Is America without racism possible?
Is America without racism possible?
A student asked me recently to assure him that an America entirely void of racism is possible. The implication, I interpreted, being that if an antiracist reality isn’t possible, is its pursuit worth as much time and effort and frustration as I essentially was asking him to commit to?
The first challenge to answering this, I imagine, is that in an exclusively American context, racism has existed on this continent since the first European stepped foot on land: Racism = Racial Prejudice plus Power (both hard and soft powers, such as perfectly legal and state-sponsored coercion, military strength, technology, and even geographically-influenced immunities to certain pathogens).
In other words, an America involving people of European descent has never existed without race and its ugly equivalent, racism. Ever. As Michelle Alexander appropriately puts it: “It may be impossible to overstate the significance of race in defining the basic structure of American society.”
So our question becomes something dangerously imaginary, like the question of whether or not life exists on another planet or in another universe. We are tasked with proving it is possible, even while we recognize that we’ve never seen it before, and therefore can have no honest idea about what it actually looks like.
But theoretical physicists, I was recently reassured, are perfectly agreed on the possibility of seemingly sci-fi concepts such as black holes, alternate universes, hologram realities, and, yes, life in other universes. (Read Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality on a rainy weekend and tell me when you come down from it if you feel as sane as when you went up.)
This assures that on a purely theoretical, scientific level, an America void of racism is not only possible, it in fact already exists, albeit on another plane altogether.
However, that’s not that helpful for our purposes, is it? It does nothing really to help us deal with why we should care and how much right now to work toward seeing anything of the sort in our time and place. Because, again, if an American without racism isn’t possible here and now, what do I tell this student—what do I tell myself—about why we are supposed to keep fighting for it?
What do you think?
OK. Racism is innate. So an America without racism, then, is not possible…???
If racism has a biological grounding in a preference for co-ethnics, we need to think realisticaly about the benefits of separation. Look at Robert Putnam’s paper E Pluribus Unum (2007, I think) in which he shows that diversity causes a huge decline in social capital, community engagement, and civic mindedness.
Humans generally prefer the company of people genetically like themselves, and are able to create strong communities only in a relatively homogeneous environment.
Pechorin, I disagree. While humans may prefer the company of people genetically like themselves, the bonds that homogenous environments create are, at best, only skin deep (pun intended). The homogenous environment does not create strong communities in and of itself. To believe that it does is tantamount to believing that you and I would support the same sports team simply because we grew up in the same city. It may seem like a logical conclusion, but it fails to withstand the pressure of closer scrutiny.
Strong, lasting communities are formed when people from diverse backgrounds find commonalities with one another. This happens because there is a paradigm shift…an ah-ha moment…an epiphany of sorts that tears down the previous limiting beliefs that kept them in their shell. This is just what I think though…I could be wrong.
Good luck with that.