Last month noted actor Forest Whitaker was falsely
accused of stealing from a popular New York City deli when he stopped in to buy
a cup of yogurt. A Milano Market employee frisked the famous black actor,
believing him to be one of the shoplifters who pocket items from the store
without paying for them. As it turns out, however, Whitaker didn’t steal
anything—and when the story hit the celebrity websites, the employee quit his
job amid apologies from the storeowner.
But it wasn’t Whitaker’s plight that blew up Liz’s
Facebook newsfeed. Instead, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s pensive New York Times essay,
“The Good, Racist People,” had her Facebook pals talking about racism in a way
that Liz told me she’d never experienced before. In his op-ed, Coates raises
the question of what the appropriate response is from an individual, the larger
public, and any sentient being to an exposed racist act.
“Facebook got started about the time I was in high
school,” Liz explained. “I’d watched how conversations there have grown over
time, but I’d never seen as many and as diverse a group of people all passing
around that article and commenting on racism in our society as they did with
this story.”
She said that the conversation among her
friends—nearly all socially engaged progressives—moved from the virtual world
to the physical, as a group of them gathered over the weekend and talked about
Coates’s article nearly nonstop. “Most of my friends care only about their
specific issues—women’s rights or gender equality or saving the whales or whatnot—but
this was the first time they all came together to talk specifically about
racism and issues surrounding white privilege,” she said, noting it was
something of a breakthrough moment.
Liz, a Policy Analyst with American Progress’s
Women’s Health and Rights Program, is a whip-smart graduate of the University
of Chicago and the Washington University School of Law. Her parents are from
China, but she has lived her entire life in the United States. And, like nearly
every person of color that I know, she’s keenly sensitive to issues of race and
identity in this country.
Liz and I talk often about these matters, partly
because it’s my work and partly because of my experiences. I am 56 years old;
Liz is 25 years old, not quite half my age. We learn from each other.
I came of age as the Great Society of the 1960s
closed—a period defined as the “years of the black” by author and scholar David
Bradley in a 1982 Esquire magazine essay. Bradley called my formative years a
“fascinating epoch” during which benevolent, wealthy, and white liberals,
driven by the guilt of their forefathers’ sins and the ranting of Afro’d,
heat-packing, shades-wearing-at-night brothers in leather jackets persuaded
politicians and activists to swallow an expensive set of social programs meant
“to conceal evidence of a scandalous past or present.”
I’ve kept a copy of Bradley’s article—titled “Black
and American, 1982: There Are No Good Times to Be Black in America, but Some
Times Are Worse Than Others”—since the first time I read it. Back then I was
starting my career as a reporter at The Charlotte Observer, my hometown
newspaper, convinced that ambition and drive would take me places that my
parents only imagined and that race would one day be unimportant in my life. I
was right about the former and wrong about the latter.
Since my youthful days, newspapers have given way to
social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. But racism endures.
I have spent a lot of energy and emotion over the
years on studying why that continues to be so. I haven’t figured it out. But
this much I do know: Racism is like gravity. Its unseen force is omnipresent,
pushing all of us to the ground. There is no permanent escape for anyone, only
temporary reprieves that are more possible for those with means, contacts, and
talents than those who lack such life benefits.
The most troubling part of this understanding that
I’ve come slowly and unhappily over a lifetime to accept is that racism’s force
seems only to be apparent to its victims. That’s why people of color—and black
people, in particular—tend to make such a ruckus over the slightest of racial
insults. We want “The Other” to see what they’re doing. Mostly they don’t open
their eyes, but sometimes they do. It also explains why insensitive people tell
us to “just get over it.”
Coates’s essay was an eye-bulging, get-’em-talking
moment. Most significantly, he made it plain and put it before a larger, whiter
audience of elite New York Times readers:
The idea
that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to
the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from
time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can
forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker
stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that
bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of
those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has
actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.
But much
worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given
tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America
is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle
class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when
it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part
of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as
such.
In this mistakenly labeled “post-racial” period,
Coates’s essay made it all the more difficult for the sighted to shield their
eyes from how 21st-century racism grounds even the most exalted among us. And
it begs the question: How do the rest of us respond? Do we demand an apology?
Public humiliation? Boycotts? What happens when those tactics don’t produce
satisfaction? I have many angry friends who tote in their heads a checklist of
places and products—Shell Oil (apartheid), Denny’s Restaurants (racism),
Wal-Mart (worker exploitation), Nike (child labor)—to avoid due to their past
and current exhibitions of human indecency. For the most part, their individual
and silent protest amounts to narcissism, a feeling of superiority over a
corporation that doesn’t know they exist. Meanwhile, the vast majority of
America yawns—if it even does that.
My young friend Liz and her friends are wrestling
with this dilemma in their Facebook postings. Like me, they haven’t figured it
out. What they do know, though, is that they can’t simply be mute. I find hope
for the future in their refusing to let injustice pass without naming it.
“Maybe we are learning in a different way in the
Facebook generation,” Liz said, just before our conversation closed. “I don’t
have any expectations of racism ending, but on an individual level, my friends
and I have a responsibility to call out people on their racism and do it in a
way that they can hear.”
Who says youth is wasted on the young?
About the author: Sam Fulwood III is a Senior Fellow
at the Center for American Progress and Director of the CAP Leadership Institute. His work with the Center’s Progress 2050 project examines
the impact of policies on the nation when there will be no clear racial or
ethnic majority by the year 2050.
This article was published by the Center for
American Progress.
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