IS RACISM PERMANENT? A
Symposium
1711 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 207, Washington DC 20009, 202-387-9887.
Reprinted with permission.
"A note on editorial style: a variety of terms, capitalizations, and punctuations referring to racial and ethnic groups are to be found in our pages. Be assured that this is not a function of editorial slovenliness; rather, given evolving terminology and the politics/emotions/history underlying each writer's preferred style, we just decided to play it as it lays."
We asked a sample of PRRAC Board members, Social Science Advisory Board members and grantees to submit short essays, to respond to the position&emdash;put forth by Derrick Ben Richard Delgado, Charles Washington, John Calmore and others, in various forms, and buttressed by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's recent research on "American apartheid" that racism is a permanent, non-eradicable feature of American life; and to provide some personal insight into what keeps them going in their anti-racism work, given the depressing, and probably deteriorating, state of race relations in the United States.
R. Jay Allain S. M. Miller Ron Mincy Leslye Orloff Jose' Padilla
I think the term "permanent racism" is unacceptable, not because I disagree with the assertion that racial inequality is a persistent feature of U.S. society, but because the choice of words makes racial injustice appear immutable and the goal of meaningful progressive social change appear unachievable. My reading of U.S. history, and an understanding of my family's past, tell me that this implied pessimism is unwarranted.
We as a society have come a long way from the days when one of my great granduncles and my grandfathers were prohibited from raising their children in this country because of their race, thus forcing them to commute over the Pacific Ocean to see their families once every few years. My maternal grandfather had the courage to attempt to bring his wife and children to Boston, but federal officials promptly deported him for his effort, thus ending a journey to the United States that had started in Mexico and with an illegal crossing of the Rio Grande River with the help of an African American, whose name unfortunately has been lost to our family. My parents immigrated using false documents, and we the children told outsiders that a family friend who had provided the papers was our father. I still recall the nights my mother cried during the early 1960s when the U.S. government went after the "illegals" in Chinatown(s). Their problems were not limited to the fear of being expelled. My father was deeply disappointed when he could not buy a simple home in a moderate-income neighborhood because he was not white. Urban decay and later urban renewal were destroying our Chinatown and the surrounding minority neighborhood in Sacramento. One of the few areas where my parents could relocate was "tipping" from white to black - that neighborhood became our home for most of my childhood.
This family history, which is also U.S. History, tells me that progress is possible, thus enabling me to find purpose in my anti-racism work. Despite the persistence of racial discrimination, each successive generation encountered a less formidable form of racism, and this progress was made possible by reforms won by earlier activists. I see my work not in terms of changing the world today or tomorrow, but as part of a multigenerational struggle. My expectations are tempered by this sense of history and by the understanding that one must fight mightily for small gains. I am not, however, so naive to believe that change is simply linear and that racism can be eliminated. There are tremendous institutional forces and economic interests that maintain and reproduce racial inequality. I accept that we will suffer minor and major setbacks.
One final note. As I implied above, I believe that the nature of racial injustice changes from one historical period to another. Our generation faces a racism that is incredibly complex in a racially pluralistic urban setting such as Los Angeles. The confounding effects of ethnicity and disparate class standing have made it exceedingly difficult to formulate effective strategies. One major challenge is to develop a more precise understanding of what we are fighting.
Paul Ong, a member of PRRAC's Social Science Advisory Board, teaches at UCLA's Grad. School of Architecture and Urban Planning
There is a growing sense within the minority community that the condition of African Americans has not improved and, worse still, that it will not get any better. An increasing number of minority thinkers voice this sentiment. Indeed one scholar, whom I greatly respect, has not only stated that racism is a permanent fixture on the American landscape, but that equality itself does not produce real change, and instead causes despair. While these sentiments are understandable, especially given the declining living conditions of African Americans, they are wrong and dangerous.
Regardless of the difficulty in defining that racial baseline and comparing the African-American circumstance during two different periods of time, one would have to ignore history to assert that the conditions and status of blacks in America have not improved since slavery. This should not be our central focus, though. The more important point we must consider is to what extent we can reasonably expect to affect the future living conditions of blacks and what role equality will play in realizing that change.
Racial subordination and racial hostility still pervade American society. Yet many people, including powerful members of the courts and the political structure, suggest that racial equality has already been achieved. How is it that society can look at the condition of blacks, some seeing racial equality, others seeing racial inequality? One reason is that many people are not aware of the racial disparity. If they see disparity at all, they see economic disparity that just happens to disproportionately affect blacks.
Another reason hinges on the way we think about equality. Many people believe that inequality is determined by formal laws and intentional individual practices. The removal of explicit racial barriers during the Civil Rights era, such as laws prohibiting blacks from living in certain neighborhoods or going to certain schools, engendered a belief that the vast majority of racial inequality had been corrected because of the advance in the level of formal equality. However, while some blacks clearly benefited from this change, a substantial number did not. Indeed, most blacks continued to go to segregated schools and live in segregated neighborhoods. This was not by choice.
