AMERICAN RACISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Five Fallacies about Racism

There are many misconceptions about the character of racism. Americans are deeply divided over its legacies and inner workings, and much of this division is a result of the fact that many Americans understand racism in limited or misguided ways.⁹ We have identified five fallacies—logical mistakes, factual or logical errors in reasoning—that are recurrent in many public debates about racism.¹⁰

1. 1. Individualistic Fallacy. Here, racism is assumed to belong to the realm of ideas and attitudes. Racism is only the collection of nasty thoughts a “racist individual” has about another group: “Mexicans are lazy”; “Blacks are criminals”; “A black person driving a nice car is a criminal”; “Native Americans are lazy drunkards.” It is a matter of personal “prejudices” (defined by social psychologist Gordon Allport as “antipathies based upon faulty and inflexible generalizations”) and of “stereotypes” (“exaggerated beliefs associated with a [racial] category”).¹¹ Someone operating with this fallacy thinks of racism as one thinks of a crime and, therefore, divides the world into two types of people: those guilty of the crime of racism (“racists”) and those innocent of the crime (“nonracists”).¹² Crucial to this misconceived notion of racism is intentionality. “Did I intentionally act racist? Did I cross the street because I was scared of the Hispanic man walking toward me or did I cross for no apparent reason?” Upon answering “No” to the question of intentionality, one assumes they can classify their actions as “nonracist,” despite the character of those actions, and go about their business as innocent. In a society with signs of racial injustice everywhere, virtually everyone can say they are not racist.

   This conception of racism simply won’t do, for it fails to account for the racism woven into the very fabric of our schools, political organizations, labor markets, and neighborhoods. Conflating racism with prejudice ignores the more systematic and structural forms of racism: it looks for racism within individuals and not institutions.¹³ Labeling someone a “racist” shifts our attention from the social surroundings that enforce racial inequalities to the individual with biases. It also lets the accuser off the hook—“He is a racist; I am not”—and treats racism as aberrant and strange, whereas American racism is quite normal.

   Furthermore, intentionality is in no way a prerequisite for racism. Racism often is habitual, unintentional, commonplace, polite, implicit, and well meaning.¹⁴ Thus, not only is racism located in our intentional thoughts and actions; it also thrives in our dispositions and habits, as well as in the social institutions in which we are all embedded.

2. 2. Legalistic Fallacy. This fallacy conflates de jure legal progress with de facto racial progress. “De jure” and “de facto” are Latin expressions meaning, respectively, “based on the law” and “based in fact.” Thus, one who operates under the legalistic fallacy assumes that abolishing racist laws (racism in principle) automatically leads to the abolition of racism in everyday life (racism in practice).

   This fallacy begins to crumble after a few moments of critical reflection. After all, we would not make the same mistake when it comes to other criminalized acts: laws against theft do not mean that one’s car never will be stolen. Consider Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that abolished de jure segregation in schools, making it illegal to enforce racially segregated classrooms. Did that lead to the abolition of de facto segregation? Absolutely not. Sixty-five years later, schools still are drastically segregated and drastically unequal.¹⁵ In fact, some social scientists have documented a nationwide movement of educational resegregation, which has left today’s schools even more segregated than those of 1954.¹⁶

   

3. 3. Tokenistic Fallacy. One who is guilty of the tokenistic fallacy assumes that the presence of people of color in influential positions is evidence of the complete eradication of racial obstacles. This logic runs something like this: “Many people of color, such as Barack Obama, have held high-ranking political posts; therefore, racism does not exist in the political arena. Many people of color, such as Oprah Winfrey, are celebrities and multimillionaires; therefore, there is no racial inequality when it comes to income and wealth distribution. Poor people of color (not society) are to blame for their own poverty.”

   Although it is true that many people of color have made significant inroads to seats of political and economic power over the course of the past fifty years, a disproportionate number remain disadvantaged in these arenas.¹⁷ We cannot, in good conscience, ignore the millions of African Americans living in poverty and, instead, point to Oprah’s millions as evidence of economic equality. Instead, we must explore how Oprah’s financial success can coexist with the economic deprivation of millions of black women.

