1.7: Liberation Theory Part 3

Theorizing and Fighting Racism

Racism is much more than a set of prejudices people hold. It is deeply entrenched in the fabric of society. Challenging racism involves transforming those deep structures. 

The following is a short excerpt from Chapter 5 of the book Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change by Cynthia Kaufman.

On February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was walking to his father’s fiancée’s home where he was staying, in Miami Gardens, Florida. He was on the way back from a convenience store where he had bought iced tea and candy. Martin was confronted by George Zimmerman, who was a neighborhood watch leader. Martin was African American and the neighborhood was largely white. Zimmerman called the police and was told to leave Martin alone. Zimmerman decided to follow Martin anyway. He challenged Martin’s presence in the neighborhood, shot and killed him, and then claimed he had done it in self-defense. Police accepted Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense and did not arrest him. Outrage around the injustice of the situation ignited protest and other forms of mobilization all around the country. Local officials were pressured to indict Zimmerman, and eventually Zimmerman was brought to trial. That trial resulted in a verdict of “not guilty,” setting off another wave of protest.

In the following years, the country began to focus on what had been a largely silent epidemic of black men being murdered by police and their deaths not being taken seriously by the legal system. When Michael Brown was murdered by the police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, that town’s legal system came under federal scrutiny. It became clear that not only were the police able to murder black men with impunity, but the local government was engaged in systematic harassment of the local population by charging high fees for the smallest of infractions, so that the poor people of color were largely funding government services. A few months after Brown’s death, Eric Garner was put into a chokehold by New York City police. He died, shortly after saying “I can’t breathe.”

Responding to these and several other horrific high-profile cases, Alicia Garza used her Twitter account to communicate with friends. She started #BlackLivesMatter, which became a slogan for a movement to challenge police violence, and other injustices in the legal system, including mass incarceration.

Why was it that many whites could empathize with Zimmerman’s concern that Martin was in the neighborhood? How did it come to be that almost one African American person a day was killed by police? How did the country move from having a very successful civil rights movement in the middle of the twentieth century, to a situation where the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with over 40 percent of those incarcerated being African American?

Just before this time, many people in the United States had begun to claim that our nation was “postracial.” Having elected an African American for president, and seeing many famous and powerful people in the public eye of all races, some had begun to think that racism was a problem on its way out, and that the best way to deal with it was by not talking about it.

For as long as racism has existed, there have been people working hard to challenge it, and many of those challenges have been successful. From the movement to abolish slavery to the movement to allow Chinese immigrants to become citizens, people of color have achieved major victories in this struggle. And, while people of color have usually been the ones leading these struggles, many whites have also dedicated their lives to challenging racism.

Mab Segrest is one such activist. In Memoir of a Race Traitor, Segrest tells the story of her work fighting the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis in the 1980s. Born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, her antiracist politics were forged in family battles over the civil rights movement. In sharp contrast to the rest of her family, she empathized with the black kids who desegregated her high school just as she entered ninth grade, and with the four girls killed in a church basement by racist bombers that same month in Birmingham, Alabama. After moving to North Carolina for college, Segrest realized that she was a lesbian and recognized the way that this difference from the mainstream further estranged her from the oppressive politics she had been raised to uphold.

In 1984, Segrest helped found North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence and became its first staff member. For many years, Segrest drove all over the state investigating acts of racist violence and or ganizing to challenge them. Looking back at that period in her life, Segrest writes, “What I uncovered in North Carolina in the 1980s will be our legacy into the next century, unless we intervene. The racism, the homophobia, the hatred of Jews and women, the greed accelerate, and they sicken us all. . . .There is a lot to be done, but how we go about it is also important. Because all we have ever had is each other.” Reflecting on the title of her book, Segrest writes, “It is not my people, it’s the idea of race I’m betraying.”

The idea of race

As we have seen in previous chapters, racism has been and continues to be an important part of the US political landscape. Yet, race has not always been an important social category. People’s consciousness of the distinctions between their group and others on the basis of physical differences has developed over time, and the values assigned to those differences have been determined more by politics than by science or common sense.