This phenomenon calls into question the role of equality and equality rhetoric in changing or maintaining the racial status quo. Conditions in many of the de facto apartheid schools and segregated neighborhoods are as bad, if not worse, than the conditions before the Civil Rights movement. But it is not equality per se we need to move beyond; rather, it is the pursuit of formal equality we should put aside. We must still focus on real equality by concentrating on the underlying conditions and causes of racial disparity. The goal of the Civil Rights movement was not simply to repeal racist laws but to end actual racial subordination. Clearly, removing racist laws was not part of the effort. It is the struggle for actual equality, substantive equality, that remains.
Certainly, the African-American condition has improved since slavery. This is little cause to celebrate, though. The struggle for the majority of African Americans remains to be fought. The problem is not simply equality, and certainly not substantive equality, but the more subtle, structural barriers that continue to maintain racial disparity. It is the condition of African Americans and racism that causes despair. It is that removal that must be our goal. Equality is not just an empty ideal; it is a social and human imperative. It must be part of us and part of our future. Will this struggle be won? Who knows? This future is not something to be discovered; it is to be made.
John Powell, a PRRAC Board member, just joined the faculty of the Univ. of Minn. Law School; until recently, he was National Legal Director for the ACLU in NYC.
Watching children chained to each other in Chicago's Juvenile Court causes me to think of Derrick Bell.
The racialized image of bondage, slavery and chain gangs evoked by the passage of these youths is unavoidable. Yet hundreds of committed employees carry on each day, undismayed by this silent assault on the dignity of children. I hear Professor Bell whisper to me when I rage at this treatment of young men, whisper that I've focused on symbol rather than substance. Surely, Bell would point out, even unchained these young people would be arrested, detained and adjudicated in heartbreaking disproportion; 80% of the youth in detention are African-American and 10% are Hispanic, in a country where 64% of the juveniles are white. Entry into the juvenile justice system is in large part racially defined, and foretells an impoverished future. This year, nearly half of all African-American children are born into poverty, and Blacks are three times as likely as whites to be poor.
The causes of this overrepresentation of children of color in juvenile court are multiple and intertwined, but the machinery and message of racism permeates the apparatus. These youths are disposable, dangerous and doomed. Another, private, system operates for white youth. The public pretends that the solutions are mysterious or expensive, but our own children have access to the schools, health care, security and dreams that all youth deserve. These children are denied.
By placing the permanence of racism squarely in the frame, Bell calls not for acceptance but for resistance as an existential act, consciously determined, based neither on sentiment nor victory, but taken nonetheless as ethical "makers-of-meaning." This notion involves creating a public space by acting, by imagining racial equality, by forging an engaged citizenry based on "committed living." Poet/ author bell hooks tells her students, "If you can't imagine something, it can't come into being." Derrick Bell insists that we acknowledge the impossibility yet act through conviction - what the South African revolutionaries call "tunnelling from both ends."
Cornel West notes that "the notion that we are all part of one garment of destiny is discredited.... There is no escape from our interracial interdependence, yet enforced racial hierarchy dooms us as a nation to collective paranoia and hysteria - the unmaking of any democratic order." For white people, resistance includes disrupting the "taken-or-granted" and the "care-less-ness" of privilege. It requires humility, acceptance of inadequacy and doses of good humor.
At the end of the 1990s, described best by W.E.B. DuBois as a century defined by "the issue of the color line," my world view based on certain understandings of racism, sexism and imperialism seems inadequate. How to understand the mass cultures of religious fundamentalism, endemic violence or the collapse of highly unsatisfactory socialism? Increasingly, I choose based on a stubborn sense of allying with the oppressed, identifying with the "other": what Toni Morrison calls "entering what one is estranged from." I fight for strategy and vision, but no longer insist that there is a rational fit.
I work with and for children because they require "futuring" - thinking beyond the bottom line and next year's election. They mirror back to us our failures and limitations, and our small, ragged mortality. The honest observations of my three sons spur me to chart the unsettling course of who I am. They spotlight the multiple hypocrisies. They tease me for obsessing about the paradigm of race in sports, music and film and for choosing sides correspondingly. They watch.
Happily, I write these reflections from South Africa, from a conference considering juvenile justice for the new government that will emerge from next April's elections. Here children rage in the townships, are incarcerated in adult prisons and live on the streets. They also attend school, rallies and work to support their families. Here fear and hope mingle in abundance and long-held dreams are being struck into realistic tools. The contrast with our diminishing hope in U.S. is agonizing.
James Baldwin wrote (in The Fire Next Time): "To be sensual . . . is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, or life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread." Yes.
Bernardine Dohrn, a PRRAC grantee, directs the Center for Juvenile Law of Northwestern Univ. Law School.
