The Perils Of Moderate White Racism

In October 2008, my good friend Jeff was working as a canvasser for Barack Obama's first presidential campaign when he heard a story. One of his colleagues knocked on a door, and a woman answered.

“Hi. I was wondering who you’ll be voting for in the upcoming election.”

The woman turned back into the house, calling to an unseen voice: “Honey, who are we voting for?”

The response from a man in the living room: “We’re voting for the n*gger.”

How does one respond to that? Progress, yay?

Suffice it to say, not many people believed America was post-racial, even in the halcyon days of Barack Obama's 2008 election. A piece by Frank Rich in the New York Times just before election day that year makes for interesting reading now, in the aftermath of another election where the vaunted Inevitable Clinton Victory Machine took a knock-out punch from an even greener neophyte. Rich wrote then on the question of race:

Still, the country isn’t there yet, and should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations.

In the aftermath of Obama's sound reelection victory over Mitt Romney in 2012, the GOP decided that being "a virtually all-white party" was going to hamper their long-term prospects, and wrote the Growth and Opportunity Project. In it, they talked about recruiting more candidates with diverse backgrounds and campaigning for votes among more diverse communities.

Instead, Donald Trump happened, and the Republican party got even whiter. At a time when the Congress is getting more and more diverse, the Republican conference in the House of Representatives is staying decidedly white and male. The Democratic side, by contrast, has dipped below 50% white male-composed only in the last few years. The commendability of this achievement is its own condemnation, in that white males comprise only 34% of eligible voters and have never in the history of the United States Congress comprised more than 50% of the adult population at-large.

I wanted to mention those statistics because I'm now going to veer into the anecdotal. After I wrote about John Lewis the other day, a man commented on our Facebook page saying that I was leaving part of the story out, and that Donald Trump may not have been explicitly racist when he called John Lewis's district run-down despite no evidence to support that statement. He, the man defended, may just not understand how cities work.

I'm inclined to appreciate any argument that hinges on Donald Trump not understanding something (see: this domain name). But I also know that Donald Trump has a history of conflating race and the "inner city" (a history I noted in the article on John Lewis) and also of not renting to black tenants at his properties.

Instead of responding to or even accepting the accusation that Donald Trump doesn't want to rent to black people, this man defended it, citing his own experiences in what he called the "ghetto" of east Buffalo, saying, "So from a property owner stand point [sic] if the majority of the race behaved like this I wouldn't rent it to anyone of that race either. I just poored [sic] blood sweat and tears and crap ton of money into making an area liveable [sic] for someone to destroy it? No thank you. I will find someone else to rent it to who knows how to respect things."

I'm not citing this man's name, and I don't mean to put him on blast. He's read articles on this page and commented in a respectful manner, and I think he has a genuine interest in engaging with the information that's out there whether he agrees with it or not, and that's an important attribute to have at a time when the post-racial myth is dissolved into post-truth chicanery. But if you believe that renting to black people is going to lead to your property being condemned, that is a racist belief, whether you consider yourself racist or not.

I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and I have friends and family there who will repeat the following sentence verbatim, as though they all found it in the same illuminating book: "This is the most racially divided we have ever been as a country."

You can only make such a statement with a straight face if you're white, and even then you should at least struggle with it. Our country endured slavery, literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, lynchings. It saw men like John Lewis beaten to within an inch of their life for protesting those conditions. What do we have now that makes white people so aware of their race? An all-too-soon-to-be-ex president who happens to be black? Maybe. News reports about police killing minorities? Well, if hearing about police shootings and stranglings of men of color is making you feel like racial tensions are increasing, imagine what it's been like for people in those communities who have experienced those deaths without media coverage for actual centuries in North America. Things aren't perfect, sure, but feeling less assured of your place in the world as a white man does not constitute racial division anywhere near the level endured by non-white men and women in any decade of American history so far.

In honor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday earlier this week, I encourage everyone, especially the "white moderates" who think things are changing too fast and becoming too tense to consider his words in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. This passage is long, but it is worth posting in its entirety as it remains as relevant as ever to those looking to brush aside racial conversations as "playing the race card":

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In the movie Hidden Figures, a black woman whose career has been slowed by her race is told by a supervisor, "I hope you know that I'm not against y'all." The response: "I'm sure you believe that."

That's the thing about racism. It's a very small number of people who are proud of their racist views (and they all, for the record, endorsed Donald Trump). It's a very large number of us, and I won't exclude myself from this category, who have our blind spots. There are ways in which our culture led us to believe things about race and racial differences that just are not true. As tempting as it is to focus on the fact that around half of all Trump supporters believe that black people are lazier and more violent, we also have to notice that white Democrats don't poll that much better than white Republicans on these questions. There just happen to be more white Republicans.

We look at history, and we see progress. And there is progress. But just because we don't own human beings and we, at least theoretically, let people vote regardless of their skin color doesn't mean that now is the time to slow down. We can't say that LBJ signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and then Obama got elected president, and so everything is fine. In 2016, we had the Republican party in North Carolina actually defend limiting voting access to people of color by arguing that people of color are disproportionately Democratic. This is three years after the GOP resolved to work for those votes and campaign in those communities(and, not coincidentally, three years after the Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court), and North Carolina Republicans decided it would be easier to just keep them from voting. And it worked, and they celebrated it.

We've come a long way as a country, but we haven't come far enough. I know that many of the people who hold these views are decent people who have a lot of love for their fellow man. I know that they aren't actively trying to oppose progress or racial equality. But they are. And until white moderates turn a critical eye to why they believe what they do, we'll have what that canvasser found in Virginia in 2008. You might vote for a black president, but will you rent to him?

#BarackObama #racism #MartinLutherKingJr #postracial