The concept of race has had such powerful effects on our social system that it is hard to imagine a world without racial categorization. The idea of the human species being divided into biologically distinct races goes back only about as far as the conquest of the Americas. Before that, people hated one another on the basis of all sorts of differences, but the nature of those dislikes was not centered on the idea of race.

We often think of race as the description of the natural differences that resulted from human beings evolving in different parts of the world, but biologists do not accept that popular concept of race. People who believe in race as biological fact have never come to agreement on how many races there are or how they are divided. Where on the globe do people stop being Asian and start being white? Are Arabs white or Asian or African? Aren’t Native Americans from Asia, and what about Jews and biracial people? Which physical differences mark someone as white as opposed to black? Although we usually refer to race as being marked by skin color, many “white” people have darker skin than many “black” people do. Our racial designations are built upon a complex mixture of skin color, hair texture, eyelid shape, lip shape, noses, family histories, geographic accidents, and political ideology.

All of these complications lead Michael Omi and Howard Winant to assert that

race is a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies. Although the concept of race invokes seemingly biologically based human characteristics (so-called phenotypes), selection of these particular human features for purposes of racial signification is always and necessarily a social and historical process.

To say that our popular ideas about race are not based in biological truths does not mean that race does not exist as a social reality. Race has become one of the most important axes of social power in the modern world.

Racial formation in the United States

The “discovery” of the Americas by English, Spanish, and other adventurers created such a cultural, economic, and physical dislocation as to produce the first “racial” formation in human history. Linked by their common goal of economic exploitation, the competitive English, Spanish, Dutch, and other explorers all began to see themselves as on the same side in one sense. Omi and Winant argue that at the time of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, 

the “discovery” signaled a break from previous proto-racial awareness by which Europe contemplated its “others” in a relatively disorganized fashion. The “conquest of America” was not simply an epochal historical event—however unparalleled in importance. It was also the advent of a consolidated social structure of exploitation, appropriation, domination, and signification. Its representation, first in religious terms, later in scientific and political ones, initiated modern racial awareness. It was the inauguration of racialization on a world-historical scale.

Although the eighteenth century in Europe saw the rise of ideas of natural rights, it also saw Europeans increasingly involved in practices of colonialism and slavery. The contradiction between belief in equality and their desire to treat others unequally necessitated the development of increasingly sophisticated systems of justification. The idea that human beings can be divided into fundamentally different types helped solve this problem. Thus, Thomas Jefferson, while arguing for equal rights for “all men” simultaneously argued that there were natural differences between people that should determine how we treat them. “Will not a lover of natural history, then, one who views the gradations in all the animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of Man as distinct as nature has formed them?” The gradations between European and Native American “man” was an essential distinction for those who wanted to expand their fortunes in the American colonies.

From its very beginning, the Anglo-Saxon occupation of North America was in the form of settler colonies. This distinguishes it from colonies in which the conquerors go to a place and set up a system of government with the sole purpose of extracting wealth from the indigenous population. The fundamental premise of a settler colony is that the indigenous people are to be eliminated, and a satellite of the original society is to be set up. The rationale of racial superiority was seen as an adequate excuse for the wholesale slaughter of any indigenous inhabitants.

Institutionalized Racism

Sometimes when people talk about racism, they talk as if it were just a matter of attitudes. It is common for people to see racism as existing be-cause some people believe that other people are inferior. While prejudiced attitudes do exist and are an important part of the picture, the way that racial differences have become woven into the fabric of society is far more important.

Racism is anchored and reproduced in people’s psyches, but it is also embedded in our social institutions. Slavery and the extermination of Native Americans are two clear examples of institutionalized racism. They were not motivated by the psychic need of whites to feel superior. Rather, they were based on raw economic interests and sanctioned through Anglo-Saxon legal and religious institutions. The psychological dimension developed alongside the institutional to help rationalize the brutality in the eyes of the dominant group. 

