Apropos of all the race-infused obsessions in today’s culture, please allow some old-style common sense and decency.
The word “racism” in itself has nothing to do with “power,” although racists with power obviously can do more damage than racists without it. The word itself has a simple meaning: the attitude of making assumptions about any individual or group because of the subject’s race (or, because “race” is a fluid concept, the subject’s ethnicity). In other words, it is prejudice based on race.
Racism is a form of bigotry, but not all bigotry is racism. One can be bigoted on the basis of religion, for example, or against the disabled, or about any number of other qualities.
If someone acts according to racism, the person engages in racial discrimination. Not all discrimination is racist, and not all racism leads to discrimination. But all racism is harmful at some level, racism is awful, and all racial discrimination is particularly awful. This means that racial discrimination by a less-powerful group or individual is awful, too, although it probably would effectuate a lesser degree of harm than racial discrimination by the more powerful.
The only circumstances in which it is reasonable and decent to look at the world through racial lenses are for political-science/statistical analyses and the like. Because so many people still think and act with racialist (different than racist) attitudes, it is legitimate for social scientists to analyze voting patterns and cultural behavior that way. Even then, though, it is neither fair nor right to assume that any individual will believe or behave according to average racial or ethnic characteristics. To make such an assumption is to be racist.
The law, especially, should make absolutely no distinctions based on race. The American ideal since 1776 has been one of equality; and the Constitution since the ratification of the 13th through 15th Amendments (the last of those in 1870) has clearly said, despite Southern practices to the contrary, that equality before the law is a central feature of the U.S. government. As Justice John Marshall Harlan rightly wrote in dissent in 1896, “our Constitution is color-blind,” and insofar as legal rights were concerned, Martin Luther King Jr. clearly agreed that it should be thus.
None of this, in terms of social science, refutes the reality that in terms of aggregate averages, black people fare worse economically and in other ways than white people, nor that some of these disparities are obviously the hangover effects of slavery and Jim Crow. In the aggregate, but only in the aggregate, “white privilege” is a real thing, meaning that a larger percentage of whites than blacks enjoy social connections, family net worth, and other physical and social resources that provide nongovernmental safety nets and opportunities.
Moreover, hidden or implicit biases do often (but not always) exist in the outlooks and assumptions of many people of all races, and decent individuals should assess their own biases and try to counteract them — a process that might require outside help, but which is often stultified, not assisted, by outside imputations of guilt, bad faith, or flawed character.
The combination of the tendencies, not the automatic existence, but mere tendencies, toward white privilege and toward implicit biases often, but not always, mean that black people are more likely to be disadvantaged in oft-subtle ways than white people are. Whites who deny this reality are either willfully ignorant or flagrantly dishonest.
On the other hand, it is equally dishonest for anyone to say that all whites are more “privileged” than all blacks, or that biases don’t work to harm some white people, or that black people today are anywhere near as likely to suffer from harmful racism as they were 50 years ago. The daughter of two black Ivy League graduates, of which there are many, is far more privileged, in terms of economics, culture, and “affirmative action” laws, than is the son of divorced white parents in a dying rural town plagued by massive amounts of opioid addictions and other ills.
It is a simple truth that millions of Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants a century ago faced worse bigotry and discrimination than many or most blacks do now. (They faced lesser discrimination than blacks did then, but that’s a different issue.) Yet, the answer for them wasn’t to gain special legal privileges to make up for the discrimination but to work to forge ahead by using the myriad opportunities provided in this great, good country.
It is thus an entirely legitimate, thoughtful, and good-hearted position to assert that the way to make up for the remaining ills related to racism is to take the advice of Harlan and King. In sum, to let all laws be colorblind (or race-neutral) and to use gentle but persistent persuasion rather than coercion to eradicate the troubling racism that still remains.
Yes, the law should punish clear racial discrimination. Punish it with vigor. Aside from that, though, we are not an inherently benighted people. Much has been accomplished, and much more can be accomplished still, by continuing to appeal to our innate ingenuity as humans and to the better angels of our natures.
