Confronting Racist Myths and Practices
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year, its got to be drummed in your dear little ear, you’ve got to be carefully taught. . . . You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught” – Oscar Hammerstein II
All human beings experience confirmation bias, which leads us to interpret new information in a way that confirms our existing beliefs. Confirmation bias is most pronounced in the case of ingrained, ideological, or emotionally charged views. Racial bias is a form of confirmation bias. Racial bias leads to all sorts of problems and perpetuates racist practices in America. Metro Detroit has been identified as the third most segregated city in America. I live in the City of Farmington, which is a suburb of Detroit. A retired police officer once told me that, in the 1980s, some officers would pull over a vehicle driven by a Black person and announce on the radio that they had stopped to pull over a “N.I.F.” I can only imagine what it felt like, and feels like now, to drive in the City of Farmington as a Black person.
I still know people in the suburbs who are afraid to drive to the City of Detroit and avoid going there. Headlines in the news and TV shows reinforce racial stereotypes, especially that Black males are dangerous criminals. It is said that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie of racial stereotypes gets passed down from generation to generation. It is insidious. Racial bias poisons the mind and, consequently, our national mentality. I am told that my grandfather thought Martin Luther King, Jr. was a “communist” and didn’t approve of him. I often heard my mother making racist statements about her various caregivers over the years. I grew up in a white suburban family where racial bias infected our thinking.
As a white American, I am choosing now to challenge my racial bias. As a first step I need to reject (or at least qualify) some deeply ingrained American myths. For example, despite what I have been taught about the American Dream, I need to accept that millions of people in this country do not have a meaningful opportunity to “pull themselves up by their boot straps.” Interestingly, this term first appeared in the 19th century as an example of a task that was impossible to perform.
Comparing the US with one high-mobility state (Denmark), journalist Kevin Drum concluded that lack of mobility for the poorest children in the United States seems to be the primary reason for America’s lag behind other developed countries. A study from the Economic Mobility Project found that growing up in a high-poverty neighborhood increases Americans’ risk of experiencing downward mobility and explains a sizable portion of the black-white downward mobility gap. The report’s analysis also showed that black children who experience a reduction in their neighborhood’s poverty rate have greater economic success in adulthood than black children who experience poverty rates that increase or are stable. Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap.” Pew Charitable Trusts Economic Mobility Project.
In today’s hypercompetitive world, the reality is that the deck is stacked against the poor from the very beginning. This is especially true for Black Americans.
The typical black family has just 1/10th the wealth of the typical white one. In 1863, black Americans owned one-half of 1 percent of the national wealth. Today it’s just over 1.5 percent for roughly the same percentage of the overall population. Why the racial wealth gap persists, more than 150 years after emancipation.
These figures are heartbreaking. As a white American, I am a knowing or unknowing participant in a system in which racism continues and evolves over time.
Racism describes a system of power and oppression/advantage and disadvantage based on race. Structural racism is a system, or series of systems, in which institutional practices, laws, policies, social- cultural standards, and socio-political decisions establish and reinforce norms that perpetuate racial group inequities. Within the context of the United State of America, and other nations, structural racism takes the form of white supremacy; the preferential treatment, privilege, power, access, networks, and access to opportunities available to white people, which often designate communities of color to chronic adverse outcomes.” Anti-Oppression LibGuide: Anti-racist resources.
What can I do in my life to stop participating in this system? First, I must call out individual and systemic racism whenever and wherever I see it, especially when I see it within myself. This is challenging. Racial bias is not obvious. It hides below the surface of my consciousness.
On a conscious level, it is also difficult to confront racial bias. Social media platforms like Facebook are not designed to facilitate meaningful public discourse. Instead, they become powerful echo chambers of offense and rage. Thousands of bots flood Facebook and Twitter with disinformation, posing as real users. As anyone can attest, an hour spent consuming the news is more likely to harden our stance, making it all but impossible to have a rational dialogue with people that have a different perspective on what is happening. This takes us in the opposite direction of where we need to go. Social media is a breeding ground for resentment.
On a national level, there is no greater evidence of the dysfunction of our ability to communicate than Congress, where neither the left nor the right seem to be able to talk to each other and accomplish anything other than through power moves. The system is broken.
Changing Our Education System
Next, I must acknowledge and accept, without the usual caveats, that a lack of access by poor Americans to a quality education is a major contributing factor to the reality of racism in our country.
At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities. The reasons are threefold. First, the K through 12 education system is simply not very strong and thus is not an effective way to break the link between parental background and a child’s eventual success. . . . Second, because K–12 education is financed largely at the state and local level, resources devoted to education are closely linked with where people live and with the property wealth of their neighbors. For this and other reasons, poor children tend to go to poor schools and more advantaged children to good schools. . . . Finally, access both to a quality preschool experience and to higher education continues to depend quite directly on family resources. 2006 Policy Brief of the Brookings Institution, Isabel Sawhill (2006:3).
In 2015, US students placed 38th out of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Disadvantaged students in the US are two-and-a-half times more likely to be low performers than their more-advantaged counterparts. Interestingly, the US spends a relatively high amount on education per student. Between the ages of 6 and 15, the US spends about $115,000 per student – more than any country besides Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway, Austria, and Singapore. The numbers suggest that the resources devoted to education in the US are available. They just need to be applied more equitably for the benefit of all students, not just those in better off districts with strong tax revenue.
What can I do to join in the fight against an educational system that has racist outcomes? I can vote for candidates for elected office that acknowledge racism and believe in a strong, public education system for all.
Changing Our Criminal Justice System
The killing of George Floyd, and so many others, has proven, again, that substantial changes need to be made to the American criminal justice system. There are many people and organizations working diligently on changing the system so that it is less toxic to Black Americans. Here I will highlight changes that would improve the system considerably:
- Prohibit the use of chokeholds and the use of deadly force for nonviolent offenses.
- Eliminate “stop and frisk” policing.
- Give police officers better and longer training and support them financially so that they can be better prepared to do their jobs, which are increasingly complex and incredibly demanding.
- Improve accountability of individual police officers. We should make it easier to terminate police officers who have a record of complaints and instances of misconduct, modifying collective bargaining agreements with police unions accordingly.
- End or replace the doctrine of qualified immunity, which is not serving its intended purpose.
- Require body cameras to be used by police and hold them accountable when they are not used when required.
- Increase funding for community mental health resources, which should help to reduce instances where mentally ill people are sent to prison instead of into treatment programs.
- Abolish unreasonable minimum mandatory sentences for non-violent drug crimes. Give judges more discretion in sentencing.
- Release nonviolent prisoners, especially those serving long mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, through an overhauled parole system.
- Engage the US Department of Justice and federal courts to reform broken police departments through the use of consent decrees and other federal oversight measures.
Ending racism requires a focused and sustained effort. I am adding my voice in support of Black Lives Matter. I will not remain quiet. I will actively support the movement and push for meaningful reform in our education system and criminal justice system.
“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there will be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” – Mahatma Gandhi