apologize," Ferraro told MSNBC, "they should apologize to me for calling me a racist."
- "In some measure, the narrowing of racism is an unfortunate relic of the civil rights movement, when activists got mileage out of dehumanizing racists and portraying them as ultra-violent Southern troglodytes. Whites may have been horrified by the fire hoses and police dogs turned on children, but they could rest easy knowing that neither they nor anyone they'd ever met would do such a thing."
This raises a question of language and whether or not nomenclature is getting in the way of more substantive progress? On the one hand, I wholly understand where Coates is coming from. The racist apologists are a curious, thriving breed amongst talking heads - people who will insist that someone couldn't possibly be a racist because [insert boiilerplate defense of your choice] and in the process, they can actual detour the focus on hand from the content and implication of a particular racist act and instead, push all the focus onto some arbitrary litmus test for "are they a racist?"
I believe this is partially what Stanford's Richard Thompson Ford was referring to in his recent interview on KPCC's Airtalk: "How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse." The gist of the argument is that "the race card" is a distraction and that people get so caught up with slapping on or slapping away the R-label, that the actual issues around racism and its deleterious effects are going ignored.
Ford promotes this idea of "racism without racists" and I admit: there is something alluring here. As I discuss in my classes on social problems when we talk about racial inequality, one of the things that makes systemic, institutional racism so insidious - not to mention resilient - is that it doesn't require the active, conscious participation of people committed to racist action. Rather, by simply maintaining the status quo, inequalities built into our institutions and social structures are allowed to survive and perpetuate. Hence, racist outcomes can occur despite the best intentions and interracial cordiality of the people behind them. That's the essence of racism without racists.
Without intending to, I think Coates actually echoes this point when he writes: "most racism—indeed, the worst racism—is quaint and banal. There's nothing sensationalistic about redlining or job discrimination."
Indeed, the kind of racism highlights is some of the most damaging because it goes beyond individualized exchanges of racism and gets at actions which affects huge portions of the public, often times hiding their racist intent from plain view but whose impact can be measured quite easily, whether it's the disproportionate amount of people of color in poverty - especially women of color - or the over-reprsentation of young men of color in the prison system. Surely there were some outright - perhaps even self-affirmed - racists responsible but more likely, it's entire systems of social organization that create those outcomes, many of which operate quite efficiently to maintain and perpetuate racial inequality without ever needing a Grand Wizard of Oz pulling chains behind the curtain.
The thing with "racism without racists" that bothers me a little however is that though it directs attention back to systemic forms of discrimination, it also feels like some semantic hair splitting. The loan officer who regularly denies business loans to applicants from poor neighborhoods of color - maybe he's not racist in the Bull Connor sense of the term but if the action and outcome are clearly racialized, what is the rhetorical gap between saying, "your actions are racist" vs "you personally are racist"? In other words, is it so important to people that we distinguish between the racism of their actions vs. the racism of their "being"?
This all said...I have another rhetorical hair-split question to ask: I don't believe that race alone explains Obama's appeal; it's not as if Democratic and independent voters were waiting for the first Black man to run for office so they could throw their lot behind him.
However, isn't it rather reasonable to claim that Obama's Blackness is at least partially behind his appeal to many? Especially many people of color? Let's be absolutely clear: I'm not suggesting that the mere fact of his Blackness is the sole, deciding factor. I am suggesting that race is hardly irrelevant to his appeal however.
This isn't an attempt to address Ferraro's particular comments one way or another. Rather, I'm trying to decipher the ways in which race does or does not factor into Obama's ability to make this run for President. I think it's a definite liability with some voters but just as notably, I think it's also an asset too with other constituencies.
This said then - where exactly is that thin line between over-crediting race or not crediting it enough?
Going back to Slate, I might have to agree with what Mickey Kaus says on the topic.
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