Ranthropologist

Tag: racism

  • Race and Privilege: Embracing Discomfort

    Race and Privilege: Embracing Discomfort

    I’ve written before about race. I focused on how race, as biology, is not real. But the events of the past few days [minutes, hours, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia…] make it painfully clear that race has tremendous relevance as a cultural, social, political, and economic construct. In that sense, in the sense of how we use it to treat each other differently, whether we think we do so or not, it is real in a way that is much more powerful than biology.

    I could go into a long history lesson here, but others have done it before me, and done it better. There are discussions about how racism and inequality are a result of centuries of White colonial powers justifying the theft of indigenous lands, the pillaging and raping of Native cultures, and the brutal enslavement of Native peoples. These crimes required defining indigenous peoples as inferior, savage, and less than fully human. Skin color became the proxy marker for subhuman status, and thus a justification for dominance, subjugation, and ultimately, the inequalities that we still wrestle with, centuries removed from the origins of colonial capitalism. These are truths that I now accept without a second thought. Still, I was talking with a friend today, trying to ease the physical weight I was feeling in my head and chest, and I realized that I am one of the lucky ones. I have been exposed to ideas, critical theory, discussion, literature, and debate on structural inequality, systemic racism, political economy, identity, intersectionality, hegemony, ideology, and more. Even if I am not a specialist in all these areas, I know more than most; maybe that’s why I bear the weight of my privilege so heavily. I know all these things, and yet my privilege is still something I take for granted until something happens to make me take it out, gaze at it, grapple with it, and try to find ways to use it for good.

    “We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned or conferred by birth or luck. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work systematically to overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance because of one’s race or sex.” – Peggy McIntosh

    I don’t want to make this post about me; my struggle with these ideas is nothing compared to the struggle of those who live without the privilege I so often take for granted. This post is about how, maybe, others can recognize their privilege. This is a very difficult thing for a lot of White people to do. We naturally become defensive. We want to believe that we aren’t complicit in the structures that allow us to move through life taking things for granted that others can’t. We don’t like the word privilege; it smacks of something unearned and undeserved, the indulgence given to a spoiled child. But in the context of White privilege, that’s not what the word means. It means something that we are lucky to have, and we are privileged because not everybody has it. If you want a full account of the idea of White privilege, read this classic paper by Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh discusses the concept, then lists several examples. If you are White, it’s illuminating to go through the list and feel recognition slowly dawning. If you are a person of color, I suspect you feel the same recognition, but from the other side of the coin. Not all of these examples will apply to everybody, but here are a few directly from McIntosh’s piece:

    1. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
    2. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
    3. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
    4. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
    5. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.
    6. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more less match my skin.

    And one of my own: I can get stopped for a traffic violation and not fear for my life.

    “[White people] move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g. white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves). Challenges to this identity become highly stressful and even intolerable.” – Robin DiAngelo, Huffington Post

    Maybe you read these and think, yeah, ok; that’s true for me, but that doesn’t make me a racist. Maybe not; but racism doesn’t just mean individual discrimination and stereotyping. And that leads us to another subject just as tricky as privilege, if not more. White people don’t want to acknowledge the privilege of their race, and they definitely don’t want to acknowledge complicity in structural racism. And I agree! It’s incredibly uncomfortable to feel like you have to defend yourself just because you happen to belong to a particular race… but there, again, is another example of White privilege; generally, White people don’t have to defend themselves based on race. I’m talking about structural racism – the kind of racist ideology that is ingrained in us from birth. It’s the hegemony that we internalize as the natural order of things: some people are just better than others because they work harder, they try harder, they want it more. It’s the dismissal of the idea that maybe the system itself is structured so that we don’t all start from the same place, and as White people, we don’t want to have to acknowledge that. It takes away from the narrative that the hard worker is the one who wins; if people of other races really wanted to, they could work harder and get a better education and a better job and get off the welfare treadmill. We make it a defect of personality or upbringing or, yes, biology, because it allows us to keep on ignoring the reality that the playing field is not level. Again, these notions are deeply ingrained and not explicit in our thoughts, so we can go about our lives feeling secure that we aren’t perpetuating a racist system. But that is the very epitome of racist hegemony – it makes implicit co-conspirators of us all. You don’t have to be classically racist to be part of a racist system.

