America learned racism; it can unlearn it, too
Gene Smith
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Well. People do want to talk about race, it seems. OK, let’s.
Last week’s column on the origin of racism and the previous one on the uproar in Jena, La., stirred a fair amount of comment. So far, it’s been mostly complimentary and entirely civil — none of that familiar add-water-and-stir indignation.
Several readers missed the point or strayed from it. Another wondered why my subversive-reading list for your kids, which includes works as plump as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and as gaunt as a two-page speech, “stopped at 1965.” Look again. I urged people to read about Justice Department voting-rights actions since 1965. Still another complained that I was trying to drag kids into an irrelevant past instead of urging them to seize the opportunities that have been created since then. I know the man and am not attacking his character or his service. But he’s wrong about the playing field being level. And this is where we’ll pick up the thread.
Slavery is dead. Codified discrimination is dead, or nearly so. But the mythology that was developed to enable people to think well of themselves about enslaving a race (what historians call “primary source” documents routinely refer to “negro slavery”) keeps morphing as changing realities threaten it.
For centuries, most American whites agreed that blacks were a subspecies whose lot had actually been improved by their being torn from their families and their wild and scary homeland; by being allowed to keep enough of the produce from the gardens they worked to feed themselves as they toiled their lives away for no pay. Whites bought it because they’d been taught it from birth, by parents they trusted, who had themselves been taught it from birth.
After 1865, the patter changed: Yankees were treating Southerners horridly, doing things that shocked the conscience. Well, many things about Reconstruction went awry. But one good reason for reading primary source material is that you learn what the worst indignity was: being outvoted. (Another for the list: “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman’s March 23, 1900, reminiscences to his U.S. Senate colleagues.)
Reconstruction didn’t last long. White supremacists retook power, often through terrorism, and excluded blacks from it. And, for most of the next century, racism coasted along on the familiar recitation that blacks, too ignorant to run governments or businesses, were happiest when doing manual labor. Well, ignorance is lack of information, not of intelligence. These were ex-slaves and the children of slaves who could’ve been whipped, jailed or sold away for being literate. Many were indeed ignorant. But separate schools existed, in part, to make sure neither they nor their progeny got the chance to shed that ignorance and prove the white-supremacist dogmas wrong.
After 1954, the lingo changed again. Once again, put-upon Southern whites were being victimized, this time by “outside agitators” and an overbearing federal government that actually expected them to respect the constitutional rights of Americans not born white.
As the violence of the 1960s cooled, there came another shift: Unlike whites who were “down on their luck,” blacks were innately lazy (what happened to their natural affinity for hard labor?), living off food stamps and undergoing the rigors of childbirth every whipstitch for a net addition of $3 plus change to their monthly AFDC checks. Enter the ubiquitous, grossly overweight and always black “welfare queen” in her “welfare Cadillac,” loading up a grocery cart with alcohol and paying for it with food stamps (a violation that, strangely, the indignant storytellers apparently never reported).
Now, with welfare and its attendant cliches basically atomized, whites denounce blacks for playing at “victimization,” and divine everything they need to know about them — from morals to criminal records to employment status — from their clothes and cornrows. (Fad-conscious whites get the benefit of a doubt.)
There are people of all hues who are lazy, who feign victimization and game the system. But our institutions are run by people, and people have perceptions.
That includes the people who decide whose street goes unpaved, the officers you call when there’s an emergency, the judges who hear your cases and the jurors who deliver the verdicts, the officials who decide where water and sewer lines go and the school boards that choose your children’s teachers and principals. There’s much more at stake than hurt feelings.
Few people think of themselves as being racist. But once you understand that race-based perceptions and judgments should have died 142 years ago with the “peculiar institution” they were created to serve, it’s hard to dispute that we’re collectively worse off for having administered life-support. Let’s pull the plug and free ourselves — all of us.
Gene Smith is the Observer’s senior editorial writer. He can be reached at smithg@fayobserver.com or 486-3581.
