Here is the first installment of our series “Defining Racism in the 21st Century” written by Katelin Hansen who consistently serves up good thought provoking posts on the relationship between Christianity and race at her blog By Their Strange Fruit Here we go…….
Modern racism is more subtle than it used to be. The foolish will get confused about the difference, and think that racism doesn’t exist anymore. Although we don’t sit in different parts of the movie theater anymore, we now constantly breathe in the smog of racism that Beverly Tatum describes: “sometimes it is so thick it is visible, other times it is less apparent, but always, day in and day out, we are breathing it in.” (Tatum, 2007)
Dr. Tatum does not characterize racism as overt discrimination or individual acts of hate. Rather, she defines it as one’s benefiting from a system of privileges based on race that is subtly ingrained in the surrounding culture, making it difficult to detect. In this sense, all white people are racist; we benefit from this system of privileges. It is possible for people of color to be prejudiced on the basis of race, but the social system is never in their favor.
Does an act of racism require the ‘intent to hurt’? Is hatred a prerequisite? Need it be large blatant acts, or do small insults (both conscious and unconscious) accumulate to establish a larger culture of problems and inequality?
Racism is not just about our prejudices or how we actively treat one another. It is about who holds the power in an institutionalized system that rewards some skin colors over others. It is within this racialized world that people of color are paid less for the same work, hired less often with the same resume, incarcerated longer for the same crime, charged more for the same mortgage. All of these problems are related to an underlying system that favors whiteness over blackness.
One of the characteristics of the post-jim crow era is that our 21st-century racism is subtle, insidious, and therefore terribly difficult to combat. It is no longer about public shows of discrimination or of individual violent anomalies that have now (for the most part) become socially unacceptable. More pervasive now is the constant bombardment of exhausting microaggressions : “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group.” (Sue et al., 2007)
It can be difficult for white folks to appreciate the magnitude, impact, and burden of the accumulated daily prejudices over a person’s lifetime. How much extra energy do have in your life to deal with the sales clerk that follows you around the store as you shop for clothes, the taxi that passes you by for someone with lighter skin, the professor that assumes you came from a bad high school? Furthermore, it is from the accumulation of microagressions, that larger cultural and systematic racism arises (wage disparity, housing discrimination, judicial prejudice).
Dr. Tatum also compares modern racism to a moving sidewalk: “because racism is so ingrained in the fabric of American institutions, it is easily self-perpetuating. All that is required to maintain it, is business as usual…[when] people do not disrupt unfair systems of privilege, they are—willingly or unwillingly—on the moving sidewalk, receiving White privilege and inadvertently enabling racism.” (Tatum, 2007) When white folk realize the advantages we have, we may think more carefully about how we use our privilege to rectify the situations of those burdened with racism, to walk against the ‘moving sidewalk’ of privilege.
Questions
Does this change your perspective on racism in the 21st century?
Have you ever been on the receiving end of microaggressions?
In what ways are you able to perceive the “moving sidewalk of white privilege”?
