Is It Racism?

            Of all the debates over the November election, one of the most important for the future of the country is the role played by racism.  Despite the remarkable split in voting between racial groups, and other information such as the enthusiastic backing for the Republican candidate by neo-Nazi groups, the statements about blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims by the eventual winner, and the racial incidents occurring at rallies and elsewhere, often in the candidate’s name, many voters, and some commentators, have argued that voters did not decide on the basis of racial attitudes but for other reasons.  Put simply, racists did not elect Him.

            Such arguments depend on a narrow view of what constitutes racism and racists.  On the narrow view, racism consists in believing that a particular, dominant race, is superior to others and that certain discriminatory actions follow logically from that conviction.  So slavery, miscegenation laws, educational and housing segregation, employment discrimination, and so forth are signs of racism.  A racist is one who holds those views and acts on them.

            There are three things wrong with this definition. 

            First, it takes what philosophers would call an essentialist view.  You are either a racist or you are not.  But if we replace racist with most other terms, we can see that the either/or rule rarely applies.  It does work in legal categories: citizen/non-citizen, employed/unemployed.  But it rarely works in self-defining cases: kind/unkind, smart/not smart, athletic/un-athletic.  Even in categories we used to think of as more stable, our judgments and the evidence change: old/young, white/black, even male/female, are more ambiguous than they once seemed.  For most categories, we are all on the spectrum, so to speak, which is why we usually deal in adjectives.  At one time there were people who were ladies and gentlemen; now there are only people who behave in those ways some of the time. As the old joke goes, there are only two things you can’t be “a little bit”: pregnant and dead.   And you can certainly be a little bit racist.

            Second, it equates racism with conscious and consistent views and actions, rather than with situational behaviors, often not consciously involving racist beliefs on the part of the actor.  Studies have shown that HR directors who consciously affirm that they are seeking diversity in the workforce nevertheless are significantly less likely to interview candidates whose first names are overtly Afrocentric (Kwame, Jamilla) than the same resumé when the candidate’s name is European (Kevin, Jane).  (National Bureau of Economic Research, nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html). 

            The Implicit Apperception Test (implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/), which asks subjects to choose between positive and negative words when these are associated with either black or white faces, consistently shows that a majority of people are instinctively biased, and that the instinctive bias is a better predictor of behavior than stated racial attitudes.  This test has been applied many thousands of times, over nearly 20 years, and in many cultures and contexts (gender and religion as well as race) with consistent results.  See Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Banaji & Greenwald, Delacorte Press.

            Therefore a person’s statement that they are not racist or that they did not vote with racial biases in mind has remarkably little value in assessing their actual motivations.

            Third, and perhaps most important, racism would not be so damaging if it were confined to those who performed overt racist acts.   Take an analogy: a person who says he or she is not callous, cruel, or brutal, but can stand by and watch women, children, or animals being beaten is, by any standard, contradicting their statement not by their action, but by their passivity. 

            The great analyst of race, Beverly Daniel Tatum, noted many years ago the asymmetry between racist and non-racist behavior.  She divided behavior into four quadrants:  Active Racism, Passive Racism, Active Anti-Racism, and Passive Anti-Racism.  Taking the example of a racist joke, she placed telling the joke in the Active Racism box, laughing at the joke in the Passive Racism box, and objecting to the joke in the Active Anti-Racism box.   Then she asked “What behavior falls into the Passive Anti-Racism box?”  After a few feeble suggestions – not laughing, walking away without comment, the audience had to agree that there is no such thing as Passive Anti-Racism. 

We have known this for a long time:

“If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

                                                                                    -- Eldridge Cleaver (attributed)

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”                                                                                    -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”                                                                                     -- Edmund Burke

“He who is not with us is against us.”            -- Jesus

           

            In recent years we have codified this understanding into the tripartite division into perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, to which has recently been added a fourth term “upstander,” to describe those who consciously defend victims from perpetrators.  So Yehuda Bauer wrote “Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” 

            So to the tens or hundreds of thousands of voters who expressed overt racism in their decision, we should add the millions who were so indifferent to the racist views and even promised actions of the Republican candidate that they also voted for him, and also the ultra-passive who saw little enough difference between the two that they refused to vote at all. 

            Racists may not have caused the outcome of the election, but racism almost certainly did.