If anyone needs convincing about the permanent nature of racism, I recommend a visit to Blakely, Georgia. Located a 3 1 /2-hour drive south of Atlanta, this small, rural community distinguished itself by allowing its fire department to be run by the Ku Klux Klan. The fire chief told coworkers that fires in the black community "beautify the neighborhood."
Until recently, Blakely's African American community - which comprises fully half the town's population - had been completely disenfranchised by decades of segregation and at-large voting. It took a federal voting rights lawsuit to force the city council to create single member districts. Further courageous organizing by a handful of black activists helped ensure an end to more than 100 years of all-white government.
Blakely's school board is still chosen in secret by an anonymous grand jury, a practice that continues in 19 Georgia counties. The result is that although the school system is majority-black, only one person on the five-member board is African American.
Cross burnings were frequent in the town and surrounding county. The targets were usually white families who socialized with blacks. The local police chief refused to investigate.
In 1990 and 1991, I made that 3 1/2 hour trip more times than I care to remember. On one of those visits, I interviewed Charles Weatherford, the regional Klan organizer. Dissatisfied with the administration of the local Klavern, he was eager to spill the beans on the fire chief. Weatherford's disclosures - and those of other Klansmen who were similarly coaxed and cajoled into talking-laid the groundwork for yet another federal civil rights lawsuit.
After the town spent nearly $50,000 in legal fees to defend itself and its racist fire chief, the suit was settled and all three Klan firefighters were dismissed. The lawsuit sparked an FBI investigation, indictments followed, and Weatherford and several of his compatriots earned felony convictions.
I had the luxury of leaving Blakely before sundown, but for millions of people of color who must endure racism's debilitating and oftentimes deadly effects, there is no escape. And, unlike Blakely, their struggles usually do not reach the federal courts, the pages of the New York Times, or network television.
While white social scientists, conservatives, politicians and media pundits debate to what extent-and sometimes even whether - racism exists, more than half their fellow citizens remain convinced that blacks breed crime, prefer welfare to hard work and are less patriotic than whites, according to the National Opinion Research Center. Numerous other objective indicators of racism exist, measuring everything from discrimination in housing and employment to car purchases and bank loans.
Racism must be fought because it - like anti-Semitism, homophobia and sexism - is inherently unjust and destroys both human potential and lives. These evils must also be challenged to preserve what humanity remains in all of us. The soul of a nation - and those of its citizens - is as much defined by the permanence of racism as by the struggle against it.
Daniel Levitas, a PRRAC grantee, was until recently Executive Director of the Center for Democratic Renewal in Atlanta.
In his 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well, Derrick Bell posited a provocative thesis:
Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary 'peaks of progress,' short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance.
Other civil rights advocates have expressed similar views. Robert Carter, a veteran civil rights lawyer and later federal district court judge, once said that the pioneer civil rights leaders thought that racial segregation was the disease. Once the civil rights movement eliminated the segregation, the society would achieve racial equality for the African American people. Instead, the leaders discovered that the segregation was only the symptom, and White racism was the disease. Still further, Kenneth B. Clark, a brilliant psychologist who conducted the studies concerning the adverse impact of segregated education on the learning abilities of Black children, recently lamented (see his contribution in Race In America: The Struggle for Equality, Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr., eds., 1993):
Reluctantly, I am forced to face the likely possibility that the United States will never rid itself of racism and reach true integration. I look back and shudder at how naive we all were in our belief in the steady progress racial minorities would make through programs of litigation and education, and while I very much hope for the emergence of a revived civil rights movement with innovative programs and educated leaders, I am forced to recognize that my life has, in fact, been a series of glorious defeats.
I agree with the thoughts of these civil rights activists about the "permanence of racism" in America. The conditions of White racism remain the same, but some of the underlying assumptions may have changed.
The traditional civil rights ideology was founded on the unstated assumption that human beings are equal in the eyes of God - the same; and that human nature unites us all in a common essence. Together we will, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, reach the "promised land" of racial equality. The permanence of racism thesis attacks that "sameness" theory. Black feminists have stood up to say, "I am not the same as you and do not speak for me." This movement, dubbed anti-essentialism, suggests that no essence unites us as human beings. Rather, we are all individuals leading the attack with unique experiences that can neither be classified nor categorized. (For example, the Black lesbian faces a dilemma about which civil rights organizations to join. Should she join NOW, led by White women, or the NAACP led by Black men, or ACT-UP led by gay and lesbian White people?) Anti-essentialists argue that unity must be built more by realistic connections, instead of relying on abstract and unreal notions of a common essence.
Similarly, the permanence of racism thesis criticizes the idea that most White people in America will grant Black people equal rights. In fact, according to Bell, African Americans advanced socially, politically and economically when the particular principle appealed to White Americans' self-interest. This means that people of color cannot rely on the majority of White people for a shared commonality of all human beings for equal treatment.
