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This is a post by a white American for white Americans. By now we all know the story of the Charleston church shooting. The media has obsessed over it since it happened, and rightly so. We need to take this opportunity to confront the myth that we live in a post-racial society, although it’s a shame and embarrassment that it took the deaths of nine more people to force us into self-reflection. But while we mourn as a nation, it’s also vital that we take this opportunity to find out why this really happened, and how we can stop it from happening again. Because you can be sure that as soon as this blows over, most of us in mainstream white America will go back to leading our privileged lives and ignoring the racism that affects too many in this country. This racism isn’t hard to spot if you look for it. It’s been right under our noses for years, hidden by legislative progress. But we are fools if we think that the right to vote came with an automatic end to racial discrimination. It may be disguised as classist politics or Confederate pride, but racism is still alive and well in American culture. It’s harder to point at concrete policies and behaviors with explicit racial motivation because they are rarer, and this ambiguity leaves room for interpretation, for people to believe that we live in an era where racism is over and ignore the lived reality of others.
Yet if those of us in the racial majority look for a moment at that other reality, it quickly becomes clear that we do not live in an egalitarian utopia where everyone is given equal chance and equal treatment, no matter what we wish to believe. Anthea Butler, a professor of religion and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a particularly relevant article for the Washington Post, in which she explores the differential treatment of whites and people of color, focusing on the disparity in media portrayals of white mass shooters and black victims. White shooters are characterized in the media as ‘mentally ill,’ as ‘lone wolves,’ as ‘boys.’ They are not held responsible for their actions and are not portrayed as products of their environments but as statistical outliers. Rather than recognize them as a product of our society, and thus implicate ourselves in their actions, we prefer to keep them at arm’s length by infantilizing and humanizing them. Adam Lanza. James Holmes. Dylann Roof. The same exculpatory language has been used in all three cases. On the other hand, people used Trayvon Martin’s hoodie to justify his death. The same was said for Michael Brown’s stolen cigars and Eric Garner’s solo cigarette business. 12-year-old Tamir Rice was painted as a young man when he was shot and killed by police for holding a toy gun (by comparison, James Holmes, 25, was repeatedly described as a kid after he killed 12 and injured 70 in a Colorado movie theatre). Anthea says all this and more in her excellent article. I suggest you all read it. The idea that we live in a post-racial society is false and dangerous. The longer we remain willfully ignorant, the more innocent lives will be ruined or lost. The longer we content ourselves with easy inaction, the more this country will suffer. Racial minorities make up almost 40% of this country. Can we really be strong as a nation with almost half of our population disenfranchised? We need to change the dialogue about race in the US. As I see it, this is a two-step process. First, we need to accept (and the discussion needs to be predicated on) the fact that we are socializing our children to be racists. White America dehumanizes and blames those with less power than ourselves because they can’t contribute to society in the same ways we do, and for some reason this makes them lesser. This places the onus of change on the victim, rather than those with the resources to efficiently effect meaningful change. Instead, we need to investigate the socioeconomic and political structures which are preventing them from gaining power. When we characterize the poor as lazy and the non-white as poor (especially blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans), we are teaching that racial minorities don’t deserve the level of status that the majority has. This is just one way in which we teach our children to see color, but I could go into this for days. The examples never end. The second step is to actually make change, and I believe this has to happen through education. Stop indoctrinating our children with racial biases. Place value in a broad education that traces contemporary race relations back, through the history of movements and legislation, and explain how what happened in the past still affects us today. For instance, the median household income of black families is only 60% as much as white families. What can account for this discrepancy? How about the fact that, while many whites have had generations to accumulate wealth in this country, blacks have been largely trapped by underfunded schools and police profiling since the abolition of slavery? If we teach an intersectional and diachronic view of racial history in the US, we promote equality and shed light on injustice. This will be a tough conversation, no doubt. Many will be defensive. Many will be fearful. But this is not about blaming or threatening individuals—it’s about changing the way we think about race, and that requires all of us. We have become accustomed to turning the other way when it comes to covert racism, become afraid of having these volatile discussions. We use phrases like ‘senseless tragedy’ to describe these events because it allows us to dismiss racism as incomprehensible and not worth thinking about. But, as stated in a recent Slate article, the cold reality is that Roof’s attack is perfectly understandable. It is simply the latest in a long series of black church bombings and attacks, a bloody history spanning well over 100 years. Speaking of these events as ‘senseless,’ isolating Dylann Roof from the rest of white society while painting minority communities with a broad and violent brush, allows this history to continue and erases the lives lost in its wake. It’s about time we had the courage of our convictions, stopped ignoring the truth about race in America, and started fighting for the people who actually live here.
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