Written by Simon Kuper
I know a well-off black American who travels a lot. He rents apartments through Airbnb. But often the deal falls through after the flat’s owner sees his photograph. Many people won’t rent to black people.
This man is many social classes removed from last month’s rioters in Baltimore, or the more than 1,000 would-be migrants to Europe who drowned when theirboats sank in the Mediterranean in April. However, they all experience structural racism — the system of inequality that benefits whites. Structural racism mostly goes unnoticed in an era when only verbal racism tends to get punished. Events in Baltimore, in the Med and on Airbnb raise the question: when and how does the majority decide to act on structural racism?
Everyday structural racism
For minorities, structural racism is every day. A non-white person in a western country typically attends an inferior school, gets hassled by police, suffers job discrimination, and dies poor.
But white people hardly ever see structural racism. Its victims generally inhabit invisible zones: ghettos, migrant detention centres and, especially in the US, prisons. Anyway, structural racism suits the majority. In the past, poor non-white males were needed to perform boring physical labour. Today, with white women working in offices, poor non-white females are needed as a carer-cleaner class. Some non-whites inevitably get good jobs but the majority would rather keep those for itself.
Instead of worrying about structural racism, the white majority worries chiefly that minorities have become spoiled — that they are living like kings thanks to state benefits, open borders, affirmative action and white guilt that lets a “community organiser” such as Barack Obama get a job above his station.
And so structural racism thrives. But what’s taboo now is verbal racism. Western ideology today demands that we all pretend to treat everyone equally. Consequently, anyone saying anything overtly racist gets punished (unless it’s about the Roma in Europe).
Take the case of Justine Sacco, described in Jon Ronson’s recent book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Sacco was a PR executive in New York until she tweeted just before flying to Cape Town: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!” Half of Twitter mocked her as racist. By the time Sacco’s plane landed, her career was over. In fact, her tasteless tweet was pretty accurate: HIV prevalence among South African whites is 0.3 per cent, compared with 13.6 per cent for blacks, according to the country’s Human Sciences Research Council.
That didn’t help Sacco. She was fed into a modern ritual: the human sacrifice of anyone who breaks anti-racist speech codes. The ritual allows the persecutors to say: “We’re not racist!” That’s why France’s Front National suspended its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen for racist remarks. This ritual doesn’t stop structural racism, and it isn’t meant to.
Only one kind of event sometimes changes structural racism: televised death or violence. Ugly images push the majority to act. Martin Luther King grasped this first. His marches for black voting rights in 1965, early in the TV age, seemed designed to create televised violence: state troopers beating peaceful demonstrators. The pre-announced marching routes allowed unwieldy TV cameras to be present. Immediately after the televised violence, President Lyndon Johnson presented the Voting Rights Bill to Congress. The same mechanism operates today. Televised terrorism in Paris in January sparked a French debate on domestic apartheid. No matter that the terrorists were entirely atypical: of several million French Muslims, almost none commit terrorism. Then, after the migrant boats sank, European leaders changed policy to try to stop more boats sinking. No matter that the boats are atypical too: fewer than one in 100 migrants arriving since 1990 in Spain, the European country nearest Africa, came through “irregular boat migration”, writes Ruben Andersson in Illegality, Inc. Televised death prompts action to stop televised death.
In the US, televised black riots traditionally prompt brief debate about structural racism. Traditionally, as President Obama has noted, nothing ensues.
What has changed in the US in recent months is that a new kind of violence is getting televised: police violence. This used to be almost invisible. On local TV news, civilians committed the violence, and cops played the heroes.
Police still try to control which violence gets televised. During the riots in Ferguson and in Baltimore, police arrested photojournalists. The thinking was, how dare they film our violence? But now smartphones rather than TV cameras tell the national story. Freddie Gray’s brutal arrest in Baltimore was nothing new; the novelty was that it was filmed on smartphones, and televised. One man who filmed it was duly arrested at gunpoint but smartphone videos are hard to control.
The technological shift will change policy, at least a bit. The one area where Obama has risked being a “black president” is justice. He has wound down the “war on drugs”, and now campaigns against police violence. His administration is helping police departments buy body cameras, to record police dealings with citizens.
