Racism

For several years Los Angeles has been the center of the world’s interest in the sensational. It began with the on-camera bludgeoning of a African-American motorist at the hands of white police officers. When the resultant trial of those officers ended in an acquittal, parts of the black and Hispanic communities erupted in the worst urban uprising in U.S. history. This trauma was followed one year later by a devastating series of fires that blackened thousands of choice acreage in the Los Angeles basin. The fires were the handiwork of arsonists. Then came a severe earthquake and the loss of lives and destruction of properties, and the disruption of the flow of commerce for months. A few months later the ex-wife of one of America’s famed athletes was murdered along with a family friend. The athlete-celebrity was charged with the murder, and there followed court proceedings that prompted some members of the fourth estate to dub it “the trial of the century.”

It wasn’t the trial of the century. In the 1990s there were still some Americans who could recall the Lindbergh kidnapping and trial; the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the husband-and-wife team accused of espionage and later executed, the first Americans thus sentenced by an American civil court; war crime trials from Nuremberg to Tokyo; the trial of the infamous Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, archiect of the extermination of six million Jews; the sensational trial of Francis Gary Powers, whose clandestine U-2 flight over Russia was terminated when he was blown out of the sky by a well-aimed missile; the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Supreme Court. No, the trial of O. J. Simpson was by no means the trial of the century. Why then did it become, and why has it remained, such a traumatic experience for most Americans?

The Simpson trial once again raised the specter of racism in American life—racism at the core of a major urban police department, racism as an underlying reality that haunts an America already deeply divided over a wide variety of issues ranging from the economy to the political viability of the two-party system, racism as an integral part of the very process of justice in an American courtroom. But this issue of racism and the courts was dragged out in the open long before O. J. graduated from junior high. For many black Americans and certainly for the white press, the “trial of the century” took place in 1955, just one year after the Brown decision, in a sweltering courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi, the county of Tallahatchie.

Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, two white men, had been arrested and charged with the brutal murder of a black teenager. Emmit Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, and while there apparently committed the unpardonable crime of making some flirtatious remarks to a white woman, the wife of Bryant. Bryant and Milam, half-brothers by birth and unified in their hatred of blacks, found young Till and decided, as Milam said, to “make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.” They dragged him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head with a .45, wired him to a cotton-gin fan and dumped his body into the water. The trial lasted five days even though the outcome had already been determined. The all-white jury deliberated exactly sixty-seven minutes, and Bryant and Milam were set free. The trial was over, but the coverage accorded it in the national press was a turning point in the handling of high-profile law cases that touched on the civil rights of black Americans. Until the Till trial the press—really the Northern press—had ignored murders and maimings of blacks. After all, such things happened in the South, which was considered backward, poor and without significant clout in Washington. The exposure of Southern justice in a Sumner courtroom changed all that.

The Till case also cast another layer of doubt across the consciousness of black people in the American system of justice. To be sure, in 1954 the Supreme Court of the land had decided in favor of blacks by ending the system of segregation in public schools. Yet when the Simpson case ended in the summer of 1995, for most Americans, black and white, the issue wasn’t over. The decision for acquittal released a toxic cloud over the nation, an acid rain of latent feelings about race that simply won’t go away.

Of course the America of the 1990s is not the America of the 1950s. For one thing, white America cannot, and does not, look on black America in the same way as it did in the fifties. Brown v. Board of Education changed all that. Prejudice and discrimination still exists, but it can no longer be sanctioned by law to the extent it had been before 1954. The struggle had taken nearly four hundred years, but the dream had now been extended to all Americans by law.

Education is one thing; justice in a courtroom where blacks were not always permitted to serve on juries was quite another. In short, black participation in the justice system is a recent advance in human relations. It is still haunted by this dark specter of racism. The Simpson trial was viewed by many Americans as something of a parable of race relations, and, unfortunately, the protagonists or the players in the drama tended always to be black and white. But the Los Angeles of 1995 is made up of multiple ethnicities ranging from Asian to Samoan, Pakistani to Somali, and is actually a mosaic of the world’s Third World peoples. The trial itself was an apt picture of the racial complexity of the area, with an Asian-American judge; African-American, Hispanic-American and Anglo-American jury; an African-American defendant; and teams of lawyers representing a mix of blacks and whites. This was truly an all-American courtroom. This was not Grandfather’s courtroom. But before it was over, it was Grandfather’s emotional nightmare.

