Not Always about Hate; Other Faces of Racial Reality Posted on 07/05/2011
The salient trait of racists is that they supposedly
hate people they don’t know based those people’s race. Generalized “hatred” of
another race has its genesis in direct or indirect, and usually shallow and
limited, encounters with people of the race, rather than in a belief in the
ideology of superiority.
Racists don’t really hate individual strangers; they
simply disapprove of the attitudes, beliefs, values, culture, and lifestyles
that they wrongly attribute to all members of the race that they select
to shove. These simplistic feelings are reinforced every time the target race is
reported in the media to demonstrate an act that reveals degenerate values, and
this horrible tendency to generalize is understood by minorities who encourage
their members not to give other races yet another reason to disapprove.
Minorities voice radical, seething, general hatred for other racial groups as
often as whites make such ridiculous declarations. But it isn’t the race that is
attacked, but disapproval of alternate, repressive, even regressive, values held
by a few members of the race; subjective associations and stereotypes are the
adversarial link between whites and blacks.
Some people pretend to hate so they can justify their
own racial discrimination to themselves and others. Hate, when it’s deserved,
reduces a sense of moral conscience about acts of discrimination and
retaliation. But it’s not hate that most people feel, and most people aren’t
racists, but prejudists. It’s disgust or revulsion that people feel, disdain
when a minority group demands that a majority share. It’s resentment and
mistrust. It’s despair about the injustice of racially preferential treatment
and the death of social values evidenced in the gangsta rap music of racial
subcultures. Disagreement with the cultural practices and values of racial
minority subsets can turn into fear that these values will be mainstreamed and
etch away at one’s own values and legal protections. For instance, Muslim
populations in Rotterdam form a voting bloc that may oust Rotterdam’s democratic
incumbents and lead to totalitarian government policies. Unease around people of
another race may be the result of generalizing to the entire race the
objectionable activities of race subset groups. For instance, many Americans
have developed a distrust of Islamic Arabs based on the terrorist actions of
Islamic terrorists.
Racism as practiced by individuals is a very specific
concept. Its definition is limited. Discrimination based on race isn’t racism.
Stereotyping subpopulations of blacks or whites or Asians or Arabs isn’t racism.
Rejecting fallacious and malicious and self-serving allegations of racism isn’t
racist. Prejudice isn’t racism. Racial profiling as practiced by law enforcement
and airport security personnel isn’t racism.
Racism isn’t illegal, but racial discrimination is
when employment and public services are denied. Denying employment and services
based on provable racial discrimination is illegal, as is assault, and verbally
inciting others to riot, regardless of racial motivation.
Do people know the difference between racist thought
and simple prejudice? Most do, which implies intention in the commission of acts
of racial injustice, such as racial profiling and job discrimination. To suggest
that people know that they benefit from perpetuating racial injustice,
infringing on civil rights, and slandering based on race also assumes that a
rational choice can be and has been made.
Emotional, intellectual, psychological, and financial
options will always be factors in decisions to embrace racial stereotypes.
Perceived benefits of deciding to believe a racial stereotype or of taking
action based on race-based statistical differences include the following:
- Greater assurance of personal safety and security by avoiding those of a different race
- A more productive workforce that has more in common than not
- Reduced business theft
- Exclusion of people who might bring along others of their race to compete for resources and housing
- Media attention and material concessions (money can be made by alleging white racism)
- No learning curve in dealing with and appreciating other cultures (easier and less time consuming to make and maintain flawed generalizations than to research differences in people)
- Boosted esteem by feeling superior to others in one’s own group
- Gains in social status by association with other races (suburban white teens in black gangs)
- Relaxation of enforcement of immigration laws.
People form opinions from the numerous perceptual
associations they make between race and racial cultures and subcultures. Some
black rappers are violent. Some teenage, gang-affiliated inner city black males
kill to gain gang respect. Some southern rednecks drive pickup trucks with gun
racks and have been known to harass minorities. Fear and caution and derision,
rather than hatred, are more likely the more accurate descriptions of responses
to people in these cultures.
