Misremembering Dr. King by Yanco Jennifer J

Author:Yanco, Jennifer J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

RACISM

There must be a recognition on the part of everybody in this nation that America is still a racist country. Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation and we must see racism for what it is.

Martin Luther King Jr., from “The Other America,”

address delivered at Grosse Pointe, Michigan, March 1968

The first step toward eliminating racism is to acknowledge its existence, something this country has yet to do in any serious way. There is an astounding level of denial about racism and the central role it plays in all of our institutions. Given how obvious the effects of racism are, the continuing denial suggests a societal delusion of great proportions. We would like to have racial justice and be done with a damning past, but we don’t want to do any of the things that would move us in this direction. We persist in coming up with other explanations, some more outlandish than others, to explain the huge racial inequities that run throughout all levels of our society. Until we get past this denial and face the facts, we can’t expect to make any progress. We are not going to eliminate racism by pretending it doesn’t exist. A “colorblind” society is not necessarily a racially just one.

It is important to realize that racism is deeply implicated in the scourges of militarism and materialism. It undergirds the belief that some are more deserving than others, that it is okay to visit violence on certain “others,” be that the violence of drone attacks or the withholding of a fair share of the earth’s resources. While Dr. King focused much of his attention on the United States, he was well aware that racism was a global problem. “Racism,” he said, “is no mere American phenomenon. Its vicious grasp knows no geographical boundaries. In fact, racism and its perennial ally—economic exploitation—provide the key to understanding most of the international complications of this generation.”90

I am defining racism as a social system in which “race” is a major organizing principle. (The fact that the notion of “race” has no biological basis does not prevent it from having enormous sociological and political significance.) A racist society is one in which social goods are systematically distributed along racial lines. Another and perhaps more accurate term is “white supremacy,” since it is white people as a group who have the corner on society’s resources. We have a distributional system based on a hierarchy determined by one’s “race.” A look at statistics for any number of social goods (education, employment, health, wealth, housing, among other things) clearly reveals the hierarchy, with white people as a group doing the best and black people (and certainly American Indians) doing the worst, with various other groups in between. This is not to ignore the fact that there are a lot of white people who are doing poorly or that there are some black people who are doing well.

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