    In case you are having a defensive reaction reading this and thinking but I’m not a racist! (and I wouldn’t blame you), try to honestly answer these questions to see if just maybe you’ve internalized some structural racist hegemony (and bear in mind that your reaction might be deeply buried and not explicit, so think hard about your unconscious gut reactions and assumptions before assuming your answer to these questions is no):

    1. Have you ever crossed the street when a person of color is approaching from the other direction? If you didn’t cross the street, did you consider it? Were you nervous as you passed the person?
    2. Do you assume that Black mothers are raising their children alone and are on public assistance?
    3. Have you ever laughed over Black names, or said things like “It’s like they name their kids by grabbing a handful of Scrabble tiles!”?
    4. When you read about a random shooting or hear about it on the news, do you automatically picture a person of color?
    5. When someone talks about their doctor or their lawyer, do you automatically picture a White person?
    6. Have you ever seen a woman in a hijab or a man in a turban, and had the word “terrorist” pop into your head, even involuntarily?
    7. Do you get annoyed when a phone system asks you, “para Espanol, oprima numero dos”?
    8. Are you interested or concerned when you hear about the murder of a white person in  your community, but when you hear about the death of a person of color, you aren’t surprised? If you aren’t surprised, do you assume that the death involved gang violence or criminal activity by the dead person?
    9. Do you dismiss the ideas of Black people who use Black Vernacular English (what some people call Ebonics) and assume they speak that way because they aren’t educated?
    10. Do you feel relieved or justified when a Black person speaks out about trouble in their own community, because it makes you feel like you were right all along?

    Again, let me be clear: answering yes to any of the above does not make you a racist in the KKK fashion, or even in the fashion of your bigoted great uncle. And you may well have that initial reaction but then catch it and feel uneasy or bad about having it in the first place. And it’s not your fault. This is what hegemonic structural racism does to us – it implants these ideas and naturalizes them. Stopping those reactions is hard, and sometimes they come from a place so deep within that we barely register them. But recognizing and grappling with them is the only way to dismantle them.

    “…saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.” – Kevin Roose, Fusion

    I am writing this because I think it’s important for White people to do the difficult work of recognizing the system we are a part of, recognizing that we occupy a privileged position within it, and recognizing that we have implicit racial biases that make us complicit in the system. One more example of White privilege and structural racism: responding to #blacklivesmatter with #alllivesmatter. OF COURSE ALL LIVES MATTER. Black Lives Matter is not trying to say they don’t – they are saying Black lives matter ALSO. And until Black lives matter, it won’t be true that all lives matter. It’s the same as saying “But I’m not a racist!” Maybe so, but that doesn’t solve the problem of racism, does it? It’s a defensive reaction of privilege to push back at a community by saying “But what about MY life” when you don’t have to live in a world where your life seems to matter less.

    If you are White and this post makes you uncomfortable… I’m sorry for that, but I’m also glad. Since the horrific events of the past few days in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas, I’ve seen more pieces than I ever have before about how White people, if they really want to help, need to feel uncomfortable. As some of these articles point out, it is not the responsibility of people or communities of color to tell White people how to help or be allies. It’s up to us to do the hard work. I’m just as uncomfortable as anybody else, even with my years of exposure to ideas that are going to be new, foreign, and even frightening to others. That discomfort – it’s growing pains. It’s the necessary strain of working to be a better person who is helping to build a better world.

  • Daily Reads: Race, Riots, and Context

    Daily Reads: Race, Riots, and Context

    In light of the riots in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of Baltimore police, I offer this article by Conor Friedersdorf. Writing in The Atlantic, Friedersdorf condemns the violence while urging that the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated by police against Baltimore residents – particularly those of color – be addressed with the same urgency, indignation, and self-righteousness. Sadly, our attention is easily diverted from the underlying causes of the violence by context-free sound bites and video feeds, or by the actions of a single mother dragging her son away from the scene. Friedersdorf includes quotes from Martin Luther King that, to me, say it all, with this as the kicker: ” I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt.” Friedersdorf reflects King by concluding “that riots are to be condemned; that they are inextricably bound up with injustices perpetrated by the state; and that it is a moral imperative for us to condemn both sorts of violence.”

