(This is a continuing, open discussion. Parts I and III are on RonP01’s blog, and Part II is on Faith Paulsen’s blog. Please feel free to go back to any of these posts and leave your comments.)
You can view Parts I, II and III of this dialogue here:
Open Dialogue On Race Part III
Ground rules for participating comments in the open dialogue on race:
1. ABSOLUTELY NO PERSONAL ATTACKS
2. NAME-CALLING OR FINGER-POINTING ARE PROHIBITED
3. READ COMMENT(S) THOROUGHLY BEFORE RESPONDING
4. STANDARD OPEN SALON RULES APPLY
5. VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED
* * *
HYPOTHESIS FOR THE OPEN DIALOGUE ON RACE PART IV:
(1) Race is a social construct, based on perceived differences between one group and another or additional groups.
(2) The dominant group will manipulate the notion of race to create institutional barriers against the subjugated groups, resulting in racial disparities that are statistically quantifiable.
I begin my analysis with some personal reflections on the concept of race. I am African-American, but the discussion does not end there. In fact, it just begins. My paternal grandfather was White, of Irish descent to be exact. I never met him, he died a number of years before I was born. I never knew that side of the family, and I can only imagine that there are White Loves spread around the country who are kin, but I never got to know them because society is complicated, and race is complicated. And if I were to meet them today, I would accept them as family, because they are family.
My wife is Jewish, and her ancestors lived in Germany and Russia. Our son is buried in a Jewish cemetery with his people, ancestors who were born in the old country in the nineteenth century, and came here as immigrants, fleeing oppression. After they arrived, they struggled against anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant sentiment. But his people also came from the sea islands of Charleston, South Carolina, and before that the coast of West Africa. They came here on a ship of quite a different kind, and oppression greeted them here. And so, we’re all family, blending cultures and turning the notion of race on its head. And there are increasingly more families like us in America.
Similarly, those of us who grew up and attended grade school and college in an environment of diversity and inclusion, and who have developed networks of friends and family across continents, do not respond to the old notions of race. It just doesn’t make sense anymore. It never did, but more people are realizing it now. The young people who voted in the last presidential election realize this.
Children are born without concerns about race. They will play with other children without racial prejudice or hatred. It is the society that conditions people to think in terms of differences among individuals and groups, not as a cause for celebration, but as a cause for suspicion, as grounds for judging us better or worse than others, superior or inferior to others, or prettier or uglier than others.
In the end, race is really not about actual differences—we all share the same DNA— but rather about perceived differences. When there are no “races”— races are created. Ultimately, this demonstrates the irrational and arbitrary nature of racism. Article 1 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD or Race Convention) broadly defines racial discrimination as “any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.”
When I visited Belfast, Northern Ireland a decade ago as a spokesperson for Amnesty International UK, I heard the stories of people who had experienced what was, in essence, racial violence. Some had experienced police brutality because of which side of the wall they lived. One young woman that I met, a rapper and student at Queen’s University Belfast, had lost an eye from a car bomb. Religious differences—Catholic vs. Protestant, driven by history, politics and power relations—acted as the functional equivalent of race. After much struggle, it took a civil rights movement in Northern Ireland to change things around.
Race and racism are not natural, but are manufactured by society, to be sure. But the effects are very real and tangible. In fact, you can quantify them. Government maintains laws and policies that serve to disproportionately exclude or disadvantage people of a certain group, punish them, and deny them opportunities. An example is the failed war on drugs, which has decimated communities of color, and has created an exploding prison population. Although 34% of the U.S. population is of color, two-thirds of the nation’s prisoners are of color. Meanwhile, over 90% of the judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys are White. Sadly, the legal profession is one of the least diverse professions in the U.S., a fact which helps to foster an environment of racial prejudice and insensitivity in the criminal justice system, and helps to create a mostly Black and Brown prison population.
Children in poor neighborhoods, disproportionately of color and with few opportunities, are steered into a cradle-to-prison pipeline as soon as they are born. For millions of poor children, failed by their families, the child welfare system and the juvenile justice system, a life of prison awaits them. As the Children’s Defense Fund reported, children of color are more likely to be afflicted by poverty. One-quarter of Latino children and one-third of Black children are poor. Black children are more than three times as likely as White children to be born into poverty, and are more than four times as likely to live in extreme poverty.
Further, children of color are more likely to be placed in programs for mental retardation, placed in foster care, more likely to be suspended, left back a grade, and drop out of school. And youth of color, 39 percent of the juvenile population, are 60 percent of incarcerated juveniles.
