What is Anti-Racism? (Part 1 of 2) It Starts with History and Humility
Note: This two-part series focuses on racism against people in the U.S. who are Black; future posts will explore racism against indigenous peoples and other people of color.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, and committed to taking part in the growing movement for racial justice, I kept reflecting on the words of historian Daniel Boorstin: true education “is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.”
Realizing how much I didn’t know, I set out to understand: Why is racism so tenacious? What is anti-racism? And what is the difference between being non-racist and anti-racist? In addition to conversations and taking part in local actions, to prepare for this piece I immersed in books, blogs, podcasts and TED Talks from a range of racial justice thinkers and activists (well-known and not, people of color and white allies), linked here at the end.
I noted four concepts that cut across the work of these leaders: 1) Racism is not just about individual attitudes and actions, it is systemic and institutional; 2) racism thrives because of current policies and the lasting impact of historical policies and practices; 3) it is folly for us to believe there is such a thing as being neutral about racism; and 4) fortunately there are many ways each of us can play a role in interrupting and dismantling racism.
Today I explore those first two points.
1) RACISM IS NOT JUST ABOUT INDIVIDUAL ATTITUDES AND ACTIONS; IT IS SYSTEMIC AND INSTITUTIONAL. While individuals can be prejudiced/biased and engage in individual acts of discrimination, racism relies on policies and laws, put in place by people in power, to hold down whole populations. Educator and musician Benjamin Mertz explains that there is an equation at work: Racism = Racial Prejudice + Power. Even the Merriam Webster dictionary recently announced it is updating the definition to move beyond individual attitudes, calling racism “a system of advantage based on skin color.” Many racial justice educators now encourage us to worry less about whether to put the words “systemic” or “institutional” or “structural” in front of racism — although it is not wrong to do so — and focus even more on educating one another that by its very nature, racism is systemic.
Similarly, these leaders encourage us not to turn away from the term “white supremacy,” as it too describes a whole system. While that phrase used to be primarily a reference to groups like the KKK, confronting the whole concept that whites are better than (supreme over) Blacks is important in felling the beast of racism.
Scholar and activist Barbara Smith noted in a recent Boston Globe editorial that white supremacy is “a powerful, entrenched system that consistently disadvantages people of color and privileges whites.” (This brings us to the concept of “white privilege,” the advantages and power held even by white people who are not well off economically. More on that in a minute.) Smith explains that “challenging individual bigotry is critical, but we have a much larger task,” given current realities. For example, families headed by a Black person with an advanced degree still have less wealth than those headed by a white person with a high school diploma.
So what’s often missing from an understanding of racism is the role of power. This is why racial justice educators assert that it is a red herring to indulge the notion of “reverse racism” (or “reverse sexism”), if we remember the second part of the equation: Racial Prejudice + POWER = Racism. A woman can be prejudiced towards a particular man, just as a Black person can be prejudiced against a particular white person, or a person who uses a wheelchair can be prejudiced against someone who can freely walk. But for a prejudice to become widespread, to become systemic/institutionalized, there has to be power. The person in the minority does not have the ability to hold an entire majority group down through the implementation of policies and laws. A person of color may refuse to wait on a white person who enters a shop, but doesn’t have the power to pass legislation that prohibits the white woman and everyone like her from buying a home in a certain neighborhood. (Note that men withheld the vote from women, and men were the ones who got to decide whether to grant suffrage to women; women did not have control of the legislatures to grant it to themselves.)
This clearer definition of racism (as including power) helps us to realize why anti-racism includes acknowledging white privilege. In their workshops, racial justice educators often encounter people who are white and dealing with discrimination and injustice themselves — whether due to growing up in poverty, or being LGBTQ, or in a religious minority — who balk at the notion that they have any “privilege,” denying that they have the power to assist in battling racism. To address this, educator Robin DiAngelo says she often uses her own story to highlight for participants the unique history and potency of racism in the United States: “I grew up in poverty and felt a deep sense of shame about being poor. But I also always knew that I was white, and that it is better to be white.”
