"I’m not a racist, but...”
A friend of mine once used a fake name on a job application. He had the kind of pedigree that would have all but guaranteed him at least an interview were it his name was of the fairer skinned variety but as it were, he was deep in a several-months-long streak of rejected applications and the skin suit he was blessed with at birth was of the Indian persuasion.
Evidently what inspired his decision to lie about his name was a study published around that time that showed that people with traditionally “black” names were a third less likely to be called back for an interview than those with “white” names and he figured what might be true of the Daquans and Tyrones of the world might be true of the Daneshes and Tanvirs.
In what proved to be a fortuitous state of affairs for him and a sad state of affairs for humanity, he was right. He landed the interview (and the job) and apparently explaining to your would-be boss that your name is actually Navin Modi and not Nathan Madison is indeed as awkward as one would expect. Upon receiving word of Navin's deceit, his boss was predictably upset but also afraid of the HR nightmare that might ensue should he raise an uproar, and Navin, for his part, was left with the kind of morose self righteousness one feels when our worst suspicions are vindicated.
This story is worth sharing because it bears on the pernicious subtlety of contemporary racism. Racism with a capital R still exists, but we have mostly silenced it. The tragedy of today is that even in the upper echelons of progressive, liberal, socially-conscious society, there remains the kind of racial biases we assume we have shed. And because calling someone a racist has become more taboo than actually being racist, accusations of “race based decision making,” to put it kindly, are welcomed with a kind of awkward denial the likes of which you might expect if you publicly point out someone’s hair plugs.
I think the shaming of racism speaks to why there is so much silent disagreement over its prevelance. Political correctness has done too great of a job of shutting out explicit bigotry in the public sphere, and so pointing out its more complicated or subdued manifestations can make you sound like a conspiracy theorist at times.
We are wired to notice change and ignore the consistent. It is why we miss partners most when they are gone. And because lynchings and residential schools are a thing of the past, we are left bickering over things like whether or not police brutality is indeed discriminatory, each side cherrypicking favourable details from academic papers and criticizing study flaws to make their point.
There is a scene in Django Unchained where Leonardo Dicaprio’s character, Candie Calvin, owner of Candie-land, a prosperous plantation, threatens to murder his slave (the protagonist’s love interest), Broomhilda, by bludgeoning her with a hammer, unless his unwelcome guests pay him twelve thousand dollars. Regardless of your opinion of the civil war or race politics today, I imagine any viewer, save perhaps psychopaths, was reeling in empathy watching that scene. Even the most bigoted amongst us will find it easy to condemn the racial-slurs-screaming antagonists portrayed in films; those characters who are portrayed with an ugliness on the outside to suit the ugliness inside.
Candie Calvin threatening to murder his property, Broomhilda.
These kind of extremes, in film or history books, serve as a sort of healing stone, placating our conscience and forgiving us of the kind of daily prejudices that go unnoticed. This is why it is possible for some to simultaneously hate german nazis from World War II and sympathize with modern white nationals who extol similar rhetoric under the guise of preserving history or cultural identity.
In this way, art and media pacify our conscience. I am not yelling chink at every Chinese person I see crossing the street and so I am better than the worst portrayed in film, I am conditioned to believe. This is what our understanding of racism today looks like, if you can call it that. The very word evokes such a garish or violent extreme of bigotry that we become blinded to its more detrimental and subtle varieties the way staring into headlights blinds you to the muted glow of the stars.
People like resolutions. The tearing down of the Berlin wall was a great symbolic end to the cold war. The images of young men and women, sledge hammers in hand, swinging at the graffitied wall bear some kind of cathartic victory over a darker past. There is no physical wall separating races, no monument celebrating racism (though if there were I would be the first person to volunteer its design) we can tear down and so instead we erect one-dimensional symbols of intolerance and make peace with our history by defeating them.
I once had a conversation about race with a white friend of mine who said sincerely “I wish I took advantage of white privilege” as though it is government-issued token you can cash in opportunistically. “Sorry, I am seeing someone” — “Wait, I have 3 white privilege vouchers” — “Why didn’t you say so? Where should we fuck?"
There are endless statistics to measure at least the empirical manifestations of racism. White people are less likely to be arrested for the same crime as minorities, more favoured romantically than any other race on dating sites, more likely to be hired with the same resume, more likely to be cast in film roles, more likely to be acquitted for a crime, more likely to be given a loan — the list goes on and on.
We call this kind of stuff systemic racism. I believe we do so in part because it helps absolve any particular individual from prejudice. It’s more comforting to know that institutions and socioeconomic classes are responsible for prejudice than we are as complicit, voting, individuals. Racism, and other isms, in this way, have evolved from a choice of an individual to a phenomenon as natural as hurricane winds; something to be studied and measured and explained through psychological and socioeconomic theory.
How privileged a race is on the spectrum of societal tolerance can be measured by the extent to which their improprieties are afforded context. A white woman who murders her cheating husband is understood to be blinded by temporary insanity or moment of passion. We might punish her out of civil duty, but deep down we extend some empathy to the heart stricken widow. Films will be made and books written attempting to explain what compelled an otherwise lovely woman to commit a crime of passion. Psychologists will be interviewed to assess how, perhaps, her father’s frequent trips overseas and the condom she once found in his travel bag plagued her with a mistrust of men throughout adulthood and how that combined with an abusive boyfriend in her past all but guaranteed destiny would bring her to this horrible act.