But if L.A. was exposed as a microcosm of a society not yet free of its historical obsession, the rest of the onlookers in the world community could scarcely breathe easily in the wake of their own problems in human relations. The Middle East is still a smoldering powder keg as Arabs eye Jews with suspicion and scorn, while many Jews view any attempt at peace as a sellout by their leaders. The murder of Israel’s prime minister, Yitzak Rabin, in November of 1995 by a Jewish student served notice on the world community that hatred can mask itself as political ideology sanctioned by religious fundamentalism. No one looking on as Serbs and Croats slaughter each other could fail to recognize ancient tribalism at work, attitudes which if expressed in South Africa would have been labeled racist. Indeed, racism has stained human relations throughout Europe as skinheads and neo-Nazis have emerged to challenge the notion that Europe had purged itself of the grisly racism of Eichmann and Hitler.

Racism’s Development as an Ideology

But what is racism? As an idea or concept, it seems to have emerged among Europeans caught in the turbulence of social and political change during the mid-nineteenth century. These changes included the creation of the nation-state and the rise of a new class of people, the middle class or the bourgeoisie. New ideas in the sciences and radical thinking about the very nature of everyday life were changing the way people saw themselves and their destinies. The grip of the church was being loosened, and reason had come to play the central role in explaining everything. Accompanying these crucial intellectual movements were important breakthroughs in industry and rapid expansion in colonial acquisitions. Of signal importance was the colonial exploits of Europeans in “the scramble for Africa.” This was the era of men like Cecil Rhodes, who, in his famous remark revealing the passion of his life, exclaimed, “I would annex the planets if I could.”

During this turbulent era, from the third quarter of the nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth, race thinking, which had surfaced in the eighteenth century as one of the many opinions that intellectuals debated, began to develop as an ideology among Europeans. It was the development of race thinking as an ideology that gave racism its strength later on. For an ideology carries with it the ability to offer its adherents a rationale, a focal point, for their cultural apparatus. When racism, for example, became an ideology in Germany, it formed the basis for Hitler’s elaborate rationale for the extermination of Jews. By then racism was simply the ideology of white, Aryan superiority.

With the rise of colonialism came unprecedented wealth. This taste of wealth led to the need for further expansion and greater wealth. In the process the emerging bourgeoisie in Europe were exposed to peoples of other cultures and vastly different lifestyles, and the establishment of foreign policy became necessary. These people possessed vast riches whose attraction to Europeans proved to be irresistible. In the process of securing these colonial empires, and subjugating millions of these people, all of whom were people of color, there arose a need for some rationale by which such conquests could be validated. One such device was to develop theories of superiority based on “race.”

Early attempts to define a people as a people were tied more to matters of nationhood than to physical characteristics. Nevertheless, theories of nationhood can easily devolve into ideologies of nationalism, and nationalism takes on an almost mystical quality, a quasi-religious character, usually associated with the notion of “chosenness.” At the vicious end of that movement are some of the most heinous atrocities in history, perpetrated by peoples who have felt themselves to be chosen to national superiority over others. It should come as no surprise that this notion of chosenness was usually baptized by religious holy water.

Viewed more romantically, on the surface at least, the term is related to the idea that all of humankind is gathered in “races” and that while all races are created equal, some are more equal than others. Scientists have argued for some time now that the term race has lost all meaning, especially among lay men and women. The problem with the term, say these scientists, is that it is usually loaded with the private meanings of those persons who use it. Thus it is devoid of approved scientific meanings and becomes something more like an obsession, a bias, a dilemma. Other scientists argue instead that not only does the term have meaning but it alone explains why such enormous gaps exist between people of different racial groups. This debate rages currently in the United States because of the conservative tilt in national politics as it affects social policy.