The permanence of racism thesis exposes the idealist aspects that racial integration will lead to equality. Today, many commentators cite the failure of the civil rights movement in the past forty years to fully reach the promises and hopes of Brown v. Board of Education for racial integration and equality. While the goal that racial integration will lead to greater equality remains paramount, the reality of not achieving significant progress anytime soon more accurately reflects the nature of the struggle. To match racism's resolve of perpetuation, the anti-racist forces must unite with equal strength of resistance. In her recent book Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker says that for African American people, "Resistance is the secret of joy." The battle against the permanence of racism will never end. Therefore society must continue to study racism and devise new strategies to combat it.
I recall a personal experience when I was a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi involving an old Black woman in Sunflower County with a fighting spirit like Fannie Lou Hamer. We came out of the federal court house one day after the judge praised the Black people for challenging some obvious vestige of racial segregation, but he denied their request for relief on some seemingly unpersuasive legal technicality. I sought to comfort her with condolences about the case that the people had lost. She taught me a lesson based on the knowledge that she acquired in life rather than by formal schooling. I never forgot. When she insisted that they had won, I tried to correct her on the legality of the decision, but she interrupted. She said they won because the Black people had the White people in town very scared about the potential impact of a favorable decision for them. True, everyone knew the White people were extremely concerned about a major change in the political relations with Black people. I thought to myself, how could this Black lady think that they had won? Then she said, "Lawyer Brittain, I just lives to upset these White folks and today we upset them."
Hence, the permanence of racism theory means that this work will never end, only the battle fronts and tactics change.
John Brittain, a PRRAC grantee, is a Professor of Law at the Univ. of Conn. School of Law and is immediate past President of the National Lawyers Guild. Marykate O'Neil, a third-year law student, contributed to the research and writing of this article.
The durability of racism is inescapable. The charge of its permanence is too scary; I don't like acting- and living - with such little hope. "Bearing witness" is a much more difficult stance than activism that emerges from the belief that our efforts will produce significant change. Can emotional hope and hard-headed analysis be reconciled?
Racism's durability does not imply fixity. Racism waxes and (somewhat) wanes; it plays out and through many stages and forms. Today, awareness of the great advances that were made on many fronts in the 60s and 70s is overwhelmed by evidence of the terrible poverty of black children, the internalized violence of many poor African-American communities, and the political unwillingness to combat residential and job segregation, to invest in black children or to offer remedies other than prison for crime and violence.
Could racism's durability have been expected? (My focus is primarily on institutional racism, not racism as personal attitude). In any process of social reform to improve the circumstances of those at the bottom, the inevitable tendency is to cream, to deal with the better off of those who suffer poverty and discrimination. They are easier to deal with; the promises of "success" are greater and costs are limited; the route to their achievement requires at most only somewhat bending the rules rather than profoundly changing them; their success presumably encourages those left behind to move in the same way; and their advance is likely to dilute pressures for deeper changes. Individual mobility, frequently sponsored by some person or institution in the mainstream world, is the model: others should tread in the path that has been established for what might be called (updating W.E.B. DuBois) the talented quintile.
Ah, but what happens to those left behind? Are they in the same circumstances to advance as the talented quintile. Are openings still available for them or are educational and employment opportunities scaled to deal with only limited numbers. The non-cream cannot easily move ahead, for deeper changes are needed to make it possible for large numbers to improve their situations. That is expensive in terms of money and privilege. The result of the limited efforts is that African Americans have a much more varied economic situation than ever before. A quarter are doing quite well; another quarter are just getting by. But a half are doing very badly. That and residential segregation are major sources of the feeling of the ineradicability of racism. (The undermining by colleagues of successful blacks is another source.)
Are we at the end of possibilities of improving the situation of those left behind? I don't think so. Some stress the need for structural changes: the opening of employment, housing and other opportunities; others are emphasizing that residents of unstable inner-city communities have to change their behavior. Personal change without structural change is likely to be overwhelmingly defeated, but structural change without behavioral change is likely to have limited appeal. Both are needed - in actuality, in concert.
Racism is durable, but we can move it into less pernicious forms - and even make some progress.
S. M. Miller, a PRRAC Board member, is a Senior Fellow of the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, MA, and a Visiting Professor of Sociology at Boston College.
Despite the progress of African Americans and other minorities in the last three decades, racism remains an enduring feature of American society and, therefore, still requires close attention and action. By racism, I mean the combination of prejudice and power that enables members of one race or ethnic group to oppress another. Today, however, efforts to combat racism should focus increasingly on its institutional forms. The importance of individual racism has been blunted by public attitudes toward race relations, although the resurgence of racially motivated crimes against minorities by groups such as the "skinheads" and majority students on American college campuses suggests a reversal of this trend. Furthermore, changes in law have created formal mechanisms for redress, which at least impose costs on those who commit individual acts of racism. Institutional racism, however, remains a powerful and comparatively untouched barrier to true racial equality in America.
