“It is hypocritical to hear the democrat leadership calling for unity, after calling Trump’s supporters racists, xenophobic, misogynists, just to mention a few. It is either the Trump supporters are legitimately racists and you shouldn’t want them on your team or the democrats and their media cronies lied and Trump supporters shouldn’t want to be on the democrat’s team…”
The above was a comment on FB. Let’s ignore the polarized thinking for now. I chose to quote this comment because it illustrates the way white American people think of “racists”. Racists are BAD PEOPLE and, as bad people, you shouldn’t want anything to do with them.
The word racist brings to the minds of most white Americans the image of a white man in a white hood, red faced with rage and chin slick with spittle as he spews epithets and hatred, under the glow of a burning cross. This is one of the reasons that being accused of racism induces such an extreme reaction. It both elevates the Klan and allows most Americans to distant ourselves from our own bigotry.
This misassociation (not a word according to my spellcheck but it should be) is why a white American may admit that their friend or family member thinks racist things, believes racist things, says racist things, and even does racist things but will balk at the thought that this person is an actual racist.
In fact, the way that many people react to the word racist one would be excused for thinking that being called a racist is worse than the racism itself.
The Klan wasn’t just weaponized words and threats. They didn’t just burn crosses. They burned churches and homes, businesses and towns. Often with people still inside of them. They pulled pregnant women out of their homes, hanged them from trees, and cut open their swollen bellies. Then they posed and made postcards of the scenes.
Most modern racists are not the Klan. Most racists in the past were not the Klan.
But here’s the thing. To believe that the American system is a just meritocracy is to believe in the supremacy of whiteness. To believe in white supremacy is a form of racism. That does not make someone a BAD PERSON.
At some point in my relationship with most white people, especially in the US, there is a time when they reveal that they think I am at least other and, more often than not, less than. Maybe not me, personally. Perhaps. But people who look like me.
These aren’t BAD PEOPLE. They don’t carry hate in their hearts. Some of them call me friend. And one or two, I call friend in return. (I know. It’s complicated.)
On May 18th, 2021 in the New York Times there was an article about a small town in Wisconsin. In the town there was a debate about using the phrase “A Community for All” as a town motto. The debate quickly escalated. Eleven-year board member and retired farmer Arnold Schlei claimed in an interview, “They’re creating strife between people labeling us as racist and privileged because we’re white.” In the words of another board member, “…acknowledging racial disparities is itself a form of racism.” The local Republican Party chairman, Jack Hoogendyk, is quoted as saying a commitment to a “community for all” would lead to “the end of private property” and “race-based redistribution of wealth.” As if we don’t already have a race-based distribution of wealth.
The article goes on to say that:
“To older conservative white residents, there hadn’t been any tension over diversity and inclusion in central Wisconsin until the past few years, when a handful of young progressive people of color won county board seats and began demanding more input.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/us/politics/race-inclusion-wasau-wisconsin.html
In America we still live in a world in which whiteness is not only best, it’s normal. That’s what makes it so insidious. Makes it so easy to colorblind ourselves. Whiteness and its place in our society is so normalized it is unquestioned. To question it makes people, white people, uncomfortable. They feel accused. And they will push back. Because if they question it, they will realize they live in a white supremacist patriarchy and with that realization comes a choice.
I don’t blame white people for being unquestioning. I’m Black and it took me years to question the showing of reverence for Confederate traitors. It wasn’t until college that I noticed that plantation guides rarely referred to the enslaved workers that made plantation life possible. When they did, they called them “servants”. It is rarely pointed out that all of the states were slave states when the Founders made the 3/5ths compromise. A professor was the first to call what we did to the native peoples genocide. Until university the Gone with the Wind John Wayne version of our nation’s history is what I was taught in school. It is the world in which I was raised. This was my normal.
Everything in the Wisconsin article is, in part, the result of this kind of thinking. These kind of “I don’t see race.” policies and attitudes that too often mean “I refuse to see racism.”
These aren’t bad people. Neither was the high school history teacher who taught me the “Lost Cause” version of the Civil War. Nor were the people who invited me into their home only to have their friend casually drop the ‘N’ word into conversation. Neither was the guy who complained that his company’s focus on diversity, after losing a massive discrimination lawsuit, made it harder for white guys like him to get ahead. But while they may not be colorblind, they are blind.
This blindness is self-inflicted. It is a comforting darkness so that we do not have to see the monster our society has made. It is a blindness that allows us to acknowledge that a friend or family member thinks racist things, believes racist things, says racist things, and even does racist things yet pull back from the idea that said person is, in fact, a racist. It’s a blindness we embrace because we don’t want the people we like, people we love, to be BAD PEOPLE.