When we say that slavery was a form of institutionalized racism, what we mean is that it was not merely perpetuated by individual people on other individual people. Rather, it was built into the legal, political, and economic structures of society. It was enshrined in the Constitution. It was built into property law. Some people were considered property, and others had rights to control them as they would any other piece of property. Racism was institutionalized in the structures that determined who got a formal education and who was not allowed access to school, who was allowed to go to church and who was not allowed to read or study religion, and in legal strictures on who was and who wasn’t allowed to marry whom. When we say that racism continues to be institutionalized, we mean that there are structures in society that tend to privilege whites and disadvantage people of color. The “playing field” isn’t level; the teams have not had access to the same training. One of the most important contributions of the theory of institutionalized racism is that it takes discussions of race outside of the arena of personal morality. Discussions of racism often bog down when one side sees an example of racism, and the other doesn’t see that anyone is acting in an immoral way.

 

 

The theory of institutionalized racism says that whites are privileged by the system whether they like it or not, and that there can be racist out-comes even when no one is acting in a malicious way. Whites are privileged by having better access to good schools and housing, by being considered more intelligent and trustworthy, and by being held up as the social models of beauty. Those of us who are white receive this privilege even when we think it is a terrible thing.

 

 

 

While discussions of racism sometimes lead whites to feel guilty for their privilege, often the best way to deal with privilege is to acknowledge its existence and use it to dismantle the systems that perpetuate it. When white people challenge racism, they are more likely to be taken seriously than are people of color. And, often, simply having a white person acknowledge the racism in a given situation can be a powerful force for making others take it seriously.

 

These patterns of privilege and disadvantage are structured into society in a variety of ways. We can fight racism more effectively if we understand 

 

the different ways that it works. Below, I’ll describe five different mechanisms through which institutionalized racism works: overtly biased laws; the rules that organizations use; the legacies of racism that perpetuate un-equal outcomes; institutional tolerance for racist actions by people in positions of power; and finally the ways that racism is embedded in culture.

 

To understand how each of these forms of institutional racism works, let’s look at the example of housing. Housing segregation is one of the most obvious aspects of racial discrimination at the present time. Where we live has an incredible impact on the quality of the education we receive and the kinds of opportunities we will have later in life. The theory of institutionalized racism can help us understand why housing segregation remains so persistent.

 

 

For over one hundred years after slavery ended, much US housing was still segregated by law. Towns had laws that prevented people of color from moving into them. Many of these housing covenants excluded European Jews as well as people of color. In the 1960s, legal challenges began to put an end to this practice.

 

Although the dismantling of this first type of institutionalized racism—overtly racist laws—has been the law of the land for the recent decades, more subtle forms of institutional racism persist. The practices of banks have been some of the most powerful forces keeping housing segregated. At times, bank officers have literally taken maps and drawn a line around neighborhoods predominantly inhabited by people of color; they then refused to offer loans within the area marked by that line. “Redlining,” as this practice is called, and restrictive covenants that don’t allow people of color to move into certain neighborhoods are now both illegal. Although some financial institutions and housing developers continue these practices through covert rules—our second form of institutional racism—they can be sued when their practices are discovered.

Often, of course, it is hard to prove that an institution uses such discriminatory rules. And discriminatory outcomes—such as fewer or lower quality home loans for people of color—might be explained by our third category of institutional racism: the lack of a level playing field. Fewer people of color may get housing loans from a particular bank simply because they have less money than white people. People of color might not have enough income to get a bank loan because they are subject to job discrimination, which prevents them from getting promotions. Many people of color have little money for a down payment because their parents were not homeowners. And their parents may not have been homeowners be-cause of overt racist laws from an earlier period. Many of the programs developed in the New Deal to promote home ownership among the lower-middle classes specifically excluded people of color.14 This and other earlier forms of institutional racism have led to tremendous differences in levels of home ownership, and thus inherited wealth, between whites and people of color. These differences in wealth are much greater than the differences in income level that people usually focus on when talking about inequality. According to Field Guide to the US Economy, “In 2001 some 21% of white households reported having received an inheritance at some time, with an average value of $274,000. Only 8% of African Americans and 3% of Hispanic households had received inheritances, averaging $78,000 and $22,000 respectively.”

