What We Talk About When We Talk About Race, by David L. Moore

 

“I'm not racist. I believe in racial equality.”

“By claiming you're not racist in this society, you prove that you're racist.”

“You're racist by automatically branding me as racist.”

“You don't understand racism!”

“Race-baiter!”

“Racist!”

What is going on here?

What is going on when progressive communities split along racial lines over racial diversity issues? This pattern beset the feminist community in the last generation, it continues to beset the environmentalist community today, and it besets the Pacifica community as well.

An underlying problem in so many conversations, negotiations, miscommunications, disputations, confrontations, etc., about race and racism in America is that there are two different definitions of racism. Our words come across or rather that word, racism, comes across in different ways depending on which definition the speaker or the listener is using. Plus, the different definitions offer quite different (though ultimately complementary) complications and solutions.

• Definition 1: Racism is an individual prejudice that groups other people by the color of their skin.
• Definition 2: Racism is a social construction that privileges some groups and deprivileges other groups by the color of their skin.
• Complication 1: If racism is an individual prejudice, then individuals can choose to be racist or not according to the first definition.
• Complication 2: If racism is a social construction, then individuals cannot choose to be racist or not according to the second definition.
• Solution 1: If racism is an individual prejudice, then individual self-improvement becomes the solution.
• Solution 2: If racism is a social construction, then social rebuilding becomes the solution.
• Resolution of 1 & 2: Racism is an individual prejudice built on a history of social constructions along racial lines; i.e., racism is a socially constructed individual prejudice that is built into cultural institutions and mechanisms. Resolving race issues involves both approaches: 1) individual self-improvement through personal effort with friends, family, workshops, and other forums for self-reflection; plus 2) social rebuilding through public efforts in legal, economic, educational, religious, and other social structures.

Thus most impasses over racial prejudice are locked around a chicken-egg dilemma. Is racism first an individual choice? Or is it a social system that drives individual choices? This is an unanswerable question, a paradox, with roots in ancient philosophical questions about free will versus predestination, about nature versus nurture, etc.

Rather than insist on one theoretical side or the other in that paradox, we can operate practically by accepting both parallel processes — individual will and political will to address racism in both our psyches and our laws.

A problem in anti-racism workshops is that those who operate by the first definition feel that they are being targeted and blamed individually, while those who operate by the second definition feel that they are not implicated individually, because itís a social problem.

Another problem is that none of us is ever going to see a racism-free society in our lifetime operating by both definitions. We are not individually going to be totally free of individual prejudice, though we can become conscious of it and develop ways to reduce it. And we are not socially going to be totally free of institutional racism.

A further problem in communication over racism is the spiraling dynamics of guilt and blame. Whites have to get to the place where they accept their own individual racist tendencies (for instance, automatic assumptions of their own superiority) built socially on white privilege, and resolve to confront those tendencies in themselves, rather than wallowing in either denial or self-flagellation. People of color have to get to the place where they accept their own individual prejudices (for instance, automatic assumptions that whites are ignorant, and a harder one impatience) built socially on disenfranchisement, and resolve to confront those tendencies in themselves.

Such individual efforts need to run parallel with the social strategizing that would address Definition 2. Social strategies involve democratic reform in many specific directions.

Pacifica Radio is in a unique position to promote the kind of resolution that would address both definitions of racism.

We need workshops and radio forums that address both the individual and the social dimensions, that offer both self-examination and social strategizing. Call them Race Unity Workshops, or Racial Healing Workshops.

Then there is simply the level of information, where so many whites need to know the statistics on underrepresentation of people of color in virtually every institutional arena in this society. The legacies of slavery and conquest are not past. Affirmative action has not achieved its goals.

[Note parallels with gender issues:]

To clarify the stakes of the opening dialogue, consider translating it into issues of sexism. Imagine if the first speaker said, "I'm not sexist. I love women." That individual's choice might be clear to himself, but he does not see his own social positioning.

[Note parallels with class issues:]

Note also that complications of class enter in. In a sense these are complications of "The American Dream" that tells people that if you work hard and play fair, you will succeed.

Whites who have felt underprivileged due to lower class status may have a hard time accepting that they have been the beneficiaries of white privilege. They are bitter about the American Dream. Then there are the formerly lower-class whites who have worked hard for their success and now believe entirely in individual initiative, disavowing social remedies. They believe the American Dream. Further, there are many upper-class whites who have felt genuine suffering or loss in their personal lives, and who are thus not willing to consider their own white privilege. They never had to dream the American Dream.

One conversation that might open up such blocks in white perspectives is the notion of the ladder of color and gender, where within communities of color, there are powerful and unspoken obstacles to status depending on the darkness of oneís skin and whether one is male or female. Many whites are simply as unaware of such dynamics within communities of color as they are unaware of white privilege in their own lives.

In Pacifica, when whites say there is no problem of racism, when they say that ìstatistics showî that representation on LABS and in employment is already diverse, what many hear is that those who make such claims are unaware of their own white privilege. Even saying it's not a problem is a problem. Such claims relax the ìeternal vigilanceî we need to face the social construction of race that places whites in a position to deny racism. Such claims come out of that very white privilege at the core of racism that takes so many forms, beginning with the fact that they donít have to think about it, that they can deny it. ìOthersî who daily bear the brunt of it see it so clearly. This is indeed a Catch-22, where denial is proof of the presence of racism.

Much more helpful than denials is the rising suggestion on the part of some whites that accusations of racism in Pacifica would better be met with openness to dialogue. Iíve heard white Pacificans begin to own their own racism. Iíve heard black Pacificans talk about inclusiveness.

My wife, who is Assiniboine, an American Indian tribe here in Montana and Canada, had some useful things to say about these issues when I told her about the mutual accusations and recriminations of racism and reverse racism and race baiting in Pacifica.

She said that we live in a culture of cynicism and criticism, and slinging that kind of language at each other becomes a substitute for true power, a mask for our powerlessness. When we realize that we are being dominated, our choices are few, but we have to be tenacious in our insistence on generosity and kindness. We have to nonviolently resist racist domination, beginning with our language, which is where the power begins. Ranting and raving is at the heart of leftist ineffectiveness.

What is an alternative to ranting and raving at each other over race? I'd suggest that Pacifica needs to return to a belief in peace. This is how we might communicate about race. We need to renew the Pacifica mission by believing in it! We need to find peaceful ways to deal with each other so we can build a democratic media movement. Democracy requires facing the truth of our divided body politic, and facing the truth requires not the inflammation of rhetoric but the clarity of calm and a return to respect. It requires peace, not further polarization, not manipulation, not recrimination. To say that peace is the way is not 60s retro. It is the only future we have.

—David L. Moore

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