Institutional racism arises when barriers to minority progress become woven into the operating procedures of a variety of institutions that provide or deny opportunity. For example, institutional racism is pervasive in public policy, especially at the federal level in the executive branch. Candidates for top positions in policy analysis and policymaking are very often graduates of our most prestigious universities. If we want the best and most well-trained minds to work on the most pressing national problems, this is sensible strategy. Nevertheless, minorities are underrepresented in our elite universities, and therefore opportunities to serve in top policymaking or policy-analytic positions (and opportunities to serve in positions that enable one to acquire the knowledge, experience, and contacts to qualify for top positions) rarely go to minorities. The result is that policies on a variety of questions from revitalizing urban America, to health care, to environmental racism are developed without the insights and perspectives of minority communities that are deeply affected.
Institutional racism is also deeply rooted in our economy, because of the legacy of individual and institutional racism in business and education, and modern procedures operating in credit markets. The legacy of individual and institutional racism is partly, though not entirely, responsible for low levels of wealth accumulation among minorities, especially African Americans. Without wealth, aspiring African American entrepreneurs must approach credit institutions, which are dominated by members of the majority group, with business proposals offering debt:equity ratios that do not meet prevailing standards of risktaking. Even when equity is not the problem, American banking has adopted procedures that require rates of return far in excess of those used in other countries and in excess of current rates of inflation. As a result, many attempts by minority business people to get loans for their projects are denied.
Because of their low rates of business ownership, African-Americans are rarely in a position to make final employment and contracting decisions that provide real opportunities for other people in our society. Face it: employment discrimination, redlining, opportunities for professional and career advancement for lawyers, engineers, accountants would all be less critical problems if more black people owned a variety of businesses throughout our economy and were able to meet their business needs through informal networks. Until you can come to the table with command over resources, so that there is real interdependence, there is no basis for racial equality. Despite the growing number of minorities in middle and upper management positions in corporate America, most must defer final employment and contracting decisions to supervisors, owners, or stockholders, who are members of the majority group. As long as this situation prevails, minority managers cannot fully exploit informal networks of qualified minorities who need opportunities to hone their skills, build their track records, expand their networks.
Combatting institutional racism will be no easy task. First, the victims of institutional racism are often unable to trace particular procedures to any prejudicial motive. Elite colleges are effective screening mechanisms for the most qualified candidates, and high debt:equity ratios are needed to ensure that a business venture can overcome inevitable fluctuations in the demand for a new product. Second, corrections to institutional racism often require affirmative action solutions, which discriminate against members of the majority group. Finally, procedures that create barriers to minority progress often exist in most organizations in the same industry or field. The would-be reformer must always answer the question: "Why is it appropriate to change our procedures, when our counterparts or competitors are doing business as usual?" This requires reform efforts to be well conceived and articulated, and exposes the reformer to risks that most people would prefer to avoid.
Ultimately, combatting institutional racism represents choices that were not as clear-cut as those made in the battle against individual racism. So often the latter involves the denial of basic rights based upon race, which flies in the face of basic American values. By contrast, the former often involves a competition between historical legacies and contemporary equality. This is more difficult to sort out. For these reasons, critical thinking and strategic action is required to overcome institutional racism. Otherwise, the goal of racial equality of opportunity will remain little more than a hollow and superficial claim.
Ronald B. Mincy was until recently a member of PRRAC's Social Science Advisory Board and has just joined The Ford Foundation as a Program Officer.
The question "Is racism permanent?" resembles a Zen koan, one of those provocative questions the master would pose to the disciple. If the student quickly answered either yes or no, the master would give a brusque reply, signalling that the neophyte had failed to ponder the matter deeply. In our case, while the dominant (white) culture has obviously thought too little about the social costs of racism, the question about its permanence is somewhat absurd. For example, the healer does not fixate on t he prevalence of illness; she heals. A more useful question is, "What must be done to make racism less virulent?" And clearly, while many of us grasp the urgent need for a radical social transformation that would cast racism into "the trash heap of history," the journey will be long and difficult. Let me briefly explore three interrelated social forces that assail us so that we might be more cognizant of them.
First, consider the power of denial - denial that would not only attempt to suppress or rationalize human costs of racism on its victims but would also disavow the very privilege that white receive simply as a function of skin color. The French thinker Simone Weil spoke to the silence of victims when she wrote: "As for those who have been struck by one of those blows that leaves a being struggling on the ground like a half-crushed worm, they have no words to express what is happening to them." As for the others, the perpetrators of racism, most will sincerely state they do not commit racist acts, as if that were enough. They fail to realize that in a society permeated by collective and institutionalized racism, one must actively seek to dismantle its pernicious effects. Denial persists because of the terrifying (to many) insight that to acknowledge racism is to concede one's complicity in its maintenance.