Education. The issue of race has figured prominently in crucial matters related to education. In 1923 Carl Campbell Bringham authored a book entitled A Study in American Intelligence in which he decried what he called the taint of racial admixture in America, a threat that would place the country in a jeopardy far worse than any other European or American nation. To reinforce his assertions, Bringham used the findings of other scientists to categorize American society into four groups, with Nordic, blue-eyed people at the top and people of African origin at the bottom. Variations of this cataloging had occurred before within the scientific community, and all such efforts had been banished under the weight of more enlightened investigations. But in 1925 Bringham became a director of testing for the College Board and became the architect of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which ever since has been the sole instrument in the hands of the educational establishment to measure student abilities judged suitable for admission in the nation’s colleges. The question this authorship raises even at this late date is whether the test was intended to measure “merit” or whether it was an artful dodge perpetrated by a racist, by which cultural advantage was the real criterion on which “aptitude” was based.

Affirmative Action. Affirmative action developed in the United States to offset tendencies toward discrimination in the workplace—discrimination that was aimed particularly at black males. As a federal policy, affirmative action began to take shape during the administration of President Richard Nixon. It was one of the first coherent plans aimed at ensuring that blacks would be hired in federal contracting jobs. Nixon’s plan, called the Philadelphia Plan of 1969, was an attempt to provide jobs for blacks. But Nixon, always the shrewd politician, had his own motives. The plan was also an attempt to undercut the influence of the Democratic Party among white union workers. The argument was that if white workers could be persuaded that their jobs were being taken by blacks, they would become open to switching their allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans. The plan began to work, and in the years that followed there emerged a distinct segment of the work force identified by the 1980s as “Reagan Democrats.”

In recent years, as the political climate of the country moved further to the right, the ever-present attack on affirmative action intensified. The emotional language most often expressed was that whites were now the targets of “reverse discrimination.” This became the new code phrase with which to attack nearly all the rights minorities had gained during the late sixties and early seventies. The feeling was, and it was more feeling than fact, that minority gains were made almost entirely at the expense of white Americans; nonwhites had secured preferential treatment in every field from college entrance to jobs in construction.

It can be seen that from the beginning, affirmative action has been an element of political strategy used by all parties and that race has been a major tool in such political maneuvers. By now most people in the black and minority communities—those most affected by the Supreme Court decision outlawing affirmative action—have concluded that attempts to eradicate affirmative action had been motivated by racist attitudes all along. They feel that even though the words employed to either defend or defeat affirmative action had been selected so as to include such important considerations as gender, religion or national origin, just beneath the surface, in the collective gut of most white Americans, the issue was always about race: “The niggers are gettin’ all the breaks. They’re takin’ over the country.”

Social Science. The crusade against affirmative action became important because it enabled some social scientists to emerge with research which seemed to prove the intellectual inferiority of minorities, especially blacks. Such publications have been around for years in both America and Europe and, in light of the history of racialist writings, sound like the material stemming from the days of slavery. But this new research is far more sophisticated, and while most educators and politicians disclaim any belief in its findings, the material has had a powerful impact on those who claim to have a contract with America. The gist of research by such scholars as Arthur Jensen of the University of California and Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein is that on the basis of class or genetics, black people are inferior intellectually to whites and Asians. The implications of this research have added scientific support to emotion-laden issues ranging from immigration to SAT scores to affirmative action. The intellectual conflict over intelligence has also helped expose the reality of race relations in the country—black people and white people share in a common obsession, and seem to be linked inextricably by this specter.

Why does such research focus on black people of African descent? After all, the United States has always been a hyphenated society, an immigrant haven. Are black people really so inferior to all other immigrants that special scientific research is needed to demonstrate it? Or is there a bias among some scientists?

It has been noted that scientists who delve into matters of genetics are usually conservative. Dinesh D’Souza, a provocateur of the far right, released a seven-hundred-word tome in September 1995 which joined the battle of eugenics and race thinking. “Poverty and deprivation are not the cause,” he says,“but the result of low intelligence” (quoted in Fish, p. 132). D’Souza, an immigrant from Bombay, is the darling of the American Enterprise Institute, funded by the ultraconservative Olin Foundation. His argument was so offensive that several African-American conservatives who had been associated with anti-affirmative-action legislation for years resigned in protest from the institute. On the other hand, scholars who tend to criticize conservative findings in the name of environmental causality tend to be more liberal in their leanings. So it seems that scholars arrive at the laboratory with ideological agendas. They are looking for something to prove, and so proceed to prove it.