   Besides, throughout the history of America, a handful of nonwhite individuals have excelled financially and politically in the teeth of rampant racial domination. The first black congressperson was not elected after the Civil Rights Movement, but in 1870! Joseph Rainey, a former slave, served in the House of Representatives for four terms. Madam C. J. Walker is accredited as being the first black millionaire. Born in 1867, she made her fortune inventing hair and beauty products. Few people would feel comfortable pointing to Rainey’s or Walker’s success as evidence that late-nineteenth-century America was a time of racial harmony and equity. Such tokenistic logic would not be accurate then, and it is not accurate now.

4. 4. Ahistorical Fallacy. This fallacy renders history impotent. Thinking hindered by the ahistorical fallacy makes a bold claim: most U.S. history—namely, the extended period of time during which this country did not extend basic rights to people of color (let alone classify them as fully human)—is inconsequential today. Legacies of slavery and colonialism, the eradication of millions of Native Americans, forced segregation, clandestine sterilizations and harmful science experiments, mass disenfranchisement, race-based exploitation, racist propaganda distributed by the state caricaturing Asians, blacks, and Hispanics, racially motivated abuses of all kinds (sexual, murderous, and dehumanizing)—all of this, purport those operating under the ahistorical fallacy, does not matter for those living in the here-and-now. This idea is so delusional that it is hard to take seriously. Today’s society is directed, constructed, and molded by the past.¹⁸ All that is socially constructed is historically constructed, and since race, as we shall see, is a social construction, it too is a historical construction.

   A soft version of the ahistorical fallacy might admit that events in the “recent past” (such as the time since the Civil Rights Movement or the attacks on September 11, 2001) matter, but things in the “distant past” (such as slavery or the colonization of Mexico) have little consequence. But this idea is no less fallacious, since many events in America’s “distant past”—especially the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans—are the most consequential in shaping present-day society. (Additionally, any historian would remind us that since America is just over 200 years old, all American history is “recent history.”)

5. 5. Fixed Fallacy. Those who assume that racism is fixed, that it is immutable, constant across time and space, partake in the fixed fallacy. Since they take racism to be something that does not develop in any way, those who understand racism through the fixed fallacy often are led to ask such questions as, “Has racism increased or decreased in the past decades?” And because practitioners of the fixed fallacy usually take as their standard definition of racism only the most heinous forms of racism—racial violence, for example—they confidently conclude that, indeed, things have gotten better.

   It is important to trace the career of American racism and to analyze, for example, how racial attitudes or measures of racial inclusion and exclusion have changed over time. Many social scientists have developed sophisticated techniques for doing so.¹⁹ But the question “Have things gotten better or worse?” is legitimate only after we account for the morphing attributes of racism. We cannot quantify racism in the same way we can quantify, say, birthrates. The nature of “birthrate” does not fluctuate over time; thus, it makes sense to ask “Are there more or fewer births now than there were fifty years ago?” without bothering to analyze if and how a birthrate is different today than it was in previous historical moments.

   American racism assumes different forms in different historical moments. Although race relations today are informed by those of the past, we cannot hold to the belief that twenty-first-century racism takes on the exact same form as twentieth-century racism. And we certainly cannot conclude that there is “little or no racism” today because it does not resemble the racism of the 1950s. (Modern-day Christianity looks very different, in nearly every conceivable way, than the Christianity of the early church. But this does not mean that there is “little or no Christianity” today.) So, before we ask “Have things gotten better or worse?” we should ponder the essence of racism today and how it differs from racism experienced by those living in our parents’ or grandparents’ generation. We should ask, further, to quote historian Thomas Holt, “What enables racism to reproduce itself after the historical conditions that initially gave it life have disappeared?”²⁰

Racial Domination

We have spent a significant amount of time talking about what racial domination or racism is not. We have yet to spell out what it is. Racial domination is the arrangement of racial life in such a way that its ordinary, everyday workings serve to benefit certain racial groups (in our society, predominantly whites) at the expense of others (in our society, predominantly nonwhites). Far from always involving overt coercion or violence, as in the days of slavery, racial domination is a matter of how institutions ordinarily operate, how interpersonal exchanges (within and across racial divides) typically unfold, and even how individuals (whites and nonwhites alike) unthinkingly come to see themselves and their place in the racial order.

