Is America a Racist Society?

In my previous post, I discussed basic aspects of racism as it operates in American society. I turn now to analyzing the different settings of racism. The three arenas of human involvement are culture, social structure, and interpersonal relations.

Cultural Racism

The concept of culture refers to the patterning of humanly created resources, both information and artifact, which members of a society access to understand and direct their lives. Much of culture consists of ideas — think of beliefs (directions for thought), values (directions for feeling) and norms (directions for acting). It is proper to speak of societal culture when most people share these understandings. However, those “invisible” ideas are not simply stored in people’s heads. They receive concrete form in patterns of spoken and written expression, and in such media formats as books, magazines, TV shows, movies, newspapers, websites, and signs. Add to this the visual representations or images of categories of people that circulate widely. Information presented in such formats has “public” as well as “private” meaning.

When a culture allows the dissemination of degrading ideas and images of minorities, or glorifies people who support that degradation, the results are problematic for all of society’s members. As we know, sports teams (if sometimes grudgingly) are abandoning the use of minorities as mascots. Well-known consumer products (think of “Aunt Jemima” or “Uncle Ben”) are shifting their marketing. Of special note, and currently contested, is the continuing celebration of historic figures who supported slavery or other forms of subjugation in public statuary and the naming of streets, buildings, parks, and universities. How should we treat such figures in school texts? What should we do about flags and banners that proclaim white supremacy? There is a vast collection of old books and movies that still circulate insulting images of minority people.

Confronting these issues means balancing the commitments to free speech against the continuing effects of public degradation. I think most people would acknowledge that we should remember the past (if only to ensure that such practices do not happen again), but we should also “frame” that history to make clear the political character of honoring and to identify the damages that occurred.

Structural Racism

It is one thing to present ideas and images publicly; it is another to build that information into the operating procedures of groups and organizations. This is what happens in the case of structural racism. In various ways, and through various rationales, social bodies put restrictions on minority people’s movements and possibilities for accomplishment.

Again, criminal justice procedures — especially whether police treat minorities differently than they do other categories of people — are at the center of a national debate. However, almost every social institution (economics, education, politics, religion, healthcare, law, and recreation among them) has practiced forms of restricted access and exclusion.

In the past, these restrictions operated openly. Commonly, legislatures and courts sanctioned that subjugation or simply permitted local customs to prevail. However, and as sociologist William Julius Wilson has argued in several books, older legalized patterns of discrimination have shifted to more subtle, economically based forms. Although minority people now have legal access to most of society’s resources, they find themselves blocked by their relative (compared to the majority) lack of wealth and income. To use the imagery of Martin Luther King, Jr., it means little to have the right to go into a restaurant of your choosing if you cannot afford to buy a meal there. All of us know that economic capacity is crucial to making one’s way in the above-named institutions. We know too that possession of income (the money to buy things) is quite different from possession of wealth (the more stable platform of economic prosperity passed to one’s descendants). Absence of economic resources causes people to live in the most dangerous neighborhoods, attend the most challenged schools, have difficulty feeding their families, and indeed have access to reasonable employment.

Wilson stresses that the new pattern also fragments the minority group itself. More educated and better-positioned people take advantage of society’s more open conditions. They move up and away. By contrast, the poorest ones find themselves trapped in urban or rural enclaves far away from employment centers.

Be clear also, as Wilson maintains, that racial discrimination, blatant or not, has not vanished. Localities continue to erect impediments to voting, to improved education, and to family healthcare. For such reasons, many minority people continue to mistrust, even fear, such “authorities” as the courts, police, public health departments, school, welfare, immigration, and so forth.

Interpersonal Racism

For the most part, our “open” society allows people to harbor pernicious ideas and to express these in the privacy of their homes. What we must not allow are behaviors that damage other people’s safety and life opportunities.

Senator Scott may be correct that race-based assaults, intimidations, and insinuations are not as common as they once were. There is hate crimes legislation to prevent the worst examples of this. However, minority parents continue to have “the talk” with their children: how to handle themselves in a racially charged situation, especially when they find themselves stopped by police.

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In this author’s opinion, the unapologetic use of n-word has declined during the last half-century; so has race-based brawling. Older patterns of dominance and deference have given way to a cooler, if wary civility. Poor minorities live apart, sometimes in urban ghettos. That marginalization of the poorest Americans does not halt the activities of white supremacist groups, who bond and plan their aggression via the internet. Note also that large segments of the population are committed to white protectionism: “us” versus “them.” Of even more concern is the fact that millions of minority people live in circumstances where they must fear for their security each day, commonly from assaults by other minorities who vent their frustrations on them.

It is because a racist system makes personal safety, self-respect, and economic sustenance problematic that these injustices proliferate. None of this excuses people attacking one another, in effect fighting for the scraps of life. Racist ideas operate as much, or more, on the minority as they do on the dominant groups.

Deciding whether America is “racist” means examining this broader range of issues.