Some people embrace a lifestyle and its associations
for the sole purpose of acquiring an image–they want to be feared as thugs,
hated, avoided, and they know that the acquired image is a big step in achieving
that, based on the valid assumptions others will make. They affiliate with a
gang whose reputation for violence is deserved and nurtured so that they can
personally realize the benefits of the reputation, which include reduced
retaliation by those whom they attack and easier relinquishment of property by
others. In these instances, stereotypes applied by potential victims based on
their attacker’s group affiliation are valid and offer a protective physical
advantage–people will give up their possessions rather than fight to keep them
when they suspect that 50 gang friends have the lone gansta’s back.
Identifying oneself as belonging to a culture and
hoping to be judged precisely for that culture’s associations gains the rewards
of that affiliation. So, voluntary affiliation with a violent subculture paired
with a demand not to be judged negatively based on purposeful associations leads
to understandable resentment for the obvious hypocrisy and demanded double
standard.
This same need for association applies to young white
male suburbanites who assume black gangsta mannerisms, clothing, walk, attitude,
talk, and friendships to get laid…and get laid. In the gangsta subculture,
whites gain associative respect from the protective brotherhood they’ve
infiltrated and are no longer perceived as easy targets, but as tough hoods with
tough friends. In such cases, perception matters if alternate possible realities
(other street hoods beating down clean- cut white boys in their neighborhood)
are avoided.
Racial StereotypingPosted on 07/05/2011
Negative stereotypes aren’t inevitable. Data from at least one psychological study suggests that increased activity in the brain’s amygdala, which registers wariness and vigilance, when subjects view faces from races other than their own might be a result of deep wired racial stereotyping. However, the longer the faces were viewed, the more that other parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate, regions associated with higher thought and control of reflexive responses, showed controlling activity. The researcher, William Cunningham of the University of Toronto, believes that “if people have a chance, they can modify or override the emotional response with the cognitive regions of their brain.” (sciencejournal@wsj.com). From studies by psychologist Susan Fiske of Princeton University, category-based emotional responses generated by the amygdala can be overridden when viewers are forced to evaluate extraracial faces with a distinct purpose in mind, such as to determine affinity for carrots, making the faces more unique. Asked to determine age, however, subjects categorized based on racial stereotypes.
In another experiment designed by Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and reported by NBC’s Dateline in a mid-May 2007 episode (dateline.msnbc.com), the word good or bad is paired with either a black or white face. Seventy-nine percent of whites showed preference for whites over blacks. Forty-two percent of blacks preferred whites, explained as a result of the media’s more frequent coverage of incidents of blacks committing crimes, or as self-loathing based on race. Is it really news that people of the same race have a greater preference for others of their race? Since only two choices were provided in the experiment, the logic issue, or confounding factor, with this type of experiment construction is called forced response to extreme position response, which denies possible continuum responses.
The brain can’t be rewired to be color blind. People are obviously different colors. It is human nature to discriminate between objects and people to form manageable patterns for the brain to handle. Figurative and symbolic color blindness is a bad metaphor that doesn’t hold up under rational scrutiny. Personally practicing color blindness works only on a theoretical level removed from individuals in face-to-face interaction, and the concept is intended metaphorically for equal treatment in systems and law.
Uncertainty about people of other races and cultures is a psychological/educational dimension, though no amount of multiculturalism education can make anyone certain about individuals. However, people can have latent biases that can nevertheless be consciously eradicated by the individual. Bias is not entrenched, rigid, unchangeable. Some biases in attitude are automatic but individuals can deny their power to inform action.
Negative opinions about entire races invite people to confuse racial issues by implicating racism and its characteristic hatred. And though we must acknowledge that some people are racist, many transactions and outcomes involving two or more races should not be assumed automatically to be racist or racially focused. A capitalist factory owner who oppresses all employees regardless of race should not be said to be unequivocally racist because some employees are non-white minorities. People misconstrue the intent behind outcomes. Any member of any race can practice racial discrimination by denying earned and deserved power or reward, or civil rights to anyone based on race–black racism against whites (“expressions of rage” in post-Rodney King verdict parlance) is still racism.