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=274193
Gene Smith
ADVERTISEMENT
Well. People do want to talk about race, it seems. OK, let’s.
Last week’s column on the origin of racism and the previous one on the uproar in Jena, La., stirred a fair amount of comment. So far, it’s been mostly complimentary and entirely civil — none of that familiar add-water-and-stir indignation.
Several readers missed the point or strayed from it. Another wondered why my subversive-reading list for your kids, which includes works as plump as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and as gaunt as a two-page speech, “stopped at 1965.” Look again. I urged people to read about Justice Department voting-rights actions since 1965. Still another complained that I was trying to drag kids into an irrelevant past instead of urging them to seize the opportunities that have been created since then. I know the man and am not attacking his character or his service. But he’s wrong about the playing field being level. And this is where we’ll pick up the thread.
Slavery is dead. Codified discrimination is dead, or nearly so. But the mythology that was developed to enable people to think well of themselves about enslaving a race (what historians call “primary source” documents routinely refer to “negro slavery”) keeps morphing as changing realities threaten it.
For centuries, most American whites agreed that blacks were a subspecies whose lot had actually been improved by their being torn from their families and their wild and scary homeland; by being allowed to keep enough of the produce from the gardens they worked to feed themselves as they toiled their lives away for no pay. Whites bought it because they’d been taught it from birth, by parents they trusted, who had themselves been taught it from birth.
After 1865, the patter changed: Yankees were treating Southerners horridly, doing things that shocked the conscience. Well, many things about Reconstruction went awry. But one good reason for reading primary source material is that you learn what the worst indignity was: being outvoted. (Another for the list: “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman’s March 23, 1900, reminiscences to his U.S. Senate colleagues.)
Reconstruction didn’t last long. White supremacists retook power, often through terrorism, and excluded blacks from it. And, for most of the next century, racism coasted along on the familiar recitation that blacks, too ignorant to run governments or businesses, were happiest when doing manual labor. Well, ignorance is lack of information, not of intelligence. These were ex-slaves and the children of slaves who could’ve been whipped, jailed or sold away for being literate. Many were indeed ignorant. But separate schools existed, in part, to make sure neither they nor their progeny got the chance to shed that ignorance and prove the white-supremacist dogmas wrong.
After 1954, the lingo changed again. Once again, put-upon Southern whites were being victimized, this time by “outside agitators” and an overbearing federal government that actually expected them to respect the constitutional rights of Americans not born white.
As the violence of the 1960s cooled, there came another shift: Unlike whites who were “down on their luck,” blacks were innately lazy (what happened to their natural affinity for hard labor?), living off food stamps and undergoing the rigors of childbirth every whipstitch for a net addition of $3 plus change to their monthly AFDC checks. Enter the ubiquitous, grossly overweight and always black “welfare queen” in her “welfare Cadillac,” loading up a grocery cart with alcohol and paying for it with food stamps (a violation that, strangely, the indignant storytellers apparently never reported).
Now, with welfare and its attendant cliches basically atomized, whites denounce blacks for playing at “victimization,” and divine everything they need to know about them — from morals to criminal records to employment status — from their clothes and cornrows. (Fad-conscious whites get the benefit of a doubt.)
There are people of all hues who are lazy, who feign victimization and game the system. But our institutions are run by people, and people have perceptions.
That includes the people who decide whose street goes unpaved, the officers you call when there’s an emergency, the judges who hear your cases and the jurors who deliver the verdicts, the officials who decide where water and sewer lines go and the school boards that choose your children’s teachers and principals. There’s much more at stake than hurt feelings.
Few people think of themselves as being racist. But once you understand that race-based perceptions and judgments should have died 142 years ago with the “peculiar institution” they were created to serve, it’s hard to dispute that we’re collectively worse off for having administered life-support. Let’s pull the plug and free ourselves — all of us.
Gene Smith is the Observer’s senior editorial writer. He can be reached at smithg@fayobserver.com or 486-3581.
http://www.fayobserver.com/article?id=274193
This guys an idiot. He wrote it in a way where 
and yall fell for this. 