    Two States of Emergency in Baltimore

  • Daily Reads: Coffee Talk

    Daily Reads: Coffee Talk

    Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard of Starbucks’ new initiative to have their servers (I refuse to call them baristas) start conversations about race with their customers. This is a terrific example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz means well, but this campaign is beyond tone deaf. Starbucks has already received a barrage of criticism, so I could have picked any number of articles to share as a Daily Read, but this one by Terrell Jermaine Starr on Alternet stuck with me. Starr points out what should have been obvious to Starbucks: racial inequality is not going to be solved during a chat over coffee. Obviously, Starbucks knows this; but to even position this campaign as helpful reveals just how little CEO Schultz and his staff seem to understand about the depth and breadth of this country’s racial problems. Starr addresses those problems from his perspective as a Black man, and because I have no desire to summarize and potentially coopt what he puts so well, I will leave it to his words to explain it. Let me just add, obviously and cynically, that as well-meaning as Starbucks may be, this is just another example of brandwashing.

    Dear Starbucks: Black People Do Not Need to Participate in #RaceTogether

  • Daily Reads: Religious Racism

    Daily Reads: Religious Racism

    I have become a huge fan of the writings of Arthur Chu, whom most people know as the guy who pissed people off with his winning strategies on Jeopardy! His articles are very well written and always thought provoking. In this contribution to Salon, Chu discusses how racism and religious intolerance are being conflated into extremely disturbing and sometimes violent acts of harassment towards those who are assumed to be associated with Islam – in particular, Sikhs. Chu correctly notes that many apologists for religious intolerance claim that it is not racist, since religions are not races (which, while technically true, does not provide a reasonable excuse for targeting people based on their religion). But the very harassment that targets Sikhs (or other people who appear exotic or foreign to many Americans) shows that people do associate religion with race – that is, a person who looks a certain way must be a Muslim, and therefore, a terrorist.  Chu’s overall point is that, while it is possible to rationally disagree with the tenets of Islam, it is not accurate to say that there is no racial/ethnic basis for people’s assumptions about who is Muslim; therefore, it is a dangerous perpetuation of racism to claim that disagreement with Islam has no racial basis or consequences. (For more on race and why it has no basis in biology, but is clearly very relevant culturally, read this post).

    I wrote about something similar in this post, and I still hold to what I said there: I think it is disingenuous to claim that people committing terrorism in the name of their religious beliefs are not true practitioners of that religion. A Muslim terrorist is a Muslim, even if the majority of Muslims disagree with the terrorist’s radical interpretation and the acts committed in support of it. But I also agree with Chu that we are wrong – so very wrong – to attack every individual who we perceive to be of that faith. Read the article. It’s important.

    Targeted for “looking Muslim”: The Dawkins/Harris worldview and a twisted new hypocrisy which feeds racism

  • Daily Reads: Color Blind

    Daily Reads: Color Blind

    This Daily Read relates directly to my last post about race, but focuses more on the social dimensions of racial categories and how people are perceived. Jenée Desmond-Harris of Vox reviews a study that shows that white people perceive lighter-skinned people of color to be more successful and intelligent than their darker-skinned peers. Even with everything else being equal – education, achievement, social class, etc. – darker-skinned people were still categorized as less intelligent and capable of success. This is exactly what I was talking about in my last post when I explained ascribed status. This is highly problematic for the way it categorizes people based on purely arbitrary physical characteristics. As the article says, “It’s reasonable to conclude that this type of thinking  — whether it’s conscious or the result of implicit bias — could taint decisions about everything from hiring and promotions, awards and internships, to mentorship and all of the other judgments that determine the trajectory of a person’s life.” I think it’s important to be aware of these unconscious biases so we can try to bring them into the realm of consciousness and hopefully be less likely to act on them.