Conversely, insensitivity to what is depicted as another race’s problems does not constitute racism. Insensitivity is most often due to the knowledge that poverty and crime and ill health, for instance, are part of the human condition and not exclusive to any particular race. Indifference to another race’s stated need for racial pride and esteem or financial empowerment isn’t necessarily racist. Acting in one’s own best interests, though not directly benefiting others, regardless of race, perhaps even countering the interests of others as a by-product of self-advancement, regardless of race, may not indicate racism. Punishing those who abuse power, who commit unethical acts, or who are incompetent isn’t a racist act only because the person being censured belongs to a racial minority. Emphasizing that dedication, tenacity, moral character, creative and original thinking, attention to detail, education, frugality, and hard work lead to success is not racist when deciding not to promote a racial minority who doesn’t apply these values in his or her work.
Racial Discrimination as a Legal DistinctionPosted on 07/05/2011
Racial discrimination is a legal distinction for the practice of considering a person’s race as an overriding factor in deciding not to sell goods to a person, not to provide services, to deny civil rights, or not to make employment available. Deciding to sell goods, to provide services, to extend the courtesy of civil rights, and to offer employment based on race is considered a positive outcome of discrimination and is not illegal. This, of course is a double standard based on perceived quality of the outcome of the discrimination; positive outcome, discrimination is okay, but negative outcome, and discrimination is illegal. However, a positive outcome based on race for one person is a negative opportunity cost for another who suffers when the resource becomes unavailable for fair competition.
Most frequently, racial discrimination is linked to unfairly favoring one race over another in hiring practices. It is a tool to oppress others. For instance, in Georgia in the early 1930s, all “the instruments of caste pluralism–social indignity, physical brutality, educational deprivation, and political exclusion–combined to keep the vast majority of blacks confined to the most menial kinds of work” (Fuchs, p. 103). Reverse discrimination laws attempt to reverse past discrimination against blacks, or a least balance the social justice scales, in essence by making the number of whites who experience racial discrimination equal to the number of blacks who have. These numbers aren’t definitively tabulated or knowable, which makes the social engineering laws an exercise in presenting the appearance of doing something positive to correct past wrongs against minority races.
Attributing racism to an instance of racial discrimination aggressively assumes that an employer, for instance, has a deep racial hatred or is actively suppressing the equal rights of a minority job applicant. In fact, racial discrimination may simply reflect a racially insular employer’s higher comfort level interacting with members of his own race, or the employer’s beliefs, based on experience, that current employees are more productive working with others of their race, sex, and age. The employer may feel that his customers prefer to deal with employees of a specific race. Or the employer may hold little esteem for the credentials of the educational program from which the minority graduated. Or, more likely, employers don’t want to hire the type of people who threaten to press false racial discrimination charges to extort jobs.
Business-based beliefs may coincidentally withhold equal consideration for job candidates who happen to be of a different race, but it is presumptuous to attribute to the employer a deep-seated hostility toward minorities, or toward whites in the case of black employers who deny employment to qualified white applicants, for instance. Employer decisions and consequent actions are racially motivated, though not racist.
It is illogical for a job applicant to conclude that because he can think of no other reason that he wasn’t hired, then it must be the interviewer’s racism. The applicant’s inability to generate reasons or to read the interviewer’s mind doesn’t indicate a default reason of racial discrimination. It doesn’t matter if the applicant can think of five people who say that they suspect the interviewer was racist. The applicant may know a hundred or a thousand others who would give that reason for not getting a job, and that still doesn’t make racism a controlling factor in why neither he nor they got the job.
In business, ability is less evident and less well defined than ability in sports, for instance, where the athlete either has demonstrable talent or doesn’t. Employers must rely on an applicant’s reported past experience and develop faith in the applicant’s educational background. Automatic presumption of racial discrimination is illogical. It also makes no sense to inductively conclude that a legal indictment of one business for racial discrimination in hiring practices is an indication that all businesses have a predisposition to racial discrimination; indictments often reflect the opinion of juries or judges, whose biased decisions are overturned daily. Even if the final verdict in the single instance is guilty, such a verdict is not grounds for labeling an entire business as guilty of general racism. An instance of discrimination doesn’t prove systematic discrimination.
