Race
Dialogue Is Back, But … Did Racism Ever Go Away?
By
The Anthony Asadullah Samad
America
is talking about race again. With Crash winning the Oscars
and Ice Cube co-producing a series on race called Black/White,
on the FX network, race dialogue is back! But did racism ever
go away? Or did it just change forms and go underground?
It has been well documented over the past five years (since
the turn of the century) that the racial disparities of the
last half of the 20th Century are still very much in evidence
today. In some instances, they are greater than they were
40 or 50 years ago. These studies, from major universities
to private research institutions to civil rights, all said
the same thing, that race is still very much prevalent in
American society, whether we talked about it or not.
So since race differences never went away, can we also assume
that racism never
went away? Of course, we can. Thus, the need for a renewed
race dialogue. America is not colorblind. It’s so blinded
by color that it just can’t see racism. Like looking
into sun with Ray-Bans, the glare doesn’t make that
object in front of you disappear. You will still run into
it if you don’t make an adjustment in your vision. America
never made the adjustment. That’s what the movie, Crash,
was about … our refusal to acknowledge race until it
confronted us.
Race
dialogue took a decade long hiatus (since President
Bill Clinton’s attempt to raise a national dialogue
on race almost ten years ago) as America came up with
race “fatigue” after the Soon Ja Du, Rodney
King, O.J. Simpson racial episodes of the early 1990s.
Of course, Clinton’s efforts was an attempt to
bring forth what some called “the Third Reconstruction,”
to address the racial disparities left over from the
unfinished work of the 1960’s war on poverty that
was interrupted during the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations.
By the time the Reagan Revolution come along, Reagan
had declared that poverty had won, and it was time to
end “race policies,” By the time George
Herbert Walker Bush came into office, America had developed
colorblindness and public policy initiatives were “race
neutral” and any discussion about race, race differences,
and most critically, racism were now persona non grata
in social circles and viewed as politically incorrect
in the public domain.
Nobody wanted to talked about race anymore, and opinion
leaders went through great lengths to convince us that
race no longer mattered. Foolish proclamations were
made by a new phenomena, the Black Conservative—a
new type of Negro that was used to deflect any discussion
on race and racism. One such fool, Larry Elder, went
on national television (20/20) and said, “There
is no racism in America.” When I want comedic
relief, I don’t put on Steve Harvey, or Cedric
“The Entertainer,” or D.L. Hugley. I put
in that tape of 20/20 of Larry Elder saying “there
is no racism in America.” America, as a nation,
tried so hard to believe that racism no longer exists,
that we just began to ignore even the most obvious demonstrations
of racial mistreatment.
Hurricane Katrina was a revelation for many who came
of age in the Post-Civil Rights era, the era where the
notion of race-neutrality also came of age. It’s
also the age where America came apart—so much
so that Colorblindness became the new “Jim Crow.”
White flight to the “burbs,” deconstruction
of affirmative action, economic boons of the 1980s and
1990s, re-emergence of white privilege, the decline
of public education and the 9/11 attacks were all reasons
to ignore race over the past 30 years. The separation
in wealth, knowledge, geography and the nation’s
shift in political ideology allowed us to deflect the
race debate on every front.
Now America got a chance to see how a simple natural
catastrophe had such stigmatizing racial implications.
While the debate is much more stratified (multi-focal)
than the historical black-white (bi-focal) race politic,
race was (and is) still the underlying factor in a time
when class conflict (the politics of the rich versus
the poor) is emerging as the biggest social threat in
America today. While race has long been at the root
of the poverty question, there were some still that
refuse to believe that the evacuation delay in New Orleans,
and the subsequent evacuation support efforts in Houston,
and other cities, wasn’t about race. America still
can’t see what it refuses to acknowledge. They
just now know that a refusal to see something doesn’t
make it disappear.
Author, Tim Wise, appearing before the Urban Issues
Forum last week, stated that “Whites don’t
get it” when it comes to understanding their own
privilege, racism and how it affects others not part
of the “in-group.” “Whiteblindness,”
as Wise called, is a refusal to understand their own
pathology with respect to race prejudice, the privileges
that seeing race affords them, denies others, causing
society (largely themselves) to ignore some very fundamental
“danger signs” that, because of their own
race biases, don’t frame all white males as suspects,
which caused the Columbine school massacre and the Oklahoma
City bombing to occur despite all signs—two events
hidden by white America’s “blind spot”—
while causing every Black (male), Arab, Muslim, and
now Latino (because of the anti-immigrant backlash)
to be met with suspicion, and be perceived as the biggest
threats to society, profiling them as un-American, un
democratic, un-patriotic and un-governable (terroristic).
White radicals who terrorize are just sick, troubled
or misguided [sic] and suspicions are limited to their
individual acts. Driven by xenophobic fears of Whites
and passed on to sub-culture populations, the biases
we all have been driven by the dominate culture’s
attitude on race and race tolerance.
America has crashed and burned on the race issue the
past two decades. But now, at least, the dialogue has
returned through the subtle entrée of art imitating
life. Or is it life imitating art imitating life…the
race dialogue being a throwback of white minstrels imitating
Blacks by wearing blackface then acting out their pre-defined
perceptions of black intellectual and cultural behavior,
allows us to watch movies and television to sympathize
with acts of racism and differences in racial treatment
we thought were days long past, but Blacks knew—had
never went away. It only went away in the eyes of Whites
refusing to see race. As we know, turning one’s
head doesn’t solve the problem. It just allows
the trash of racism to pile up in the house until the
stench becomes unbearable, somebody has to say something
or somebody takes the trash. Well, the movie, Crash,
and Ice Cube’s Black-White series have decided
to say something, calling out the stench.
Colorblindness was a ploy to refuse to acknowledge race,
but racism is as plain as it’s ever been. Thanks
to the arts, we again smell the stench of racism. Now
it’s time to take out the trash.
Anthony Asadullah Samad is a national columnist, managing
director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of 50
Years After Brown: The State of Black Equality In America
(Kabili Press, 2005). He can be reached at www.AnthonySamad.com
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