Two specific manifestations of racial domination are institutional racism and interpersonal racism. Institutional racism is systematic white domination of people of color, embedded and operating in corporations, universities, legal systems, political bodies, cultural life, and other social collectives. Institutional racism involves many types of power: the symbolic power to classify one group of people as “normal” and other groups of people as “abnormal,” the political power to withhold basic rights from people of color and marshal the full power of the state to enforce segregation and inequality, the social power to deny people of color full inclusion or membership in associational life, and economic power that privileges whites in terms of job placement, advancement, and wealth and property accumulation.

Informed by centuries of racial domination, institutional racism withholds from people of color opportunities, privileges, and rights that many whites enjoy. Examples of institutional racism include the tendency of schools and universities to support curricula that highlight the accomplishments of European Americans, ignoring the accomplishments of non-European Americans; the disproportionate numbers of white people in high-ranking political, economic, and military posts and the ongoing exclusion of people of color from such posts; and the prevalence of law enforcement practices that target people of color, especially African Americans and Arab Americans, as criminals or terrorists. In all three of these examples, racial domination is carried out at the institutional level, sometimes despite the motives or attitudes of the people working in those institutions. Because institutional racism operates outside the scope of individual intent, many people do not recognize institutional racism as racism when they experience it.

Below the level of institutions, yet informed by the workings of those institutions, we find interpersonal racism. This is racial domination manifest in everyday interactions and practices. Interpersonal racism can be overt, as in old-fashioned bigotry (old-fashioned but not outmoded, as the examples at the start of this chapter indicate). In such instances, people act out their prejudices, giving direct expression to their negative attitudes guided by their demeaning stereotypes of others. However, most of the time, interpersonal racism is quite covert: it is found in the habitual, commonsensical, and ordinary practices of our lives. This is part of the reason why our racial problems are so challenging: they extend far beyond the confines of straightforward, conscious bigotry. Our racist attitudes, as Lillian Smith remarked in Killers of the Dream, easily “slip from the conscious mind deep into the muscles.”²¹ Since we are disposed to a world structured by racial domination, we develop racialized dispositions—some conscious, many more unconscious and bodily—that guide our thoughts and behaviors.

We may talk slowly to an Asian woman at the farmer’s market, unconsciously assuming that she speaks poor English. We may inform a Mexican woman at a corporate party that someone has spilled his punch, unconsciously assuming that she is a janitor. We may unknowingly scoot to the other side of the elevator when a large Puerto Rican man steps in, or unthinkingly eye a group of black teenagers wandering the aisles of the store at which we work, or ask to change seats if an Arab American man sits down next to us on an airplane. Many miniature actions such as these have little to do with one’s intentional thoughts; they are orchestrated by one’s practical sense, one’s habitual know-how, and informed by institutional racism.

“Can people of color be racist?” This question is a popular one in the public imagination, and the answer depends on what we mean by racism. Institutional racism is the product of years of white supremacy, and it is designed to produce far-reaching benefits for white people. Institutional racism carries on despite our personal attitudes. Thus, there is no such thing as “black institutional racism” or “reverse institutional racism,” since there is no centuries-old socially ingrained and normalized system of domination designed by people of color that denies whites full participation in the rights, privileges, and seats of power of our society.²² Interpersonal racism, on the other hand, takes place on the ground level and has to do with attitudes and habitual actions. It is certainly true that members of all racial groups can harbor negative attitudes toward members of other groups. An African American may hold ill feelings toward Jews or Koreans. An Asian American may be suspicious of white people. And such prejudiced perceptions often are rampant within racial groups as well, as when a Cuban American feels superior to a Mexican American, a Japanese American feels uncomfortable around Chinese Americans, or dark-skinned African Americans profess to being “more authentically black” than light-skinned African Americans. Indeed, some nonwhite groups have a deep, conflict-ridden history with other nonwhite groups. One thinks here of the Black-Korean conflict, the so-called Black-Brown divide, bitter relations among Latino subgroups, and animus among various American Indian nations.