Racial PrejudicePosted on 07/05/2011
Just as racial discrimination has a specific meaning that differs from the concept of racism, the concept of racial prejudice also has a less inflammatory meaning. Prejudice is the habit of harboring associations about strangers based on reports and experience. Prejudice is most often a comfortable reaction which reduces risk to one’s personal safety in unfamiliar situations. It is often an unthinking dependence on the ubiquitous negative publicity members of a specific race receive, or on the warnings of parents about the violent predisposition of a race. Prejudice is unfair only if it is incorrect for a given person or situation, and only if acted upon in the suppression of another’s civil rights. If the person who is prejudged does intend to mug you, having a gut prejudice lets you anticipate and decide to quickly release your valuables rather than let your pride and indignation at the insult get you killed.
Often, prejudice is an attempt to preserve one’s narrow ignorance, because remaining narrow is easier and takes less energy than approaching every new situation with zero preconceptions, and thus no direction for proceeding in the interaction. Prejudging may lead to lapses in good and true judgment, and a prejudiced employer may fail to analyze a job applicant’s skill levels, job experience, and other intangible qualities like honesty and desire to perform beyond expectations, which may effectively constitute illegal discrimination based on race. But prejudice, exclusively, does not presume hatred, hostility, or the idea that one race has a privileged superiority over another–all components behind the actions of a racist.
Statistics on race give more weight to general negative conclusions. Blacks, based on their percentage of the population, commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes, though in absolute numbers, whites exceed (Charen, p. 15). Crime rates for 1992 show that 1,360 blacks per 100,000 were arrested for a violent crime; “Though they represent only 12 percent of the adult population, …in 1993, blacks comprised 44.2 percent of all inmates in jails and prisons…” (Charen, pp. 20 – 21). Barring the exceptional cases of wrongful imprisonment, that’s quite a safety concern, making associations of violence with the people who live in black communities understandable. Blacks are 325 times more likely to engage in gang attacks on whites than whites are to take part in pack assaults against blacks. Interracial rape is overwhelmingly black on white; black men rape white women 30 times more often than white men rape black women (Williams, Dayton Daily News, December 15, 1993). Whites choose black victims 2.4 percent of the time, whereas blacks select white victims in over half of the crimes they commit. However, “ninety-three percent of black victims are killed by other blacks, and 85 percent of the murders committed by blacks are of other blacks” (Charen, p. 25).
These numbers are the motivating force behind the excessive attention police give to young black males, but they’re not an indication that police forces are racially biased or racist.
Frequent reports of blacks committing violent crimes, such as car-jacking and murder for clothing, and knowledge of the statistically and disproportionately high percentage of members of the black race committing violent crimes and hate crimes against whites cause a generalized fear and leads whites to insulate themselves against the risk of physical harm.
Speaking about RacePosted on 7/05/2011
No matter how outrageous the accusation, most forms of speech and racial slurs and counter speech are still protected, though employers have ways of penalizing those in their organizations for speech. The inflammatory speech laws were intended to curtail the vocal rights of people if they used language to incite violence, infringing upon the constitutional rights of free speech of others. A high visibility instance of the law’s equivocal interpretation was when former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott’s guaranteed right to speech was overridden by her obligation not to provoke anger within her self-policing business organization. Schott was censured by the sports industry and asked to attend a cultural sensitivity class for referring to Reds General Manager Jim Bowden as “my boy” (Dayton Daily News, November 25, 1992). Frank Allison, then President of the Cincinnati Chapter of the NAACP, stepped in. It didn’t matter that Bowden is white. Allison told Schott “‘the way you speak and refer to people can be offensive. I said, ‘If you had referred to me–or any African-American male–as ‘boy,’ we would have taken offense.’”