Stereotypes are a burden carried by minorities and individuality a luxury afforded to the light skinned. When I go to a restaurant, I make sure to give a nice tip even if the service is terrible. I feel that in social settings I am an ambassador for Middle Eastern people the world over, like I am carrying a lanyard with the words “Iranian Male Corp. Name: Saeid Fard. Ask me about how non threatening I am.” One act of rudeness or impropriety might be generalized to my entire community, I fear, and conversely all the stereotypes of middle eastern men, the chauvinism, homophobia, or proclivity to douse ourselves in a shroud of cologne, are assumptions I have to actively invalidate.
I recall one corporate training session years ago when conversation of diversity in the workplace came up and the lead administrator, the kind of person who gets off on being offended, asked the group to raise their hands if they have a gay friend. One of my closest friends at the time was gay (which I hate to bring up because invoking friendship with a minority is the go to defence of any bigot), but I declined to raise my hand on grounds of how ugly I found the question to be. I wondered if he would feel as comfortable asking the group if they have a black friend. Did not raising one’s hand imply that one is necessarily homophobic? Needless to say, I was the only one with my hand down. I was hoping this would spark some kind of dialog where I could make the point of how I found his very question insulting and unproductive. Instead he made eye contact with me, lectured us briefly with platitudes about the importance of diverse perspectives, and moved on. That was it. It was a homophobes-anonymous roll call and apparently I was the only member. Perhaps it was my own insecurity, but I imagined him looking up my name on a clipboard later with the words “hates gay people” next to it and a box labeled “verified” which he gleefully checked.
I have spoken to many members of visible minority groups who feel the same way — feel that they must proactively fight against the assumptions made of them. Even “positive” stereotypes are destructive in that they strip us of complexity. Blacks as athletic or asians good at math, are the kinds of expectations that strip people of the freedom to self actualize. Slavoj Zizek touches on this point in his talk of political correctness and racial cliches. In one binary cultural narrative of the west, natives are cast as stewards of nature living in harmony with the environment, while the white colonialists on the other hand conquered their environment and are now dealing with a rapprochement of sorts. The truth is, of course, more complex. Natives, for instance, employed what would be considered today barbaric hunting practices that brought the buffalo population of North America to near extinction. Giving people the benefit of being fully human requires giving them the dignity to be horrible.
Modern day racism is the stripping of individuality and complexity. We spend more effort trying to understand why people of European descent do things and yet generalize the behaviours of coloured people to inherent flaws (or virtues) of their race. A white serial killer is a case study in human psychopathy. A brown one is a terrorist. A white drug user is self medicating, or exploring their identity or navigating societal norms. A black drug user is a thug. It’s worth noting now that there is also an undeniable element of social and economic class at play but describing our penchant to strip minorities of individuality cannot only be deconstructed by race.
When I was in seventh grade I had the misfortune of being granted the nickname Saudi Arabia from my class of mostly east Asian and White children. Kids will be kids and most of them will tease and be teased, but it’s not if but how you are teased during your formative years that defines what talismanic insecurities you will exercise into adulthood. Already different from every student, I became acutely aware of how physically different I was from my peers at the time. Darker, hairier, wide-nosed, the list goes on. Insults and defamations aside, words have a way of mirroring your identity, a literary conduit into the perceptions of others. I was brown (or olive or whatever) and that brownness or oliveness or whatever really seemed to mean something to people.
Two paths emerge when people are persistently reminded of their differentness from such a young age, they either let that differentness empower them or swallow them whole. We carry our adolescent identities and insecurities to our grave. And it is through those formative experiences and labels that we develop the racial pride and resentments that bias the decision making of even the best of us.
Our present inability to rid ourselves of this whole messy racism thing is in part due to the fact that we have been trained to care about race in the first place. The moment you devise an arbitrary way to separate people, whether it be race, national boundaries, or gender, the pernicious “ism” won’t be too far behind. Make too much of a fuss about the sexes (as we have for centuries) and sexism will brew and, like a parasite, snake its way into the most fundamental assumptions we make about each other. We have collectively decided that talking of the “positive” elements of our race is permissable but talking of the “negative” is not. The problem is they are two sides of the same coin. The instant you allow a place for value judgments, there will be both good and bad judgments.
I don’t believe we can ever truly rid the world of racism, but we can make progress to reduce it. And that starts with the inconvenient step of thinking twice when we celebrate our particular race or culture. That is hard, and perhaps controversial, because many would argue that celebrating our race, particularly as minorities, is a step towards empowerment. And that’s true, but empowerment perpetuates the very acknowledgement of race that can stifle progress.
Our tendency is to cling to identity myths to help give our lives meaning. Race serves as a kind of semi-exclusive club we are born into. Some clubs have better member benefits than others, but better to be a part of a club than a pariah.
We are tribal, after all. Study after study has shown that when you give groups of children or adults an arbitrary identity, like making some of them team blue and others team red, they will eventually begin to drape themselves in that identity and build real favouritism for their own and resentment for others. We are literally hard wired for it.
I dream of a day where we have successfully interbred to the point where the human genetic soup becomes some kind of mono race. Then, we can hate each other for entirely novel reasons.