American police violence will now probably start to decline. After all, we Europeans manage to maintain structural racism without needing much police killing. But structural racism will diminish only when we figure out how to capture it on smartphone videos.
Dr. Robin DiAngelo explains why white people implode when talking about race.
I am white. I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race. This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture. But mainstream sources — schools, textbooks, media — don’t provide us with the multiple perspectives we need. Yes, we will develop strong emotionally laden opinions, but they will not be informed opinions. Our socialization renders us racially illiterate. When you add a lack of humility to that illiteracy (because we don’t know what we don’t know), you get the break-down we so often see when trying to engage white people in meaningful conversations about race.
Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to individual racial prejudice and the intentional actions that result. The people that commit these intentional acts are deemed bad, and those that don’t are good. If we are against racism and unaware of committing racist acts, we can’t be racist; racism and being a good person have become mutually exclusive. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.
Social scientists understand racism as a multidimensional and highly adaptive system — a system that ensures an unequal distribution of resources between racial groups. Because whites built and dominate all significant institutions, (often at the expense of and on the uncompensated labor of other groups), their interests are embedded in the foundation of U.S. society. While individual whites may be against racism, they still benefit from the distribution of resources controlled by their group.
Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won’t be one of them. This distinction — between individual prejudice and a system of unequal institutionalized racial power — is fundamental. One cannot understand how racism functions in the U.S. today if one ignores group power relations.
This systemic and institutional control allows those of us who are white in North America to live in a social environment that protects and insulates us from race-based stress. We have organized society to reproduce and reinforce our racial interests and perspectives. Further, we are centered in all matters deemed normal, universal, benign, neutral and good. Thus, we move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g. white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves). Challenges to this identity become highly stressful and even intolerable. The following are examples of the kinds of challenges that trigger racial stress for white people:
• Suggesting that a white person’s viewpoint comes from a racialized frame of reference (challenge to objectivity);
• People of color talking directly about their own racial perspectives (challenge to white taboos on talking openly about race);
• People of color choosing not to protect the racial feelings of white people in regards to race (challenge to white racial expectations and need/entitlement to racial comfort);
• People of color not being willing to tell their stories or answer questions about their racial experiences (challenge to the expectation that people of color will serve us);
• A fellow white not providing agreement with one’s racial perspective (challenge to white solidarity);
• Receiving feedback that one’s behavior had a racist impact (challenge to white racial innocence);
• Suggesting that group membership is significant (challenge to individualism);
• An acknowledgment that access is unequal between racial groups (challenge to meritocracy);
• Being presented with a person of color in a position of leadership (challenge to white authority);
• Being presented with information about other racial groups through, for example, movies in which people of color drive the action but are not in stereotypical roles, or multicultural education (challenge to white centrality).
Not often encountering these challenges, we withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore, and in other ways push back to regain our racial position and equilibrium. I term that push back white fragility.
“Unfair racial stereotypes have taken root in the hearts of people. Racism is poisoning our society.”
Written by Sharon E. Watkins
Recently I posted a prayer. It was in response to the events in Baltimore: a young black man was mortally injured while in police custody, citizens took to the streets, and on the day of the funeral, the protests turned violent. My prayer was for all: those who mourn, those who are injured, the protesters, the police. I prayed for a release from the sin of racism and our dependence on violence to solve our ills.
As so often happens, the word “racism” triggered angry responses. “How can you say ‘racism’ when we don’t even know what happened?” Let me try to explain. Racism is more than what is in the heart of an individual person at the moment of a particular act. Racism is the cumulative history of all those thoughts and acts. They add up to a pattern in which people of color are routinely and systematically treated differently than white people.
Unfair racial stereotypes have taken root in the hearts of people. They cause us to react to people differently—in stores, on the streets, in encounters between police and citizens. They even affect the way we describe violence and destruction of property. Young white men smashing windows, overturning cars, and battling police after a big athletic event are “revelers,” “out of control fans.” But a group of mostly African American youth who do similar things out of sorrow and rage that a young black man has died in police custody are dangerous “thugs.” The difference in the two descriptions is telling. Happy “revelers” whose youthful celebration “got a little out of hand” can be corrected and forgiven. “Dangerous thugs” present a much more ominous threat.