White Racism

Race relations in the United States have been and continue to be a family affair between white Americans and their fellow African-American citizens. This has been true since Thomas Jefferson expressed the wish that people of African descent could be proven as human as persons of European background. He clearly had his doubts—this after he had declared that all men were created equal. To be sure there have always been other “racial groups” on the scene, and by now more are coming into the country by the planeload. They don’t have a clue about what they’re getting into as far as human relations are concerned. But when Americans talk about race relations, they usually mean black-white relations. And this affair between blacks and whites is not always, or even usually, a study in logic or rationality. It is about perceptions and emotions. Gayle Pemberton, an American educator writing about the difficult task of teaching minority students, put it succinctly: “Existing simultaneously in American culture are two competing emotions: the first is that minority people are just like white people; the second is that they are not. And individuals are rarely conscious of how they select the line where the first ends and the second begins.” The key here is the idea that white people are the standard by which all other nonwhites are to be measured. It is this idea that lies at the heart of any definition of racism.

Racism as an idea is inextricably linked with Europeans and their American cousins. To be sure, there are all sorts of attitudes and horrific behaviors among all peoples of the earth. Getting along has never been easy. But if you ask nonwhite people who have been exposed to white people for any length of time, they will identify racism as a peculiar “white problem.” This was the finding of the Kerner Report after the devastating riots that enveloped several of America’s largest cities in the late sixties. After acknowledging that an understanding of these riots was “a massive tangle of issues and circumstances,” the commission concluded that “certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cites since the end of World War 2” (Report, p. 203).

The problem seems to be an attitude, and it can be so intrinsic to one’s self-definition as to be unrecognized. It is an internalized ideology of an assumed superiority over anyone who is nonwhite. Technically, it is called the ideology of white supremacy. But surely this view of racism that places the blame solely at the feet of white persons is patently false. Racism exists in all parts of the world, and among or between all peoples. Hannah Arendt argued years ago that two ideologies had managed to survive in the tough arena of historical debate—the one having to do with the economic struggle of classes and the other with the struggle of races. That Americans could still be impressed with the latter after all the country has been through testifies to the virility of this ideology. The ideology of white supremacy has become a given, the starting point in the assessment of nonwhite persons whether they are applying for a job at Joe’s pizza joint or running for president of the United States.

Conclusion

What the matter of racism comes down to, at the popular level, is far more simple than studies in genetics or environmental factors. The matter comes down to color. American society is still a “pigmentocracy” in spite of all the so-called progress the country has made in race relations. Persons are judged by the color of their skin by people who have never heard of Bringham or D’Souza. When this judgment has the clout of institutional power, institutional racism is the result. Most white Americans rarely consider the impact of this dimension of the problem because they have never suffered through the experience. White Americans do not suffer discrimination because of ideas that nonwhite persons have of them. One suspects that to avoid the possibility of this, white Americans have rejected social legislation that would level the playing field.

Here, as always, the issue is not the progress of a democratic society toward equality. The issue is power. Racism, finally, is just another notion in the heads of people who play at being deity—until it is married to power. So at the end of the century we are faced with a dilemma which has embarrassed the nation since its very beginning, the struggle, as one black ethicist put it, between “powerless conscience and conscienceless power.” Put that way, the resolutions may not lie in the direction of politics, or science. The issue is, as it has always been, a spiritual one. And the solution lies in the willingness of people—whatever their skin color—to yield to the God who looks not on the outward appearance but on the heart.

» See also: Ethnocentrism

» See also: Multiculturalism

» See also: Neighborhood

» See also: Pluralism

» See also: Social Action

References and Resources

Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); D. D’Souza, Illiberal Education (New York: Ashland, 1992); S. Fish, “How the Pot Got to Call the Kettle Black,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1993; A. Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner’s, 1992); R. J. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); W. Pannell, The Coming Race Wars: A Cry for Reconciliation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1993); G. Pemberton, On Teaching the Minority Student (booklet; Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College, 1988); T. Powell, The Persistence of Racism in America (Lanham, Md.: Littlefield Adams, 1995); Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968); S. Terkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites Think About the American Obsession (New York: New York Press, 1992); C. West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon, 1993).

—William Pannell