“Obviously, America’s an extraordinarily racist country.” So says Gary Lineker, a successful soccer player in the 1980s who went on to become a $2 million-per-year BBC sports presenter. That’s not a bad wage when you consider that the BBC is taxpayer-funded. He made his remarks in the context of saying that, whatever Qatar’s human rights record, the United States as the next World Cup host had problems of its own.
Lineker articulates most of the standard liberal prejudices that sustain the BBC: EU good, Tories bad, yada, yada. Had he expressed his opinions privately, he would have remained hugely popular. He was a fine footballer, and his commentary combines razor-sharp perspicacity with easygoing amiability. But like so many broadcasters, he was fatally tempted into political commentary by Twitter — almost always a process that takes people on a downward spiral of increasingly outrageous statements.
The shocking thing here is the “obviously.” In the circles in which Lineker moves, the idea that the U.S. is peculiarly racist, almost as bad as Britain, goes without saying.
But is it really so obvious? I’d say that racism in America is in no sense “extraordinary.” In most countries, some people are more or less distrustful of those who are unlike themselves. While it is difficult to measure the phenomenon across borders, there are a few standard questions that apply in different countries — how people would feel if someone from a different race moved next door, for example. By such measures, the U.S. generally comes out mid-table, behind the Swedens and Switzerlands, but
ahead of the Serbias and Saudi Arabias
.
The U.S. has certainly had its shameful moments, but so have many countries. When I think back to my 1970s childhood in Peru, I shudder at the unspoken assumptions — the way in which certain positions were effectively off-limits to the indigenous majority, the casual use of racial slurs by otherwise respectable people. Peru has come a long way in half a century. But so has America.
One of the oddities of the public discourse in the U.S. is the inverse correlation between how racist the country actually is and how much people fret about it. On every measure, from the end of lynchings to the rise of mixed marriages, racism in the U.S. has declined sharply and palpably. In the 1950s, 40% of white Americans said they would move if a black family bought the house next door, 55% approved of segregated schools, and over 90% opposed interracial marriage. All these attitudes now poll in the low single-digits.
The trouble is that no one is interested in perspective. We don’t look at other eras or, indeed, at other countries. Or if we do, we try to blame their problems on the West. Internal slavery in Africa? A consequence of the Atlantic trade. Religious tensions in India? Must somehow or other have been introduced by the British.
There are two things wrong with the “only white people are racist” shtick. First, it is palpably untrue. The West did not introduce the notion of categorizing whole peoples. On the contrary, it introduced the notion of the sovereign individual into a world that had until then been tribal. The reason we have a word for racism, the reason we recognize that it is unjust, is that a combination of Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment traditions teach us to see the world that way.
Second, the whole debate, especially since the Great Awokening of 2015, has been aimed at guilty white people. Ethnic minorities are treated as bit players in someone else’s drama, denied agency. Little thought is given to what effect this has on young people in minority communities who are constantly told that, in effect, nothing they do can alter the fact that society is rigged against them. This is pretty much the opposite message that educators try to give in other contexts. If our aim were to induce anxiety and depression among a group of children, telling them that they’re doomed to victimhood is a pretty good way to go about it.
The truly extraordinary thing about America is that, pretty much uniquely, it was founded in the name of individualism (or “liberty and property,” as the phrase of the time had it). Every other nation was, at least to a degree, defined by place and race.
Yes, America fell short of its ideals, but it got there in the end. When we talk of telling the American story, “warts and all,” we shouldn’t forget the “and all,” from the Civil War to the defeat of Nazism. To reduce that story to a morality tale about bad white guys — that isn’t so much extraordinary as downright deranged.