Racism is complicated, and has an individual aspect of prejudice. But even worse is the reality that generations of racist attitudes are now woven into our systems and institutions like poisonous threads, hurting us all. When our election laws begin again to systematically make it harder for African Americans to vote; when police forces protect and defend some people less than others and are not held accountable; when schools and jobs are routinely of lower quality in areas where people of color live; and when white people don’t know or care, then we have a system that perpetuates racism whether the people in it intend to be racist or not.
What happened to Freddie Gray didn’t just happen to him. According to Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic, Baltimore has paid out “almost $6 million in police brutality settlements in the course of a few years.” And it’s not only in Baltimore. Other cases are now familiar: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Eric Harris. Too many African Americans, especially boys and men, are shot by police: in the back, unarmed, after stops for minor violations. Until the justice system can demonstrate that it holds all people, black and white, police and civilian, equally accountable for their actions, we won’t be able to get beyond the reality that racism—systemic racism—is involved.
So I pray for release from racism at times like these. I pray for everybody: for the police—most of whom are courageous, well-meaning persons—who have to face the anger of the crowds, for protesters who have a lot to protest, for decision-makers who have the authority to bring reform. I pray for the grieving, the injured, the fearful. I pray that we all will find the courage to face the truth and do something about it. Racism is poisoning our society.
To my white friends and colleagues, a good place to start is to listen to our friends who are people of color—really listen. Don’t justify. Don’t defend. Just listen to how our institutions work for or against our friends in their daily lives. And then join me in praying for a release from racism—in our hearts and in the institutions that perpetuate racism with or without us. Join me in advocating for transparency and accountability in those institutions—for all people.
Sharon E. Watkins is the General Minister and President of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States and Canada.
The Black Lives Matter movement is exploring how racial discrimination negatively affects the mental health of African Americans.
The Black Lives Matter movement–which initially targeted the lack of indictments for the murderers of unarmed African American men and women and has since contributed to a larger conversation about the impacts of racism—has unapologetically highlighted the experiences of African Americans in this country. Another lesser-known but equally critical result of the movement: it raises an opportunity to discuss how racial discrimination negatively affects the mental health of African Americans. To combat the psychological and physical effects of racial discrimination, leaders of institutions that both serve and employ African Americans should first examine their environments and policies to identify implicit biases or overt acts of exclusion are taking place.
It’s no secret that a sense of belonging has been scientifically proven to be an essential human need. For people of color, functioning in a society that consistently pressures them to downplay their cultural identities to fit in can have detrimental health effects. This “shifting” may increase African Americans vulnerability to depression and other psychological problems if certain reaffirming buffers are not in place. Racial discrimination in the workplace can be especially unnerving. Research has also shown that racial discrimination in the workplace is a chronic stressor for African Americans.
The societal pressures to be stoic, yet hyper-vigilant towards both overt and subtle racial threats can be a psychologically daunting task. Research indicates that the daily experience of racism in America is associated with low self-esteem, depression, and anxiety. Experiences of racism have even been associated with physiological reactivity, i.e. high blood pressure, a predictor of heart disease. This finding implicates perceived racial discrimination, a psychosocial factor, as a determinant of this leading cause of death among African Americans, alongside more commonly recognized behavioral factors (i.e. poor diet, lack of exercise).
It’s important to deconstruct the sources for both systemic and interpersonal racism to pinpoint why these infractions still exist, and the steps that are necessary for change. We can kickstart that first step by implementing the second step: talking. Institutional and employment leaders must engage employees in conversations around inclusion, equality, and difference; this is a key step in the process of addressing mental health disorders among African Americans.
Substantive dialogue is critical, but it’s equally vital to note that simply starting these conversations is a powerful thing. It’s a move that shows both internal and external stakeholders that your organization values the tenets of social justice and reflects an investment in community well-being. Beginning these conversations is also an explicit acknowledgement of the problem, which could help employees affected by racial discrimination build back trust in the institution.