Comedian Michael Richards, most well known for his Cramer character on the sitcom, Seinfeld, slandered racial groups publicly in a comedy routine and was expected to apologize, which he did, half-heartedly, on Late Night with David Letterman in December 2006. Senator George Allen from Virginia made a similar error in the November 2006 election campaigns by referring to an Asian Indian student reporter in derogatory terms. Don Imus was fired in April 2007 from his radio program for referring to college female basketball players as “nappy-headed HOs.” A month later, CBS cancelled a shock jock radio show on WFNY-FM because its hosts Jeff Vandergrift and Day Lay made prank phone calls on the air that were rife with offensive Asian stereotypes (Dayton Daily News, May 13, 2007).
In such penalties, it is hoped that the manifestations of racism–violence and verbal slurs that could lead to violence–can be reduced while token re-education attempts are made to simultaneously adjust racist attitudes.
Hasty general statements regarding race may or may not reflect true prejudicial thinking. The necessity of public officials to convey messages in 30-second sound bites makes simplification and generalization appealing. If he had unlimited time and no chance of losing audience interest, a sports analyst might be more precise, saying that untrained white males who have no interest in basketball can’t make jump shots with the kind of grace that other skilled basketball players admire and emulate (rather than the more concise but factually wrong generalization, white men can’t jump). He could go on to quote statistics about the percentage of white basketball players versus black players who play on professional basketball teams, or whose famous fluid moves on the court lands shoe endorsements.
Often, speakers don’t have a facile grasp of the English language. They have an imperfect ability to state how they feel, and so they lapse into sloppy generalizations in their speech that don’t necessarily reflect their thoughts. Even when language is used to intentionally berate, such as a white calling a black a “knuckle-dragger,” for instance, the name-calling insults and provokes anger, or intentionally tears down self-esteem for easier future subjugation whether or not the name-caller believes his derogatory remarks to be true. In August 1992, the Ohio Supreme Court declared that a 1987 state law prohibiting ethnic intimidation was unconstitutional and violated guarantees of free speech, seeking to penalize speech in addition to proscribed acts. Intimidation laws, though unconstitutional because they seek to punish thought and speech, are meant to reduce symbolic affronts against entire segments of society. Though intimidation laws have been struck down, training courses continue to be based on the premise that people need to be made more aware of words that may offend minorities. For instance, in January 1993, the Ohio Peace Officers Training Council required state academy students to take 24 hours of cultural and racial sensitivity training.
However clearly freedom of speech is supported by laws, hate crime legislation has overridden freedoms by categorizing name-calling and similar expressions as evidence of the advocacy of racial superiority, invalidating any defense that a white name-caller was simply jockeying for personal dominance over a specific individual, though not physically violating or depriving another of his constitutional rights, which is the former standard for defining crime. It is a telling double standard that blacks who use racial pejorative when calling out other blacks aren’t cited for racism, though it’s possible for blacks to hate their own race (see the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, as an example of a man who seems extremely uncomfortable in his black skin).
“Some universities, among them the University of Cincinnati, have student handbooks that say, and professors who teach, that blacks are incapable of racism. Therefore, media people see the Howard Beach and Bensonhurst incidents–where whites murdered and beat blacks–as racist and view situations where blacks do the same to whites as simply crimes” (Williams, Dayton Daily News). At Stanford University, some black students wore T-shirts proclaiming “Black by Popular Demand,” but eyebrows raised when white students wore Ts stating that they were “White by the Grace of God.” Though a number of college campuses have black student unions, white students at Temple University who organized a White Student Union created a controversy (Williams, “Crisis of ‘racism’…,” Dayton Daily News). Black students can petition universities for special black culture centers, though whites are frowned upon for petitioning for WASP and southern plantation lifestyle centers. Blacks can have rallies in open public places about what blacks perceive as injustices that continue to be perpetuated by white-controlled institutions, but whites can’t hold rallies protesting entitlements for which only blacks are eligible.