A Black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime. A Latino boy has a one in six chance. Today, as a result of unfair drug laws and draconian sentencing, failing schools and a lack of opportunity, 580,000 black men -- many of them fathers -- are doing time in state and federal prisons, while only 40,000 graduate from college each year, a sobering statistic.
Corporations practice racism as well— in hiring, firing and promotion, and against their customers. The banks—those loan sharks, bailout beneficiaries, and recipients of corporate welfare—have redlined inner city communities for years, refusing to provide people with access to capital. And the banks got rich quick through a racial profiling scheme called predatory lending. According to a report by United For A Fair Economy, people of color are more than three times as likely to have subprime loans. To be sure, people of all backgrounds have been devastated by subprime mortgages, an inherently flawed, expensive and predatory product with exploding adjustable rates, balloon payments, and penalties for early repayment that cripple their victims and make it unlikely that they will repay. But these loans account for only 17 percent of loans to Whites, and 55 percent of loans to Blacks. Given people of similar financial circumstances, Whites are generally steered into safer, less expensive loans. The subprime lending debacle is causing the greatest loss of wealth to people of color, primarily African-Americans and Latinos, in modern U.S. history. In dollars, the loss amounts to somewhere between $164 billion and $213 billion over eight years.
Thoughts?
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Comments
I cannot say that I feel their pain although I am also paying a regular mortgage on a devalued house while making do on less money due to a reduced income caused by medical issues last year. The one thing these students and I do have in common is an inability to get the mortgage companies to call us back about using Obama's refinancing or the banks internal restructuring processes. I am going to try to call two more times this week and then I swear I will threaten to blog about it and expose their practices to say 126 people ;0)
This makes me want to scream every single time I hear any discussion of bailout funds for those in upper income brackets who are disproportionately white.
Forget about sharing the wealth. There is no wealth. That was an illusion and con game. It is time to share the burden. If that is socialism then so what? It is fair.
Here are some thoughts:
The "middle class" is poor people living on credit.
The criminalization of poverty has been an ongoing phenomenon in western capitalist societies. Being poor has become the equivalent of being a criminal. People of color are disproportionately poor. Little wonder that they are disproportionately represented in the prison populations.
"Socialism" is now a code word for government policies and programs designed to help those who are least able to help themselves (read people of color) and thus attempt avoid the cycles of impoverishment and incarceration. They (Republicans and Right-wing racists) have not stopped trying to scare white people into voting against their own economic interests. In fact, if it weren't for the collapse of the financial markets we might well have a McCain/Palin administration in place today.......
Great post....
Interesting point about socialism: opponents of the New Deal made similar claims about FDR and socialism. Funny that free market capitalism doesn't have the same negative connotation, given that unfettered capitalism (=greed), with its loan sharks, shell games and ponzi schemes, is what got us into this mess in the first place.
My best friend is African-American and we always laugh that people say all the time to Derek, "man, I would have never known you were black talking on the phone to you." (belly laughs from us both on this all the time). HTF does someone know a skin color by talking on a phone? When someone talks to Eminem on the phone do they automatically assume he's black because he talks the way he does? It's asinine.
By the way David, I know an entire family of Love's here where I live that are "African-American" and I know several of them. Any family in the Tennessee area?
Just some thoughts and experiences.
There is more genetic difference between two fruit flies than between two people of a different race.
My first day in class while in grad school for anthropology had the prof single me out as someone who looked mixed, that no one would know for sure what race I was. He explained that I was the future, for we're looking more and more similar (brown eyes, brown hair, brown skin) What will we fight over then?
If you take off on a plane from Sweden and land in Kenya, you'll swear there's race and can draw the line between it. However, if you walked from Sweden to Kenya, you wouldn't be able to determine where one race ends and the other begins.
There used to be laws forbidding Irish and African Americans from hanging out together. The reason was that if they lived, worked, and talked together they'd find they had much in common and might realize they were both fighting over the same scraps. Therefore, all the powers had to do was give a slight few advantages to the Irish to ensure they'd never fight for the rights of the African Americans. Brilliant.
I find that the worst racism and violence comes from those in the lower, middle class and lower class. The rich have nothing to fear, but the poor feel they're having to share their small piece of the pie. It's always been this way in this country.
When I tell my students that in the next 20 to 30 years, demographers predict that Hispanics will make up the majority in this country, inevitably one of them says, "We've got to start having more kids." A country has never gone through that kind of demographic shift without upheaval. It might just get ugly.