Second, to begin to see racism is to admit the need to act. And, to act is to risk. Yet Erich Fromm has pointed out our societal obsession with security over risk taking, our collective reticence to traverse unfamiliar social terrain. The German theologian Dorothee Solle described the estrangement she experienced as she grew more radicalized in her essay, "Resurrection and Liberation" (in Border Regions of Faith, Kenneth Aman, ed., Orbis Books, 1987):
Neighbors stopped greeting me, and colleagues ceased their chatting when I entered. On the one hand, I became lonelier; on the other hand, my eyes were opened to persons who had been invisible to me before. I learned a new type of relationship based on the common cause.
Each of us must consider then: Am I willing to accept such invalidation? And are we able to nurture the community bonds that will help others to risk such stigmatization? To go forward, we must be able to answer yes wholeheartedly to each question.
Third, and finally, historically we know that animosity between people from different races, social classes and genders increases as the economy has deteriorated. Almost 60 years ago, W.E.B. DuBois wrote of the impact of early capitalism in words that resonate powerfully today: "God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood."
At present the established order has effectively exploited white middle-class fears about the underclass, thus deflecting legitimate rage from itself and subverting the prospects for progressive social change. Yet as the middle class comes to experience the savagery of economic oppression and displacement, a savagery people of color and the poor have known for centuries, the organizing possibilities for the Left may well expand. Rather than maintaining the feeble hope that the floundering economy and ossified political structures will somehow right themselves, we must help create a popular groundswell that insists on accountability and an improved quality of life. This will necessitate forging coalitions and breaking down age-old barriers that have allowed the commonweal to be fractured.
Be assured that the enduring vision of real egalitarianism and power-sharing among all peoples in the United States will not be disseminated through the mass media or mainstream publications. For a livable future, we will increasingly need to look to alternative sources of information - and each other. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." Only we can force power to make concessions.
R. Jay Allain tutors part time in an inner-city high school and is a community activist in Springfield, MA.
As a Jewish woman who grew up in a diverse multi-racial, multi-ethnic community and who has spent her professional career serving those communities, I have come to believe that racism is not an immutable characteristic of American life. Much of my career has been devoted to developing better understanding and bridging gaps between people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. During years of working in organizations that have been striving to become multicultural in their approach and composition, I have come to develop a theory that racism in our society falls along a continuum which applies equally to persons of all backgrounds. The continuum runs from understanding to tolerance to intolerance, from persons who react instinctively to racism against others as if the racism were aimed at them, to persons who are devoutly racist. Where each of us locates her/ himself along the continuum is a function of our experiences with other racial and ethnic groups while we were growing up and our conscious efforts to think about, address and deal with our own racism during our adult lives.
If the ultimate goal of our work as advocates is to improve and enrich the lives of all persons in our society, we must work together in a multi-cultural context to achieve this end. This is true whether the specific goal of our work is to fight racism, improve human rights at home or abroad, help bettered women, reduce poverty, better our environment or improve access to health care. However, our ability to work together effectively is greatly hindered if we fail to recognize that we are all raised with a certain level of racism. Our own racism affects our view of the world and each other. We cannot overcome racism unless we learn to recognize it in ourselves. It is for this reason that the most troubling group on the continuum are people who incorrectly believe they are not racist. For this group of people, what they view as objective and fair is in fact based on racist assumptions that they are unable to identify. If we are to move towards eradicating racism in our society, we must sensitize others to recognize their own racism so that they can move along the continuum toward racial tolerance.
Continuum of Racism
1 2 3 4 5 React instinctively to racism against others Worked to successfully eradicate own racism. Believe they have overcome racism but have not Do not think about racism Are devoutly racist
In the first category of the continuum are a group of persons who have generally been raised or spent a significant portion of their lives living among ethnic and/or racial groups that are different from their own. Many of these persons come from families who permitted and encouraged them to develop childhood friendships across racial and ethnic lines and attended schools that were ethnically diverse. This category generally includes people who were raised in racially and culturally mixed communities and people who moved during childhood from a community or culture where they were part of a racially dominant group to a community where they were members of a distinct minority. Persons who fall into this category on the continuum generally react viscerally when they experience racism against others as if it were racism aimed at themselves. For this group of persons, racially biased thoughts against groups of persons with whom they were raised or have close ties, rarely, if ever, enter their consciousness.
The second category is composed of many enlightened persons who have worked to overcome racism. This is the category that encompasses most progressives, activists and civil rights advocates. These are people who have worked to recognize that we have all grown up with our own racism. They have looked inward to identify their own racial biases, and taken what they have learned about themselves and used it to work towards eradicating racism in our society. They have developed friendships and close working relationships in their lives with persons of diverse backgrounds and have strived consciously to learn about other people and other cultures so that all of us may better understand each other. People in this category have taken concrete steps to remove racism and racially biased actions from their lives, their work, and from the messages that they pass on to their children. It may be that persons in this category will occasionally think about making statements or undertaking actions that may be be perceived by others to be racist, but because they have educated themselves about racism and worked to overcome it, they are able to recognize the racism in these thoughts and do not act on or articulate them. In time, as people become more attuned to racism, these thoughts cease to come to mind. If most people could strive for and successfully address their own racial biases in the manner that people in this category have, we as a society would make great strides toward eradicating if not all racism, practically all of the manifestations of racism that so dramatically affect and impede our lives.
