America is talking about race again. With Crash
winning the Oscars and Ice Cube co-producing a series on race
called Black/White on FX, race dialogue is back! But
did racism ever go away? Or did it just change forms and go underground?
It has been well documented over the past five years (since the
turn of the century) that the racial disparities of the last half
of the 20th Century are still very much in evidence today. In some
instances, they are greater than they were 40 or 50 years ago.
These studies, that come from everywhere, from major
universities to private research institutions to civil rights organizations,
all say the same thing: that race is still very much prevalent in
American society, whether we talk about it or not. So since race
differences never went away, can we also assume that racism never
went away? Of course, we can. Thus, the need for a renewed race
dialogue. America is not colorblind. It's so blinded by color that
it just can't see racism. Like looking into sun with Ray-Bans, the
glare doesn't make that object in front of you disappear. You will
still run into it if you don't make an adjustment in your vision.
America never made the adjustment. That's what the movie, Crash,
was about: our refusal to acknowledge race until it confronted us.
Race dialogue took a decade-long hiatus (since President
Bill Clinton's attempt to raise a national dialogue on race almost
ten years ago) as America came up with race "fatigue"
after the Soon Ja Du, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson racial episodes
of the early 1990s. Of course, Clinton's efforts were an attempt
to bring forth what some called "the Third Reconstruction,"
to address the racial disparities left over from the unfinished
work of the 1960's war on poverty that was interrupted during the
Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. By the time the Reagan Revolution
came along, Reagan had declared that poverty had won, and it was
time to end "race policies." By the time George Herbert
Walker Bush came into office, America had developed colorblindness
and public policy initiatives were "race neutral" and
any discussion about race, race differences, and most critically,
racism were now persona non grata in social circles and viewed as
politically incorrect in the public domain. Nobody wanted to talked
about race anymore, and opinion leaders went to great lengths to
convince us that race no longer mattered.
Foolish proclamations were made by a new phenomena,
the Black Conservative—a new type of Negro that was used to deflect
any discussion on race and racism. One such fool, Larry Elder, went
on national television (20/20) and said, "There is no racism
in America." When I want comedic relief, I don't put on Steve
Harvey, or Cedric "The Entertainer," or D.L. Hugley. I
put in that tape of 20/20 of Larry Elder saying "there is no
racism in America."
America, as a nation, tried so hard to believe that
racism no longer exists, that we just began to ignore even the most
obvious demonstrations of racial mistreatment. Hurricane Katrina
was a revelation for many who came of age in the Post-Civil Rights
era, the era where the notion of race-neutrality also came of age.
It's also the age where America came apart - so much so that Colorblindness
became the new "Jim Crow." White flight to the "burbs,"
deconstruction of affirmative action, economic boons of the 1980s
and 1990s, re-emergence of white privilege, the decline of public
education and the 9/11 attacks were all reasons to ignore race over
the past 30 years. The separation in wealth, knowledge, geography
and the nation's shift in political ideology allowed us to deflect
the race debate on every front.
Now America got a chance to see how a simple natural
catastrophe had such stigmatizing racial implications. While the
debate is much more stratified (multi-focal) than the historical
black-white (bi-focal) race politic, race was (and still is) the
underlying factor in a time when class conflict (the politics of
the rich versus the poor) is emerging as the biggest social threat
in America today. While race has long been at the root of the poverty
question, there are some who still refuse to believe that the evacuation
delay in New Orleans, and the subsequent evacuation support efforts
in Houston, and other cities, wasn't about race. America still can't
see what it refuses to acknowledge. But a refusal to see something
doesn't make it disappear.
Author Tim
Wise, appearing before the Urban Issues Forum last week, stated
that "Whites don't get it" when it comes to understanding
their own privilege, racism and how it affects others not part of
the "in-group."
"Whiteblindness," as Wise called, is a refusal
to understand their own pathology with respect to race prejudice,
the privileges that race affords them, denies others, causing society
(largely themselves) to ignore some very fundamental "danger
signs" that, because of their own race biases, don't frame
all white males as suspect, which caused the Columbine school massacre
and the Oklahoma City bombing to occur despite all signs - two events
hidden by white America's "blind spot" - while causing
every Black (male), Arab, Muslim, and now Latino (because of the
anti-immigrant backlash) to be met with suspicion, to be perceived
as the biggest threats to society, profiling them as un-American,
un-democratic, un-patriotic and ungovernable (terroristic). White
radicals who terrorize are just sick, troubled or misguided and
suspicions are limited to their individual acts. Driven by the xenophobic
fears of Whites and passed on to sub-culture populations, all of
our biases we have been propelled by the dominate culture's attitude
on race and race tolerance.
America has crashed and burned on the race issue the
past two decades. But now, at least, the dialogue has returned through
the subtle entrée of art imitating life. Or is it life imitating
art imitating life…? The race dialogue being a throwback of white
minstrels imitating Blacks by wearing blackface then acting out
their pre-defined perceptions of black intellectual and cultural
behavior, allows us to watch movies
and television to sympathize with acts of racism and differences
in racial treatment we thought were days long past, but Blacks knew
- had never went away. It only went away in the eyes of Whites refusing
to see race.
As we know, turning one's head doesn't solve the problem.
It just allows the trash of racism to pile up in the house until
the stench becomes unbearable. Somebody has to say something or
somebody needs to take out the trash. Well, the movie, Crash,
and Ice Cube's Black-White series have decided to say something,
calling out the stench.
Colorblindness was a ploy to refuse to acknowledge
race, but racism is as plain as it's ever been. Thanks to the arts,
we again smell the stench of racism. Now it's time to take out the
trash.
Anthony Asadullah Samad is a national columnist,
managing director of the Urban Issues Forum and author of 50
Years After Brown: The State of Black Equality In America (Kabili
Press, 2005). He can be reached at www.AnthonySamad.com. |