People of color, then, can take part in overt and covert forms of interpersonal racism. That said, we must realize that interpersonal racism targeting dominated groups and interpersonal racism targeting the dominant group do not pack the same punch. Two young men, one black, the other white, bump into each other on the street. The black man calls the white man a “honky.” In response, the white man calls the black man a “boy.” Both racial slurs are racial slurs and should be labeled as such, and both reinforce racial divisions. However, unlike “honky,” “boy” connects to the larger system of institutional racial domination. The word derives its meaning (and power) from slavery, when enslaved African men were stripped of their masculine honor and treated like children. “Boy” (and many other epithets aimed at blacks) invokes such times—times when torturing, whipping, and raping enslaved blacks were not illegal acts. Epithets toward white people, including “honky,” have no such equivalent. (“Honky” comes from derogatory terms aimed at Bohemian, Hungarian, and Polish immigrants who worked in the Chicago meat-packing plants.) “Boy” also reminds the black man how things stand today: if the confrontation escalates and the police are called, the black man knows that the police officers will probably be white and that he might be harassed or looked on as a threat; if the two men meet in court, the black man knows that the lawyers, judge, and jurors will possibly be mostly (if not all) white; and if the two men are sentenced, the African American man knows, as do many criminologists, that he will get the harsher sentence.²³ “Boy” brings the full weight of institutional racism—systematic, historical, and mighty—down on the African American man. “Honky,” even if delivered with venomous spite, is powerless by comparison.

Moreover, sociologists have shown that unlike white people, people of color are confronted with interpersonal racism on a regular basis, sometimes daily. For people of color, there is a cumulative character to an individual’s racial experiences. These experiences do not take place in isolation. Humiliating or degrading acts always are informed by similar acts that individuals have experienced in the past. To paraphrase sociologist Joe Feagin, the interpersonal events that take place on the street and in other public settings are not simply rare and isolated events; rather, they are recurring events shaped by social and historical forces of racial domination.²⁴

Institutional and interpersonal racism are not altogether distinct phenomena, however useful it may be to distinguish them analytically. When Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton first brought the concepts into race studies in their 1967 classic, Black Power, they affirmed that those who “would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies”—and who would do so “deliberately”—are driven as much by racism as are the perpetrators of interpersonal acts of insult and humiliation.²⁵ For instance, the judge who sentences a person of color to a prison term longer than what a white person would receive enacts institutional racism yet also engages (in an indirect and mediated way) in an interpersonal interaction. Likewise, cemetery owners who put out a sign forbidding the consumption of food on their premises also interact, after a fashion, with visiting family members of color, whose ritual practices the owners specifically are targeting—some nonwhite groups consider bringing food to a cemetery a long-standing cultural practice—even as these authorities lay down their impersonal organizational rules in the isolation of their executive offices. Carmichael and Hamilton easily could have made the inverse point as well; namely, that every act of interpersonal racism also carries with it the force of institutional racism. Not only do institutions shape the perpetrator through past practices of socialization, but institutions also authorize her or his racist actions in the present. Institutional and interpersonal racism interpenetrate and support one another: whenever one comes to light, the other’s shadow can be found alongside it. Their common root is a social psychology of racial animus, dispositions and habits of thought, perception, feeling, and action that lead one to denigrate the racial Other. This especially is important to note in light of the tendency to invoke institutional racism in ways that absolve racial dominants of their culpability. As originally conceived, it may have been useful for finding ways to talk about the historical legacy of racial inequality, yet it also allows personal responsibility to be neutralized. After all, someone did lay down those prison sentences; someone did write up those cemetery rules.

Symbolic Violence

Elaborating on the nature of “unconscious racism,” law professor Charles Lawrence has observed, “Americans share a common historical and cultural heritage in which racism has played and still plays a dominant role. Because of this shared experience, we also inevitably share many ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that attach significance to an individual’s race and induce negative feelings and opinions about nonwhites. To the extent that this cultural belief system has influenced all of us, we are all racists. At the same time, most of us are unaware of our racism. We do not recognize the ways in which our cultural experience has influenced our beliefs about race or the occasions upon which those beliefs affect our actions. In other words, a large part of the behavior that produces racial discrimination is influenced by unconscious racial motivation.”²⁶ Take note of the italicized sentence. Why didn’t Lawrence write, “To the extent that this cultural belief system has influenced all of us, all white people are racists?” The answer is that such a statement would be inaccurate.