Thanks again for this discussion. I'll check back in to read more and possibly to add more later if I think of something else.
I'm thinking that it isn't enough for me to try to understand people on a one-to-one basis, or to learn about other points of view, or to make sure my kids are exposed early on to people of diverse backgrounds.
Because no matter how I try to treat people equally (and I'm sure I fail more than I admit), I am still part and parcel to a system that perpetuates racism. The criminal justice system is a prime example, the corporate system, the mortgage lending industry. . .
So -- although I believe in change, I voted for change, and hope -- I wonder how meaningful change will come when racism is so closely knit into our very institutions.
People of Earth: "Culture" is real and homo sapiens' chief tool of adaptability and survival. "Race" is out-and-out crap invented for fairly ignoble reasons.
But it's everywhere, regretfully. Like Faith stated, I detest the fact that society tries to force me into a life where I must play a role in the perpetuation of racism via my roles in its institutions. As such, I've tried like hell to remove myself from that and all it has done is made me a near-exile.
Yesterday, for example, the only time I left the house was for a three-hour editorial duty corresponding with layout. Before I was in the office a full hour, I encountered my boss' bigotry (which includes both racism and homophobia) as he continues on his crusade to purge black/Democrats from the city's most powerful positions.
Today, my only venture from the house was to a locally-owned cafe where I was "lucky" enough to witness the establishment's all-white management, employees and ownership engaging in mirthful banter about the manager's alarm around her pool that they tagged her "nagger snagger." They went on to gleefully recall a South Park episode that inspired their insipid little joke.
So I write that establishment off as one I will no longer patronize. The list of acceptable places is pretty small.
This is commonplace and irksome.
And Noahvose, as far as your observation about narrowing margins of physical characterics – "He explained that I was the future, for we're looking more and more similar (brown eyes, brown hair, brown skin) What will we fight over then?" – the answer is pretty simple.
The Middle East is filled with people with nearly identical physical characteristics and cultural origins yet they've had no problem finding things over which to battle for thousands of years. Don't worry, you can count on people to always build walls.
I see race as an illusion. It is nothing real or inherent, but merely a taxonomic device, made for organization and dependent on the organizer's agenda. For instance, who is "Black," depends on who is asking the question.
An optometrist might classify his customers by who wears glasses and who wears contacts. This does not mean he has discovered any new type of human being. He has merely divided people up according to his own purposes.
So also with race.
Get on an airplane in Ethiopia and land in Sweden, and you would say, "Oh my goodness, look! Here are two races!" But *walk* from Ethiopia to Sweden and you would see no divisions at all, just a seamless progression from dark with one set of physical features to light with another set. And genetically speaking, race is nonexistent.
The "one drop rule" is an example of the taxonomic aspect of race. Who decides that a single drop of "black blood" makes one Black? It's arbitrary and capricious.
Or as Wanda Sykes so eloquently put it a few nights ago, "This is amazing, you're the first black president. I'm proud to be able to say. But that's unless you screw up. And then it's going to be, 'What's up with that half-white guy? Who voted for the mulatto. What the hell?' "
It's all about the organizer's agenda. And I, for one, am tired of it. But so many people are invested in the status quo, from powerful so-called "white" males to so-called "black" leaders and victims alike.
I would so love to see the dialogue move *away* from race. Call it the bullshit that it is. I am not my race, you are not your race. The false construct has only the power we give it.
Yet no one seems to like my idea of tossing the whole race system into the trash.
I am dispirited.
Aside from skin color differences, there are always going to be cultural differences, and I think that makes people uneasy more than anything else. All anyone can do is live the example, really.
Noahvose ~ it's interesting what you said about the future race, because I've told my daughter that she's the face of the future. Her racial heritage is White/Choctaw/African-American/Creek.
One very frightening aspect of racism is how perniciously it affects people over time - you didn't mention health disparities. Certainly, these are due in part to a lack of access to culturally responsive health care, healthy foods, etc. However, they are also the result of the physical stress placed on individuals who are forced to deal with the constant pressures of racism. We are only beginning to learn how much impact unrelenting stress can have on chromosomal expression (epi-genetics) that can lead to adverse health outcomes - and once you turn a gene on, it can take several generations of "stress-less" living for it to be turned off again.