    Study: lighter-skinned black and Hispanic people look smarter to white people

  • Straightjacketing

    Straightjacketing

    The purpose of a straightjacket is to hold its wearer immobile so that she is unable to harm herself or others. It restricts movement so that arms cannot flail and balance cannot be easily kept. It can eventually induce a sense of calm in its irrational and/or panicked wearer, subduing her into a more manageable state. For some, I would imagine that the straightjacket becomes a source of comfort. It allows the wearer to feel that she is being cared for and watched to make sure she stays out of trouble. She believes that those who put her into the straightjacket have her best interests at heart, and eventually the wearer may choose to spend more and more of her time in the jacket.

    The straightjacket analogy is an apt one for those who voluntarily lock themselves in to a particular ideology. The straightjacket of beliefs keeps the wearer calm and gives him a sense of control over his world. Those who constructed and applied the jacket are clearly looking out for the best interests of not just the wearer, but everybody. Alas, this is only comforting when we are surrounded by other people who are wearing the same jacket – that is, those who believe what we believe. When we are confronted with those who think differently, the world can again become a remarkably frightening place, and we retreat to our belief jackets and take comfort there, wrapped immobile in our own ideas.

    This is a false comfort. The straightjacket may be soothing and familiar, but it restricts our ability to engage with other points of view. Remember, the straightjacket is meant to calm and immobilize a person who is a danger to himself or others. The analogy starts to break down if you take it too far, but I think it is safe to apply it to the idea that we may be so accustomed to our jackets that we don’t even realize we are wearing them. Instead, those with whom we disagree or by whom we feel threatened are the ones we think are, or should be, wearing the jacket. This is to protect ourselves, not them. It is much easier to believe our ideological opposites are crazy and dangerous than it is to acknowledge our own jackets. I believe we need to step away from the straightjackets and take our chances with the sometimes frightening, irrational, and crazy world as it is. If we engage with others perhaps we will see that they are not as dangerous as we thought – and vice versa.

    Sadly, even when people are faced with evidence that what they thought to be true actually isn’t what they thought, they remain straightjacketed in their beliefs and will turn to increasingly strident rationalizations for maintaining their original belief. I recently felt the restraining pressure of my own straightjacket when I made the mistake of immediately accepting a conclusion in a news story that aligned neatly with my already formed beliefs. The case of actress Daniele Watts being detained by the LAPD for alleged inappropriate sexual behavior in public was presented as a matter of clear racial discrimination in this article from Jezebel. I read the article and was instantly outraged. I posted the article to Facebook and defended my position that the LAPD had acted inappropriately by essentially accusing Watts of “kissing while black,” in particular because the man she was kissing was white. It turns out, based on new information, that I had knee-jerked to the wrong conclusion. The investigating officers were answering a call from a member of the public who believed Watts and her husband were having sex in public. The responding officers requested both of their IDs. The husband, Brian James Lucas, complied. Watts did not, claiming that since she had done nothing wrong she was not required to present ID. This is technically true in some circumstances in California, but not when officers have reason to believe a crime may have been committed, which is the case when a citizen makes a call to the police. Audio recorded by the responding officers shows that Watts immediately escalated their request into an accusation of racial discrimination. She ended up in handcuffs as the officers verified her ID, and then let both Watts and Lucas go on their way.

    When I heard the audio I immediately realized I had made a mistake. I do not believe that there was any racial motivation in what happened. I am open to new information on the incident potentially changing this conclusion, but based on other things I have read I do not believe the LAPD officers were acting on bias. I also believe, not incidentally, that just because there was no apparent discrimination or bias in this case does not mean that discrimination and bias by cops never happens. I ABSOLUTELY believe that it does. But I do not want to let that belief straightjacket me into thinking that every single interaction between a cop and a person of color is discriminatory, or even potentially discriminatory. As I am so fond of saying to others, you have to gather the facts. You have to get context. As your opinion forms it must be provisional and await further evidence before solidifying. I did not do that in this case, and I am ashamed of myself for it.

    My mistake has been a lesson to me about recognizing my own straightjacket. It is hard to escape our own places of comfort but it is vital that we do. Remember that the straightjacket is NOT for comfort – it is meant to restrict us. Don’t let your straightjacket lull you into a false sense of security. Instead, we should shrink from ideological straightjacketing and learn to be comfortable in a world that is sometimes infuriating, frightening, or irrational. We need to keep our minds free.