Racism surrounds us. To borrow an analogy developed by Beverly Tatum, racial domination is like polluted air. On some days, the pollution is weighty and visible, while on other days, it is virtually invisible—“but always, day in and day out, we are breathing it in.”²⁷ Because racism infuses all of social life, nonwhites and whites alike develop thoughts and practices molded by racism; nonwhites and whites alike develop stereotypes about other racial groups.

In fact, people of color may internalize prejudice aimed at their own racial group, unintentionally contributing to the reproduction of racial domination. Psychologists have labeled this phenomenon “internalized oppression” or “internalized racism.” Following the work of French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we label it “symbolic violence”: “violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity.”²⁸ In the case of racial domination, symbolic violence refers to the process of people of color unknowingly accepting and supporting the terms of their own domination.²⁹ “So we learned the dance that cripples the human spirit,” laments Lillian Smith, “step by step by step, we who were white and we who were colored, day by day, hour by hour, year by year until the movements were reflexes and made for the rest of our life without thinking.”³⁰

The pervasiveness of symbolic violence presents a challenge to all students of color who might read this textbook—or any other work on race in America—and feel they have little to gain from it, as if the study of race merely were a way of enlightening their peers who are white. Regrettably, symbolic violence operates everywhere. It can be found among whites, to be sure, who perhaps out of racial guilt repudiate their own whiteness by engaging in misguided attempts, say, to “act black” by altering their outward patterns of dress, bodily mannerisms, or way of speaking in ways that conform to blackness as they envision it (often, however, without also repudiating their own white privilege). We shall have more to say about this in Chapter 10. However, symbolic violence also is found among nonwhites who learn from an early age that nonwhiteness is devalued.

A good example of symbolic violence is the nearly worldwide acceptance of European standards of beauty. The false aesthetic separation between “white beauty” (epitomized by long, straight, blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin) and “black ugliness” (epitomized by short, curly, black hair, brown eyes, and dark brown skin) grew out of slavery. Features associated with the African American phenotype were demonized. Since the “Black Is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s, many African American women have resisted such standards, taking pride in their curly hair and their ebony-colored skin. Nevertheless, many others have internalized white standards of beauty, using costly and painful methods to straighten and dye their hair and, less frequently, to lighten their skin. In fact, Madam C. J. Walker, the first black millionaire mentioned earlier, made her fortune developing a product to straighten black women’s hair! Today, many black women, to borrow a philosopher’s line, have been “poisoned by the stereotype others have of them.”³¹

Symbolic violence operates by virtue of the fact that the dominated perceive and respond to the structures and processes that dominate them through modes of thought (indeed, also of feeling) that are themselves the products of domination. The racial “order of things” seems to them natural, self-evident, and even legitimate. This in turn has an important practical implication. What is required is a radical transformation of the social conditions that produce embodied habits, dispositions, tastes, and lifestyles that lead people to become actively complicit in their own domination. The only way to bring about change that does not entail merely replacing one modality of racial domination with another is to address specifically and to undo the mechanisms of de-historicization and universalization—“always and everywhere it has been this way”—whereby arbitrary workings of power are enabled to continue.

Intersectionality

Racial domination does not operate inside a vacuum, cordoned off from other modes of domination. On the contrary, it intersects with other forms of domination—those based on gender, class, sexuality, religion, nationhood, ability, and so forth. Social scientists have evoked the term intersectionality to explain the overlapping systems of advantages and disadvantages that affect people differently positioned in society.