Finally, a person of color may not get a bank loan as a result of the fourth type of institutionalized racism: individual bank employees may be racist and can choose not to approve loans for people of color, or they can be offered loans with worse terms. The housing market crash of 2008 had dramatically disproportionate effects on communities of color. In that period, people of color were 30 percent more likely than whites with similar credit scores to get loans with bad terms.  While this was often a result of personal racism, it becomes institutionalized racism when an institution, the bank in this case, allows the person to act in racist ways. In this case, the institution is complicit in the racist behavior through its passivity. In analyzing this type of action, people often talk about gatekeepers: people in key positions within an institution who prevent the promotion of people of color or who use their institutional power to prevent structural and cultural changes from developing in the institution. We see this especially in professional settings, where there are less objective criteria for an employer’s decision-making. Tenure committees at universities are a prime example.

 

 

The fifth form of institutionalized racism is the way that racist ideas come to be embedded in and perpetuated through cultural practices. In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen chronicles the numerous ways that children in our schools are taught a history that centers white experience as normative, and minimizes the challenges faced by, and accomplishments of people of color.  Attempts to shift the educational system to fair representation has been an important area of struggle, beginning with some huge victories in having ethnic studies programs at colleges and universities. 

 

Civil Rights

One of the most effective strategies of anti-racism has been the demand for civil rights. While human rights are the protections we believe we deserve simply on the basis of being human, civil rights are the protections we ought to have as members of a society. They are usually thought of as the right to equal protection under the law and the right to freedom from discrimination. The demand for civil rights has been at the core of movements for racial justice since at least the end of slavery. 

Much of the power of the concept of civil rights is that it uses dominant ideas of “equality and justice for all,” which resonate with large numbers of people in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. was an expert at using the dominant values of the majority society to build support for radical change. As with demands for equality, demands for civil rights can sound moderate but end up being very radical. By pushing these ideas into new areas, by insisting that they apply to everyone, they end up having deeply transformative implications.

The civil rights movement, which began in the 1940s, was probably the single most important movement of the twentieth century. It was enormously effective at achieving its goals. Before the movement, African Americans, especially in the South, were second-class citizens by law. They were not allowed to use facilities, such as local municipal swimming pools, water fountains, and bathrooms that were reserved for whites. They were prevented from voting and were refused housing in white neighborhoods. They were sent to second-rate schools and barred from state universities. And they were required by law to defer to the needs and desires of whites in many arenas of life, such as seating on buses and space on sidewalks. The situation was not very different from apartheid in South Africa.

 

 

Thousands of African Americans and their white allies engaged in sit-ins, boycotts, and other forms of protest to challenge segregation. They used the media effectively, appealing to the better aspects of the dominant ideology.

 

 

 

After the civil rights movement, it was no longer legal for states to discriminate. This change led to the elections of African American government officials, from city councilors to senators. It also led to an ongoing struggle for better schools, jobs, and housing. And probably most significantly, it led to a major cultural change, through which African Americans no longer were forced by law to defer to whites.

 

In addition to its impact on the lives of African Americans, the civil rights movement inspired major changes in US society as a whole. It inspired movements among other groups that were not given their full civil rights as equal citizens. Beginning in the early 1960s, movements for cultural and political equality developed among Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.

On college campuses, these movements led to demands for ethnic studies and women’s studies programs, and, in general, a less biased curriculum. They led to the development of the idea of student empowerment, the demand for free speech on campuses, and the abolition of the principle that colleges were to act like they were the parents of students. This was the beginning of the student movement that would eventually develop into a full-scale movement to oppose the war in Vietnam.

 

 

We are at a time of extreme backash against those wins, and the fight for civil rights, and equality in all spheres of life, continues.

Activity\(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Question

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling.

1. What was meaningful to you in this reading?
2. How has racism impacted your life?
3. How might it matter if race is a social construct or it is natural? 
4. What are some forms of institutionalized racism you see in present day society?
5. What are soem forms of institutionalized racism you could imagine oraganing to challenge in your community?

Attributions

• Adapted from "Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change, 2nd Ed” by Cynthia Kaufman is copyrighted. It has been reproduced with permission from the author and publisher.