The third category on the continuum is the most difficult to address and in some ways, for those of us committed to building positive relations among racial and ethnic groups in this country, the most destructive. This category is made up of people who understand that it is politically incorrect to be racist and who fervently believe they are not racist. Although they believe they are not racist, they have been unwilling or unable to identify and address their own racism and therefore, despite their intellectual protestations, they repeatedly make statements and undertake actions that are based on racism assumptions. Persons in this group will think a racist thought and express it even in a multi-ethnic context and will be completely unaware they have done so. They will fail to comprehend the racism in their statement or action and will become defensive when challenged. This defensiveness will in turn prevent them from identifying or addressing their own racism.
I have worked with multi-ethnic boards and staff in numerous organizations where the actions of this group of persons have significantly undermined the ability of others to further common goals as a multi-cultural whole and to approach our work in a manner that addresses the needs of all constituencies and is infused with the rich flavor imbued by our diversity. Persons in this category need to become open to learning and not be ashamed to admit and identify their own racism. They must accept and not be threatened by the fact that if we are to end racism and work in a multi-cultural environment, each of us must recognize her/his own unique strengths. Those strengths are to some extent related to the racial and ethnic background we each bring to our work. Those strengths are also related to the unique role each of us can play in a society that has not yet addressed its racism. Some persons, because of their own life experiences or because of our present society's attitude toward them, may be more effective than others in carrying out certain portions of our work. If we approach our work with an understanding of our own strengths and limitations and a willingness to recognize and create room for the strengths others bring to our work, we can exponentially improve the quality of our work.
We cannot overcome racism unless we learn to recognize it in ourselves . . . We must be willing to relinquish control, share responsibility with and value the unique contributions of others.
The fourth category contains persons who have made no effort to address or think about their racism. Many are well-meaning and do not necessarily intend to perpetrate racism. They were born, raised and have continued to live their entire lives in communities where racist assumptions are prevalent and go unchallenged. As adults they arrange their lives so that they have little or no contact with people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds. When their life experiences bring them into contact with persons from diverse backgrounds they may begin to challenge the racist assumptions they have always accepted as true. Thus, it is incumbent upon all of us to encourage multi-culturalism not only in our work but in our public schools, in PTAs, in our places of worship, and within groups working at a community level to solve problems facing our communities.
In the fifth category on the continuum are persons who are devoutly racist and make no pretense to hide their racism. While changing attitudes of persons in this category may be impossible, their willingness to openly express their views may be constrained in a society where racist attitudes are not socially acceptable. We may, however, be able to interfere with their ability to pass unfettered racist attitudes on to their children by developing school-based programs aimed at fostering understanding and cooperation between children from diverse backgrounds.
It is important as well for us to keep in mind, as we strive to develop organizations that undertake work aimed at the betterment of the human experience for all in this country and around the world, that we cannot stop with creating organizations and boards that are multi-racial and multi-cultural. Our ultimate goal must not be to achieve equality in numbers alone. Diversity in our workplace, on our boards and in our communities is only a significant step toward achieving a rich multi-cultural society in which the cultures, life experiences and needs of all are addressed, respected and valued equally. As we work together in organizations striving to achieve these goals, we must remain aware that the functioning of our workplaces and organizations will change. The organizational models and styles of operation for many of our institutions were developed in an era when white males predominated the board rooms of even our most progressive institutions. If we are to succeed in our struggle to eradicate racism and achieve multi-culturalism, we must change the way we think about our lives and our work and must be open to experimenting with, developing and adopting approaches that incorporate the world view and life experiences of persons from diverse backgrounds. This work will require each of us to address our own racism and identify the unique contributions we can each make to our struggle. We must also be willing to relinquish control, share responsibility with and value the unique contributions that others will make in our struggle to achieve a multi-cultural society.
Leslye E. Orloff, a PRRAC grantee, is founder of the domestic violence program and presently the Director of Program Development at Ayuda, a community-based legal services program in Washington, D. C., that serves immigrant and refugee battered women and children.
Early on, I believed that were we to rid the world of railroad tracks, "racism" would disappear. The daily crossing to "the other side of town" to receive a Catholic schooling was an education in itself. I failed to understand "racism" upon graduating from middle school, when my mother offered her prophetic wisdom that my white Catholic school friends would abandon me for other "social circles" at the mixed public high school. I also failed to understand "racism" when I learned that perfect grades and bilingual skill were secondary to being "too Mexican" and that the latter foreclosed for me the honor of representing this country through the foreign exchange program that was sending a student from my high school to Costa Rica.