The notion that there is a monolithic “Asian experience,” “African American experience,” or “white experience”—experiences somehow detached from other pieces of one’s identity—is nothing but a chimera, an illusion. Researchers have labeled such a notion racial essentialism, for such a way of thinking boils down vastly different human experiences into a single “master category”: race.³² When we fail to account for these different experiences, we create silences in our narratives of the social world and fail to explain how overlapping systems of advantages and disadvantages affect individuals’ opportunity structures, lifestyles, and social hardships. When we speak only of “Hispanic people,” for instance, we overlook how Latinas (Hispanic women) confront not only racism but also sexism in their day-to-day lives. We also overlook how poor Hispanic families must struggle against poverty and worker exploitation, whereas more well-off Hispanic families may not be confronted by such obstacles. And we overlook how Hispanics with disabilities and those whose faith would not be considered mainstream are disadvantaged in ways that able-bodied Hispanics and those who practice mainstream religion are not. Finally, we overlook the ways in which gay Hispanics face ridicule, discrimination, and violence that heterosexual Hispanics do not, as well as the fact that Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Dominicans—all of whom would be classified as Hispanic—have very different cultures and experience life in the United States in very different ways.

The idea of intersectionality implies that we cannot understand the lives of poor white single mothers or gay black men by examining only one dimension of their lives—class, gender, race, or sexuality; no, we must explore their lives in their full complexity, examining how these various dimensions come together and structure their existence. When we speak of racial domination, then, we always must bear in mind the ways in which it interacts with masculine domination (or sexism), heterosexual domination (or homophobia), class domination (poverty), religious persecution, disadvantages brought on by disabilities, and so forth.³³

In addition, we should not assume that one kind of oppression is more important than another or that being advantaged in one dimension of life somehow cancels out other dimensions that often result in disadvantage. Although it is true that poor whites experience many of the same hardships as poor blacks, it is not true that poverty somehow de-whitens poor whites. In other words, although they are in a similarly precarious economic position as poor blacks, poor whites still experience race-based privileges, while poor blacks are oppressed not only by poverty but also by racism. In a similar vein, well-off people of color cannot “buy” their way out of racism. Despite their economic privilege, middle- and upper-class nonwhites experience institutional and interpersonal racism on a regular basis.³⁴

As is suggested by some of our previous examples, people of color, too, can enjoy important societal advantages, whether by dint of economic standing or being straight as opposed to gay or personal attractiveness (beauty capital or erotic capital) or any number of other considerations. This is yet another reason why critical thinking is crucial not only for whites in our society but for nonwhites as well.

But how, exactly, should we conceptualize these intersectional modes of domination? Many scholars have grappled with this question, and we do so here, if only in the most provisional way.³⁵ The notion of intersectionality is perhaps as old as the social problems of racial, masculine, and class domination, but in recent memory it has been popularized by activists who criticized the feminist and civil rights movements for ignoring the unique struggles of women of color. The term itself is credited to critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, who imagined society as divided every which way by multiple forms of inequality.³⁶ In Crenshaw’s view, society resembles an intricate system of crisscrossing roads, each representing a different social identity (e.g., race, gender, class, religion, age). Your unique social position (or structural location) is identified by listing all the attributes of your social identity and then pinpointing the nexus (or intersection) at which all those attributes converge. This conception of intersectionality has been the dominant one for many years, leading scholars to understand overlapping modes of oppression as a kind of “matrix of domination.”³⁷

Recently, however, scholars have criticized this way of thinking about intersectionality, claiming it reproduces, in minimized form, the very essentialist reasoning it sought to dismantle.³⁸ When scholars divide racial groups into a set number of classes, genders, sexualities, and so forth, the end result is not a critique of essentialism, but a new, softer kind of essentialism. A better metaphor for intersecting modes of oppression might be not crisscrossing roads, but a web of relations within which struggles over opportunities, power, and privileges take place.³⁹ One implication of this new theoretical development is the realization that racial domination is deeply implicated in the perpetuation of other forms of domination—and vice versa. Systems of domination, in other words, are mutually reinforcing: to flourish, each system relies on the logic and ramifications of others. Dissecting the details of this process—uncovering, for example, precisely how racial domination supports and is supported by masculine domination—is crucial for developing effective strategies to combat all kinds of social suffering. The result of intersectional thinking, in other words, should not only be a picture of your complex identity, however important that may be; it also should entail a thorough understanding of the ways in which intertwined modes of domination rely on one another for survival.