All Racism Is Not Created Equal
About the only thing nearly all black people can agree upon these days is that racism is—how can I put this so that we’re all covered—undesirable. Where we seem to fall to pieces is somewhere over the question of just how much blame it ought to bear for our problems in the present day. I’ve recently noticed certain prominent black intellectuals espousing theories of black solidarity rooted in the shared experience of racism, in contradistinction to the more conservative Cosbian/Rockian rift between hard-working black folk and “niggas,” “bad Negroes” or however you want to refer to them. The black syncretists reject their opponents’ discounting of the role racism plays in perpetuating our community’s ills, preferring to paint racial prejudice as a bridge to the promised land of Black Unity. The crux is that racism, like a wedding or a death in the family, should bring all of us—thugs, baby-mommas, NOIs, Oreos, and the rest—together for the common purpose of black uplift.
I’m going to set aside my philosophical objections to this view for now and instead delve into an infrequently-observed fact standing in the way of this well-intentioned hypothesis:
All racism is not created equal. This may be something that Tommie Shelby addresses in his recent book—I don’t know, I haven’t read it—but I’ll explore a few of the implications to the best of my ability. They stem from the fact that the middle-class African-American experience of racism is very different than that of the brothers and sisters who live on the other side of town. I don’t imagine that the consternation, embarrassment, and cognitive dissonance I feel while being profiled by a cop is anything like living in a virtual police-state where the omnipresence of the law entails not inconvenience but violence, detention, and sometimes even death itself. To me, racism is mostly about having to wait a little longer on the corner for a cab, occasionally second-guessing my white colleagues and clients, and stupid things white people say on TV, not having to pay more for essential commodities and services, voter disenfranchisement, or the seductive allure of mass media images that invite dreams of unattainable wealth. The economic gulf between people like myself and the working class has created two incommensurable worlds of experience that are nevertheless labeled with the same unqualified term.
So, normative issues notwithstanding, I do not believe that an unvariegated conception of racism is especially likely to unify us. To paraphrase Cornel West, class also matters, in ways we all grasp dimly but fail to completely comprehend. In considering questions of how best to help the working classes, my first instinct is to give a great deal of weight to individual choices and how they affect life outcomes. But that is a consequence of the fact that I had successful, loving parents growing up, and that none of my childhood neighborhoods were havens for gang violence, prostitution, or other pernicious influences. And that makes me think twice about lecturing the poor on the decisions they make—which is a mental leap that, for whatever reason, some affluent blacks are unwilling to take. Unfortunately, all the thought-experiments and community service in the world cannot instill in me the experiential viewpoint of a black man who grew up in the ghetto and there’s nothing I can do about that. In many ways, my opinions, prejudices, preferred explanations, and overall mindset will be as different from his as they are from those of the white man who shares my tax bracket.
Anyway, the reason I decided to get into all this is that blacks need to understand the disproportionate effects of racism’s many incarnations before they start grappling with the unfathomably complex concept of black solidarity. I don’t know whether class is an insurmountable barrier, but it damn sure is a tall one. We need to start thinking about new ways to tear it down, go around it, blast holes through it, or something, because until we do we will remain a house divided by irreconcilable interests.
Published on September 8, 2006 at 1:39 am.
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Filed under racism.