Then a civil rights problem walked onto our high school campus in 1969 when the Chicano students decided to wear ethnic buttons that called for "liberation." At that moment, the white-on-brown near riot was an invisible line separating brown teenagers from white teenagers, both enraged because the previously unspoken differences between them were now expressed openly in the words on yellow-brown buttons. Then the following June I let go of the naive "railroad track" theory just before college, when the mother of a white friend reminded me that it was not the grades that got me (and not her daughter) into the prestigious university, but rather "race."
I repeat this personal racial sojourn from rural youth to mid-life because its reflection persists today in the larger society. Twenty-some years later, I continue to sense the evolution of my race education, with its increasing complexity that mixes not only class and race, but race and nationalism and (new to me) nationalism and the indigenous factor. The latter is evidenced when even our own Latino folk differentiate based on language and darker pigmentation, and thereby mistreat fellow Mexican citizen farmworkers of indigenous physiognomy.
In my youth, the poverty factor confused the issue because the rural tracks didn't keep just Mexicans on their side, but poor Mexican and poor black families. Although it was true that the social circles at the high school were largely richer kids hanging around with each other, other circles mixed and masked the race "thing" on the athletic field, in the college-prep classes, in student body governance, and even in limited interracial dating.
I have concluded that as long as differences exist between people of like-being and near-being, the potential for "racism" will always exist, through which the supposed superiority of one racial or nationality group suborns another. Concurrently, other "isms" (e.g., sex/gender, class) will play roles that accomplish the same end. In this society, as long as there are wealth differences and the concurrent possibility and reality of economic mobility to get nearer the ceiling, "racism" will feed healthily within various classes because of competition for limited opportunities.
As to solution, laws might help get people of color near the ceiling. But while laws may force us into legal tolerance, they do not necessarily achieve "love of neighbor." Marriage might get some near the appropriate power or social circles, as may being "middle class" or prestigiously schooled. On the edges, however, raw hatred will characterize "racism." An "edge" is where white-on-black violence sets the black man afire and where black-on-white violence bashes a truck driver senseless on the pavement. But as long as the dominant economic and political culture is "white," that second expression of hatred isn't "racism," but pure brutishness, justifiable to some perpetrators as a residual from a race-driven society. Five generations hence, the same hatred might be called "whitism," when the victim pleads to humans of color running the country with similar subordination.
Moreover, other edges exist today where racial competition leaves little room for sharing of the bone: for example, where racial candidates compete for the limited political, corporate, or governmental presence and advantage. Is this "racism" or simply "racial politics?"
And I add another edge: where the immigration dynamic meets racial difference. At a recent academic debate on immigrant-bashing, an enraged Latina advocate called the root cause of immigrant hatred "racism." It is in that context that some Latino advocates try to understand the ethnic-racial factor of white-on-brown-and-yellow or black-on-brown-and-yellow anti-immigrant sentiment. We ask, why isn't anti-immigrant sentiment "racism?" Can we easily distinguish that sentiment from racism because the persons of color are "illegal?"
The immigrant history of the nation indicates that hatred expressed as anti immigrant sentiment varies in the cycle only with the nationalism, color or religion of the victim. Although the oppressive treatment of immigrants may not always be labeled "racism," immigrant history argues that hatred against immigrants has persisted.
The two centuries of African-American oppression following the forced emigration into slavery is a historical fact different from the Mejicano or Native-American experience as victims of conquest by warring. Yet the quality of the racial oppression experienced by different ethnic groups is not dissimilar. With African Americans we share the mistreatment due to color. With our Native-American brethren we share mistreatment due to color and language. With our Asian brethren we share these, adding immigrant status.
From this view, the necessity for the nation to feed its economic needs and democratic tradition with immigrants would argue for the persistence of racism. Immigrants of color will enter at the bottom of the economic ladder. They will compete with the poor of this country, and their accentuated differences (e.g., color and nationality) will breed contempt.
The solution will be in an intergenerational struggle evolving to end the injustices and intolerance of "isms" and to create the justices of cultural pluralism. A few generations hence, the tolerant will govern and dominate the debate, having overcome the intolerant citizen voicing the undercurrent of hatred. Only if a cultural leadership existed that learned to communicate across ethnic lines and to mediate across the multi-lingual obstacles will "racism" have been defeated and left to the racial economics of our time. Then we shall all be rich. We shall all be poor. But we shall "have the grace to look up and out/ And into your sister's eyes/ And into your brother's face/ And say . . . With hope - Good morning." (Maya Angelou).
Jose' Padilla, a PRRA C Board member, is Executive Director of California Rural Legal Assistance.
R. Jay Allain S. M. Miller Ron Mincy Leslye Orloff Jose' Padilla
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