Racism
and Hate?
In
the last two weeks lawn signs have sprung up all over our
neighborhood condemning hate. The intent of those lawn signs is
clear: they oppose racism.
But
this identification of racism with hate is
attracting well-deserved
criticism. Racism
in the form of slavery was not a matter of slave owners hating their
slaves. They may have hated some who were particularly difficult and
loved others. But slavery was an economic system that produced
significant wealth for the slave owners who worked their plantations
with slaves – a workforce that was owned and did not receive wages
and was maintained at fairly minimal levels.
Any
business that produces goods – regardless of whether it is cotton
or electronic appliances – thrives to the extent that it can sell
its products for more than it costs to produce them. One source of
wealth is keeping one's production costs down. Wages are one
important part of production costs. Where labor earns little, a
business has a chance to thrive. Slavery was attractive because its
labor costs were low. Slavery was supported because it enriched an
entire class of landowners, not because these owners hated black
people.
The
end of the Civil War put an end to the institution of slavery.
Afterwards the
super exploitation of black labor was arranged in different ways by
means of a set of laws we now refer to as "Jim Crow." No
longer were black workers the private property of white plantation
owners but their
exploitation
was
enforced by new
laws and random
violence such as lynching.
Racism
remains an economic system. The majority of black Americans are there
to take up the slack of an economic system that is unable to create
decent jobs for all who want to work. Black Americans are the first
to be unemployed when jobs disappear. When they do work, they often
work for little to do menial jobs.
The
same applies to racism against other persons of color. Mexicans and
other immigrants from Central and South American play the same role
in
the
labor market as African-Americans. Immigrants from China built
significant portions of the railroads in
the 19th century and
worked in mines. But the Chinese Exclusion
Act of
1882 prevented
further immigration from
China and
made it impossible to unite the families of men who had come here to
work but had left their families back in China. Different laws
restricted immigration from Asia until, during World War II,
China and the US were allies in fighting Japan.
Racism
has always played a political role. In the slave south not all whites
were rich plantation owners. Many whites were also poor. Their farms
were small, their land barren; they had to work hard to wring a poor
living from the soil. But the rich white people reminded them that
they were after all white people. They had something significant in
common with the plantation owners who were wealthy and politically
powerful. This served to conceal the fact that the poor whites had in
fact a lot more in common with the poor black laborers and
tenant-farmers.
The
racial divisions in our society were and are
not primarily a matter of
everyone's feelings about each other. The racial divisions were
maintained because they were in the economic and political interest
of the most powerful families in the region. The
interests of the rich and powerful to maintain racist exclusions can
continue to be concealed because
most white people know next to nothing about what it is
like
for persons of color to live in this society. They don't know about
the experiments where applicants with "white" names and
applicants with what sounded like "black" names both put in
applications for jobs and the persons with what sounded like black
names were a lot less likely to get any response from the employers
advertising jobs. They don't know about the different ways in which
black and white students are treated in public schools,
or the various myths circulating about how most people on welfare are
black and that they are on welfare only because they are too lazy to
work.
They
don't know the sad history of the G.I. Bill for black veterans at the
end of World War II. The G.I. Bill gave substantial support to all
veterans to get an education and to get mortgages to buy a house in
the suburbs. But black veterans in the South could only attend
segregated black colleges that offered a very limited education.
Colleges and universities in the North would admit only small numbers
of Blacks. Many white veterans managed to go to graduate school and
end up being college professors. That possibility was only rarely
open to black veterans. The G.I. Bill guarantees of mortgages were of
no use to black veterans because banks did not issue mortgages in
black neighborhoods and those were the only places where black
veterans would have been able to buy a house. Realtors would not sell
homes in white neighborhoods to Blacks.
And
on and on.
If
we want to reduce the ravages of racism on our black fellow citizens
we should stop talking about love and hate. Diagnosing racism as a
form of hate misdirects our attention. It completely misdiagnoses the
problems our society creates for person of color and why it does so.
Accordingly well-meaning efforts to reduce the damages created by
racism will miscarry because they address imaginary causes and
conceal real ones. Talking about racism as a form of hate is not just
an innocent error. It gets
in the way of addressing racism.
We
need, instead, to
make
sure that where we work or where we study black Americans are given
the same chances as whites. That means that everyone is treated with
equal
respect. It means that each of us patrols their thoughts and
behaviors motivated by derogatory mythologies about African-Americans
and other people of color.
Well-meaning
whites are often eager to "help" African-Americans as if
somehow their difficulties in getting ahead, in getting and keeping a
decent job, in finding housing in secure communities, in securing a
good education for their children are due to their inadequacies which
we, the well-meaning whites, can help repair.
But
the disadvantages suffered by people of color in this white
supremacist society are imposed by white people. If whites want to
help, they need to learn what limitations we, the white people,
impose on persons of color and try to remove those.
I
do not think that persons of color in this society are aching to be
loved by whites. They want to be given an equal chance to live
agreeable and secure lives without being judged defective--morally
and otherwise--by people who know no more about them than that this
skin is dark.
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