How to Be Less Stupid About Race by Crystal Marie Fleming

Author:Crystal Marie Fleming
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

As shocked and disgusted as I feel reading about young people making Holocaust jokes or laughing about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the harsh truth is that there is nothing at all unusual about the trivialization, and even celebration, of violence against people of color and religious minorities. Other empirical studies have repeatedly shown that white supremacist “joking” is common across the ideological spectrum, with liberal and conservative whites alike admitting to the routine practice of denigrating nonwhite minorities and using racial slurs. Remarkably, most people who engage in this kind of behavior—Trump among them—doggedly insist that their vile attempts at humor and use of racist epithets are magically nonracist.38

The key to understanding whites’ insistence that they are always already nonracist (even when caught in the act of perpetrating racism) is the rise of what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “colorblind racism” in the mid-twentieth century. One of the major consequences of the civil rights movement was the emergence of a new way of talking about race, an ostensibly kinder, gentler form of white supremacy that eschewed the biological essentialism of the past yet still denied white racism and blamed minorities for racial disparities. Instead of coming straight out and saying that black and brown people are inherently inferior, this “new” white racism defended white dominance with subtler forms of signaling, called dog-whistle racism in which coded terms and imagery are used in lieu of overt racial discourse. The gains of the civil rights movement and the introduction of equal protection laws changed the racial climate of the US. These new, fragile norms had the effect of officially framing white racism as a “bad thing” for the first time in the history of the United States. The norms and ideals of color blindness meant that white supremacist beliefs—the literal law of the land for generations—could no longer be easily expressed in public without the risk of criticism and even legal sanction. As a result, many whites “developed a concealed way of voicing” racist ideas while also pretending not to see race.39 In other words, whites began attempting to be viewed as “politically correct.”

But crude, politically “incorrect” racism, long embedded in white American culture, did not disappear. Instead, it was largely, though not entirely, pushed behind closed doors in all white, or predominately white, settings. This is what Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin mean by “two-faced racism”: white folks’ public, and hypocritical, posturing as “non-racist” even as they practice racist behavior in the comfort of all-white settings. For almost fifty years, the white “backstage,” maintained by segregation and protected from the eyes and ears of people of color, allowed millions of whites to privately express their rage and hostility toward minorities while portraying white supremacy as a thing of the past. For many whites and people of color alike, Obama’s election (and reelection) concealed the underbelly of racist beliefs and practices that were brewing under the surface of our society. That is, until Trumpism brought the ugliness and ordinariness of white racism back into public view.

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