This critical dialogue also can’t just be a one-time thing—it requires consistency and commitment. To be effective, these conversations have to be on-going, inclusive, and employ a technique called active listening. Active listening communicates empathy and builds trust by using signs of attentiveness (i.e. paraphrasing, assumption checking, asking questions) to indicate unconditional acceptance and confirming the other’s experience. This type of listening behavior will ensure that an employer’s responses are not dismissive and authoritative. This form of listening reflects that the individual is respecting the other person’s experiential reality, not just waiting to speak and give a predetermined statement.
One of the most important factors in these conversations is to acknowledge up front that racial discrimination does exist, and that the conversation leader and organization genuinely wants to create change that will promote better mental health for African American employees. Of course, conversations can’t fix everything. They need to be complemented with stress reduction and communication workshops. Leaders and executives should also be aware of the signs of depression, anxiety, and stress in others and have a repository of mental health providers for referrals. This action may require additional training, but it is well worth it for the employees will see that they are viewed as fully-functioning humans, and not just producers.
Taking these additional steps will create a culture that respects the voices, experiences, mental health, and holistic lives of African Americans. They present a visceral and impactful embodiment of the growing Black Lives Matter movement.
This article is written by Veronica Y. Womack, a Social Psychologist and Research Associate at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison argued recently that she wouldn’t consider racism in America as resolved until she sees a police officer shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back.
“People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race,” the 84-year-old told The Telegraph in an interview published Sunday.
“This is the conversation: I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back,” Ms. Morrison said. “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”
Toni Morrison on the relationship between economics and racism
She also spoke about the relationship between economics and racism.
“Race is the classification of a species,” she told The Telegraph. “And we are the human race, period. But the other thing — the hostility, the racism — is the money-maker. And it also has some emotional satisfaction for people who need it.
“They don’t stop and frisk on Wall Street, which is where they should really go,” she added.
Toni Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for “Beloved” and the Nobel Prize in 1993. In 2012, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.
After Russian soccer fans displayed a Nazi flag at a match in Moscow on April 5, Sepp Blatter, the chief of FIFA, soccer’s governing world body, said there is still “a lot of work to be done” before 2018.
MOSCOW — Fans displaying neo-Nazi symbols. Racist chants aimed at players from the North Caucasus. Hooligans attacking nonwhites on a train.
These are just a few of the 200 racist incidents committed by Russian soccer fans between 2012 and 2014 that were documented in a recent report titled “A Time For Action: Incidents Of Discrimination In Russian Football.”
The report was completed by the Sova Center, a Moscow-based racism-monitoring group and the Fare Network, an international organization fighting discrimination in soccer. And its findings illustrated the persistent problem of racism among soccer fans as Russia prepares to host the World Cup in 2018.
After Russian soccer fans displayed a Nazi flag at a match in Moscow on April 5, Sepp Blatter, the chief of FIFA, soccer’s governing world body, said there is still “a lot of work to be done” before 2018.
With just over three years remaining until Russia hosts the World Cup, Moscow has only made small moves to clamp down on racism in soccer.
“There is no plan yet,” said Pavel Klymenko, Eastern Europe development officer for Fare Network, which is seeking to advise the Russian Sports Ministry and Football Union on the issue. “I would say no concrete measures have been designed yet to tackle the problem. Very initial steps [have been] taken — I would say symbolic steps — that have to be followed by real action.”
Since Russia was awarded the World Cup in December 2010, the country’s Football Union (RFU), the Interior Ministry, and the government have implemented hefty fines and spectator bans for racist fan behavior.
The new punitive measures have been dished out widely.
LOS ANGELES, California. – A defamation lawsuit filed against television host Dr. Phil McGraw by two brothers once considered suspects in the disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway has been dismissed.
The defamation lawsuit court records show the case by Deepak and Satish Kalpoe was tossed out Monday, one week before a trial was scheduled to begin.
The Kalpoes sued McGraw and CBS over a 2005 report that featured a secretly recorded conversation between Deepak Kalpoe and a private investigator. The Kalpoes’ lawsuit accused the show of altering the footage to make it seem like the brothers had something to do with the disappearance of Holloway.