@Kind of Blue - I have another perspective on the issue of "voice" and race. My ex-ex is black, and while other black folk do not mistake him for white over the phone, lots of white folks do. When he was in graduate school, he took a bartender's course, thinking that this would be a convenient way to earn money. After "graduating" the school sent him on interviews - in liberal San Francisco. I cannot tell you how many times he had a great interaction over the phone only to receive a cold shoulder when his prospective employers met him in person - the school was always mistaken or they had just given the job to someone else. When it happens once, you figure you just got there too late. Twice, perhaps you figure it to be a coincidence. More than that, it is clear there is a pattern.
@Dana Douglas, while I completely agree with you that race is a construct, if you are on the receiving end of it, it is clearly a construct with very sharp teeth.
@Noahvose, just have to say, "thumbs up" to the future!
@David again, SIDE NOTE: It is interesting that you mention Northern Ireland. Just a historical note - the division between Protestant and Catholic is NOT a religious one as commonly believed, but a racial one. The English honed their colonial techniques on the Irish before exporting them to the rest of the world. The Protestants were the colonizers. You know those little drunken Leprechauns that folks like to trot out on St. Patty's day? They are racist representations of Irish folk, similar to the stereotypical Aunt Jemimahs and lawn jockeys that were once so ubiquitous in the southern United States. The English stereotypes of Irish people are not so dissimilar from those of black folk in this country.
I have a friend who, like me, is Potato Famine Irish who has gone back to Northern Ireland to participate in counter-demonstrations against the "Orange" marches through Catholic neighborhoods. Based solely on his looks, he was often stopped on the street by Republican (re: Protestant) cops who would rough him up until they heard his American accent. Did you also know that the Irish were the first immigrant group to be pitched against freed blacks in order to depress wages? On another note, my grandmother was a Slovak peasant born at the turn of the last century - she didn't actually learn to read until she immigrated to the U.S. because in the "old country" she was taught in Hungarian, a language she didn't understand.
Last comment, my understanding of my history guides my willingness to stand up against racism when I see it, and to acknowledge the privilege that my white skin grants me. If one is white, one cannot truly do the first, without first doing the second.
These facts alone should silence any critics that claim the race issue has played itself out. It has also been said that the prison system is "the fastest growing Indian reservation in the country." These three stats alone are an embarrassing display of racial and social inequity in our system. The only conclusion that I may reach with these glaring statistics is that either the criminal justice system is biased against minorities, or that our we institionalized racism to a point that some are enabled to succeed, while others are shut out.
Thanks for the great writing, good points, intriguing style.
Monte
The Hypothesis for the Open Dialogue On Race Part V: Classism has/will replace Racism as the dominant social issue in America.
Part V will be posted by Wednesday morning, 27 May....Stay tuned.
Check out RonP01's blog tomorrow for the next installment of this ongoing discussion on race. Hypothesis for the Open Dialogue On Race Part V: Classism has/will replace Racism as the dominant social issue in America.
Ron, if you knew these people, it might be easier to understand. The folks with the cafe don't care what I think. Not only do they have plenty of other customers on which they can depend, they know because of cultural vagaries hereabouts that no stink I would hope to raise will make a difference. Their customers just won't care.
And my boss? I could certainly do that if I want to be fired. Otherwise, it wouldn't be wise. We're talking about someone who was once a press secretary for Trent Lott and is a hardcore, Southern fried Republican. He thinks his bigotry is funny and the more he knows such talk irritates others, the more likely he is to goad them with it. Any protestation from me would make no difference in what he does as his attitude is, "It's my paper. If you don't like it, leave."
"Children in poor neighborhoods, disproportionately of color and with few opportunities, are steered into a cradle-to-prison pipeline as soon as they are born." It is admitidly hard for many whites to understand how this works, due the racist way it is portrayed. However, Serious scholars have produced math equations clearly predicting exactly what will happen. Digging deeper, the anxiety this situation creates is another "invisible" variable effecting education, proper growth patterns, so much more.
Once these beautiful kids are big, scary parolees- the GOP Willie Horton's them out to scare the crap out of whites, many of whom are already holding hating racist views to start, at as such, as stated, is an attempt to keep the Status Quo as is and the power balance as such.
David, I appreciate your perspective here very much. I'm sorry to say I am appalled in general at the race discussion on Salon, denial is so rampant, and these, for the most part, educated people.
Frankly, I'd be scared to death still but I know the Youth of today is already global and does not buy this garbage any more ... and, prior to the Web, MTV truly helped get this rolling with their inclusive audience and programming. Media Matters, thanks OS.