“Within the last decade or so, we have seen a rise in racial conflict and resentment. Especially unsettling is that much of this resentment is among our youth on college campuses” (Willams, “Kindling for the racial bonfire,” Dayton Daily News). Black racial equality organizations, according to Walter Williams, are “little more than race hustlers championing a racial spoils system.” Blame for the resurgence of racial resentment rests with otherwise decent people who tolerate and implement racist demands. Among these are college administrators who give in to black student demands for racially exclusive campus facilities or subsidize a black student union and intimidate a white student union; employers that have one set of performance standards for whites and another for blacks; and union agreements where, should layoffs become necessary, higher seniority whites are laid off before lower seniority blacks in the name of racial balance (Williams, “Kindling for the racial bonfire,” Dayton Daily News).
Speech should be protected because self-reports of the intent of one’s words where race is concerned are unreliable, and the self-reports of criminals are notoriously suspect. Criminals may report that they attacked someone because of that person’s different race, but such statements should not be used as proof of the attacker’s intent. The statement may be motivated by the attacker’s plan to gain future acceptance in a race-based protective gang in prison, or to become a media whore so that he can later repent and be seen as amenable to reform and a second chance, or to obtain attention as a good cause or as a victim himself by his parents who pounded racist ideas into him all his life, somewhat mitigating his actions. Self-reports also suffer from recall bias (people don’t recall accurately the circumstances in a given past situation), lack of appropriate case controls, inadequate objective measurements, and uncontrolled and unevaluated confounding variables. The truth in verbal expressions about race can’t be known precisely.
Every Kind of DiversityPosted on 7/05/2011
In race relations, emphasis is generally placed on the differences between the races and ethnic groups rather than commonality. People remark about things they see in others that are different from what they see in themselves. Children who don’t wear glasses make fun of other children who do. They make fun of other children who wear clothes that are different than their own. They make fun of people whose skin color is different than their own. Boys make fun of girls. Christian children make fun of Jewish children for their differing beliefs. Perhaps people hope that those they ridicule will rebel and enlighten them about the purpose of the difference, or perhaps by making fun of others, people are boosting their own self-esteem for how they are different and somehow better for the difference. For some, there may be an underlying hatred or fear of things that are different.
It’s easy to find a minority or ethnic group to ridicule in America. America is still a melting pot, a metaphor that sees all people assimilating into one big goulash of sharply defined American culture, all cultural diversity melding into part of the overall culture. One American in four is of German ancestry, according to the 1990 Census Bureau. Germans make up the nation’s largest ethnic group. The Irish are next, 1 American in 6; followed by the English, 1 in 8; blacks, 1 in 12; and Italian, 1 in 17. One American in twenty considers him or herself to be just plain American. The results came from a long version of the 1990 census form about ancestry, which went to one household in six. New data places the number of Hispanics living in the United States at 41 million, making Hispanics the new largest minority, or 13 percent of the population.
In the patchwork quilt metaphor, however, each ethnic group is separate and the boundaries between them and other ethic groups are clearly defined. Members of ethnic groups and people outside the groups fear that assimilation of American systems and integration will weaken the ethnicity of the races. So, the patchwork quilt metaphor seems to depict how ethnic groups want to be, perhaps with a little pressure from others in society who want to segregate them so that it may more readily apply negative labels to the group, thereby oppressing it and differentiating the group’s problems from society’s problems. The Salad Bowl metaphor assumes that each ethnic group in the salad retains its unique culture and characteristics, and people recognize that they have a double-belonging, which means having a subculture while recognizing larger, American culture.
The melting pot metaphor, if true, contributes the most to building a unified America, whereas the patchwork quilt reflects the reality of American life more accurately, with the added dimension that ethnic groups appear to want to impress their cultures upon others for profit.
Regardless of the metaphor used, it’s impossible to meet the needs of every individual in an ethnic or minority group. Group organizers, like the federal government who must abide by the wishes of groups that vote them into power, must accommodate as many people as possible, and it doesn’t have enough budget to do this on an individual basis. It is difficult to make arrangements that benefit the greatest number of people while inconveniencing the fewest. However, if preferential treatment isn’t offered, spokespersons for the excluded, special needs groups object. Their objections usually fail to take into consideration that making special arrangements for one group could infringe on the rights of everyone else for fair and equal treatment.
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