2) RACISM IS ALIVE AND THRIVING, DUE TO BOTH CURRENT POLICIES AND PRACTICES AND THE LASTING IMPACT OF HISTORICAL POLICIES AND PRACTICES. Anti-racism educators urge us to make time to learn about the realities left out of our history books, such as the existence of Black Wall Street and the history of the SAT. Black Wall Street was a thriving middle and upper middle class Black community destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, when white vigilantes burned the entire community to the ground, destroying lives and destroying wealth that would have been passed down. The SAT, of course still in use today, was invented by avowed eugenicist Carl Brigham, who acknowledged he created the test to uphold a racial caste system and prove, in his words, “the superiority of white Americans.”
Racial justice leaders urge us to learn about education and housing policies of the past that cast long shadows into today. It will surprise many people to learn that of the one million Black men from the U.S. who fought in WWII, only 4% were able to access the GI bill’s offer of free education when they returned, in part due to quota systems that limited the number of Black students in higher education. Further, as a result of openly racist laws and policies, often referred to as “redlining,” between 1934 and 1962 the federal government underwrote $120 billion in new housing, including funding in the GI bill, and less than 2% went to people of color. As journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates explains, redlining not only kept Black people from buying property in certain areas, it conversely relegated their ability to buy a home to specific areas, thereby establishing “ghettos” with poor public services and lower property values.
Thus current disparities in assets and wealth among Blacks in the U.S. can be traced back to the barriers redlining set up, barring Blacks from reaching the American dream of home ownership. In fact, when Blacks were allowed to buy homes with the assistance of banks, Coates explains, they were often limited to a predatory type of mortgage called a “contract” loan: the buyer accrued no equity in the home while paying off the loan, and if they missed even one payment, they forfeited the house and their down payment. In essence, what passed as access to home ownership actually stripped from many middle income Blacks the wealth they had worked to accrue.
Educator Debby Irving explains, “The GI bill is one of the best examples of affirmative action for white people” that helped them reach a standard of living and accumulate assets then passed down to future generations (including those of us living today), while “driving blacks and other minority populations into a downward economic spiral.”
These educators aren’t looking to imbue guilt, but to help us understand that what we see as individual behavior and accomplishment is often part of a system of unseen advantages and disadvantages. We can picture a field set up for a race, where people who are white start ten steps ahead of the line, and people who are Black start ten steps behind the line — with the organizers and audience insisting it is a level playing field. This doesn’t mean that individual behavior has no impact, just there is a context. Irving describes racism as headwinds (barriers and pressures that people of color face) and tailwinds (the advantages of white skin color in our country).
What might we say to those who question that racism persists, believing that these kinds of policies and practices are solely a thing of the past? (I hear that often.) In addition to understanding the current impacts of earlier racist policies, one only needs to look at research about hiring and housing practices to see that simply being Black (with the same career resume or real estate application as a white candidate) means a person is less likely to be invited in for an interview or offered a mortgage. And it is important to name that most Black people in the U.S. today can cite personal instances of discrimination and threats, such as being pulled over unnecessarily by a police officer, followed while shopping in a store, or called the N word by a passing stranger. In the Harvard Business Review, authors Keith A. Caver and Ancella B. Livers provide dozens of examples of the ways that people of color live not only with those threats, but with daily stressors in the community and at work that most whites don’t even see, situations that take a huge human toll on quality of life and on workplace effectiveness.
Both the systems of rewards and the systems of punishment in the U.S. continue to be rigged. In a study conducted just a few years ago, the United States Sentencing Commission found that Black men served prison sentences on average 19.1% longer than white men for the same crime and with the same background.
For those who don’t face it daily, it is horrifying and yet essential to confront how much hate lives among us. For the past 30 years, the Southern Poverty Law Center has tracked hate groups in the U.S., with their most recent map showing 940 such groups, many of which are explicitly anti-Black.
So racism is systemic and it is tragically alive and well today. What are the other key things to know about anti-racism? I explore that — and next steps — in part two of this series, here.
Thank you for coming on this journey with me, as many of us continue to learn what we didn’t even know that we didn’t know.
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Black educators/activists/leaders from whom I drew for this series (with a special thanks to those with an asterisk, who reviewed my drafts):
White racial justice allies from whom I drew for this series:
· Sue Naimark*