Colorblind

I’m a native of the greater Milwaukee area, infamous for being one of the most segregated areas in the country. According to a January 8, 2019 Brookings Institute study, “three out of four black residents in Chicago, Milwaukee, or New York would have to move in order to live in fully integrated neighborhoods with whites.” Milwaukee recently marked the fiftieth anniversary of the fair housing marches spearheaded by equal rights activists Father James Groppi and Alderperson Vel Phillips. Unfortunately, despite these local heroes, we haven’t seemed to make much headway in the fight to overcome racism.

            Race is a difficult issue to talk about. Most of my white liberal friends—and myself—would be offended if anyone called us racist, but yet you probably wouldn’t find us discussing the issue of racial inequality with a black person because it’s a topic that makes us—all of us—uncomfortable. The reasons for this are as complicated as the subject itself. First of all, white people live in a society that is normalized to white standards; what others see as racist may seem completely normal to us.

            Racism is usually understood as an individualized belief or action. Persons who engage in racially charged speech or acts are labeled as malevolent, or even—with the hate crime tag—criminal, which is as it should be. But the converse of this assertion—that the lack of racist behavior makes you a non-racist—is also prevalent; in other words, if we don’t see it, it’s not there. What we—as whites—fail to understand is that we don’t recognize racism, even though it may be right in front of us, because we’re immersed in a belief system that’s inextricably wound up in it. In short, individual racism is easily recognizable, but a deeper type of racism is complicit in our social norms; it’s a group thing—and we’re all up to our necks in it.

            Think about it. We’re taught (and we teach) that everyone in this country are born as equals and have the same opportunity at success and happiness as anyone else, regardless of skin color, religious belief, or sexual orientation. But that—as most of us know either consciously or unconsciously—is simply not true. Yet we fail to see just how the playing field is tilted. How is this so?

            According to Dr. Robert DiAngelo, who coined the term white fragility, “Social scientists understand racism as a multidimensional and highly adaptive system–a system that ensures an unequal distribution of resources between racial groups. Because whites built and dominate all significant institutions, (often at the expense of and on the uncompensated labor of other groups), their interests are embedded in the foundation of U.S. society. While individual whites may be against racism, they still benefit from the distribution of resources controlled by their group.”

            So, according to Dr. DiAngelo, we exist in a system where whites believe anyone can get ahead, but still fail to see the obstacles blocking the paths of people of color. We ignore these barriers because they seem normal to us, but, in fact, failing to acknowledge them makes us implicit in their existence. 

As a teacher in an urban system, I often said to my students, “If you work hard and get good grades and stay out of trouble, you’ll be able to get to college.” I ask myself now why I added that bit about staying out of trouble; would I have said the same thing to a white student? My students would nod their heads and say okay, but they knew it would be harder—even with Affirmative Action—for them, as black students, to get admitted to college, to dress and act in ways that wouldn’t put off white folks, and to be able to navigate a world based on white norms. 

            The white majority is often unaware—sometimes willfully so—of these double standards. Take Colin Kapernick, for instance: an NFL quarterback who decided to kneel during the national anthem to protest police brutality in the African American community. This is a black man who risked it all to do the right thing, to raise his voice against a glaring and deadly injustice in our criminal justice system. And what happened to him? He is now a pariah. Even though Kapernick was at one time an elite NFL player, no team—and there are plenty who could use a decent quarterback—has seen fit to hire him. During a recent tryout, Kapernick demonstrated that he is still as talented and skilled a player as he ever was, and yet he still is not playing in the NFL. 

            Other activists, however, who dare to speak truth to power, like the courageous women in the #MeToo Movement, or Greta Thunberg, or the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors, are lauded as heroes. Double standard? I’d say so. It may seem glaringly obvious, but some people cannot see it. 

            I think at heart we’re mostly good people; but being good at heart is really not enough anymore. To be truly fair, truly just, and truly honest, we have to start having conversations about race, and—for myself, as a white American, I know I need to start thinking more about what it truly means to be black in America. Do black people get charged the same for cars or insurance? Do they wait longer to be seated in restaurants? Are they followed around by security in retail stores? 

            Finally, at an educational seminar I recently attended, the African American speaker related how she tried to wash her hands at the Atlanta airport but that none of AI motion-detection faucets would work. She went up and down the line to no avail. Then a white woman reached into the sink and the faucet immediately activated. Apparently, according to the speaker, the motion detectors were calibrated to operate on pale colors and were not picking up darker skin tones. 

            I’m sure this oversight was not deliberate, but it is a glaring example of how the white majority fails to recognize how tilted the playing field really is, and how frustrated our fellow citizens must feel for being treated like strangers in their own land.