McGraw and CBS denied any wrongdoing in the report. Their attorney, Charles Babcock, declined to comment.
Holloway went missing in Aruba in May 2005, and her disappearance has never been solved.
Ever since Sept. 11 we have been extremely racist toward Arabian-Americans and people of the Muslim faith. For some reason, America always struggles with discrimination and racism.
When many people think of the Muslim religion or Arabians they think of terrorism. But anyone could be a terrorist, not just these people. Yes, there are terrorists who are Muslim and Arabian, but it certainly doesn’t mean all of those people are.
For some reason, people love it when a group can be pigeonholed. Like in high school, there are the jocks, the preps, the artists, the nerds, etc. The TV and media just love to do this, too.
For some reason, all Arabian men have to be rich and terrorists, and all women are belly dancers and sex toys. They are not like that at all. It’s like saying all Americans are obese and love McDonalds. Is everyone in America obese and in love with McDonald’s? No. Is every British person kind and polite? No.
So why must we do this to these people? They were either born here or came to America for a better life. Why do we have to make it so hard for them? They are people just like us, and they can be kind, or angry, just like every single person on earth.
I found a story on the Huffington Post about how a Muslim woman went to the movie theater with her kids and got called a terrorist even though she did absolutely nothing but be polite. It began when her kids started eating popcorn, apparently loudly. Another woman who was sitting near them then yelled “YOU ARE SO ANNOYING,” which is so uncalled for. The mother, who wrote the Huffington Post article, said nothing to the woman but smiled to her boys and asked them to quiet down.
The woman who complained then used her phone for the next 20 minutes, and the mother asked if she could please put it away because it was distracting. The woman then started using profanity at her and her group, saying that the writer was racist and her kids needed to learn manners. When she continued to use profanity, the mother went and got the manager.
When she returned with the manager, the woman kept on using profanity for “ratting her out.” The woman’s husband yelled at the movie theater manager, saying that his wife did nothing wrong, and this *itch was causing all the trouble. The manager then asked the couple, who had their 3-year-old daughter with them, to leave the theater. The husband kept repeatedly calling the writer a terrorist. When they finally left, she felt herself shake in fear.
She says she wrote about this because she is tired of walking on eggshells, and this shouldn’t happen to people.
No person should have to go through this. That woman was incredibly rude to the writer and her kids. It’s so depressing that our world and our communities still behave like this. Only humans can help humans — we can’t always rely on a miracle to save us.
Please stop the racism.
This article is written by Peyton Baker, an eighth-grader at North Middle School and a member of the Tribune’s Teen Panel, USA Today.
Anti-Racism Causes Racism
It can be argued that zealous and fanatical anti-racism is doing more than almost anything else to contribute to racism in the United Kingdom and United States. To put that in very basic terms, one of the biggest contributors to racism today may very well be anti-racism policies and statements.
Almost every single day someone or other is put before an anti-racist inquisition or a new — even stricter — law is decreed to fight racism.
Anti-racism has now become another revolution that’s eating its own children.
What we have with much of today’s anti-racism is the same kind of absurdity and extremity which often happened during various historical inquisitions. More specifically, anti-racism is just like the many other political movements that, in time, became corrupted.
Many anti-racists also feel the need to justify their existence and legitimacy by becoming more and more pure (i.e. extreme). And, as a consequence, they will also need to find new targets — more evil racists — to reprimand or even punish.
What partly contributes to all this is that a minority of Leftist activists (though often highly-influential people in the law, councils, academia, etc.) are attempting to create a “revolutionary situation” by deliberately making anti-racism policies and actions more extreme. Thus, in the process, these Leftists — along with their words and actions — are alienating people who aren’t otherwise racist. Such Leftists think that the violence, turmoil or even civil conflict that their words and policies create may be utilized to benefit their own primary cause: revolutionary socialism or the “progressive future”. Thus they see what they’re doing as tapping into anti-racism’s revolutionary/radical potential. (These very same Leftists also — to use their own words — “tap into the
Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/01/antiracism_causes_racism.html#ixzz3WSsIIe5Z
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