RACISM: IT'S IN YOUR HEAD

From CNN:

A 5-year-old girl in Georgia is being asked a series of questions in her school library. The girl, who is white, is looking at pictures of five cartoons of girls, all identical except for skin color ranging from light to dark.

When asked who the smart child is, she points to a light-skinned doll. When asked who the mean child is she points to a dark-skinned doll. She says a white child is good because "I think she looks like me", and says the black child is ugly because "she's a lot darker."

As she answers her mother watches, and gently weeps.

Her daughter is taking part in a new CNN pilot study on children's attitudes on race and her answers actually reflect one of the major findings of the study, that white children have an overwhelming bias toward white, and that black children also have a bias toward white but not nearly as strong as the bias shown by the white children.

And

Research and discussions with parents of the children who participated in this study, indicate that white parents as a whole do not talk to their kids about race as much as black parents.

More here.

Post racial society, indeed.

For me, this is as much about Michael Richards as it is about children. That is, when the Seinfeld actor went into a racist tirade against some African American hecklers at a comedy club a few years ago, many Americans automatically assumed he was a closet racist. Not so, he later said, insisting that he is not a racist, calling his gratuitous usage of the n-word a terrible mistake. He was trying to be outrageous, he asserted, but failed miserably. In a video-feed appearance on Letterman after the story broke, Richards seemed to be in near shock as he apologized repeatedly. It was almost as though he couldn't believe what he had done.

Is Richards a racist? Well, yes and no. It depends on how we're defining "racism." Based on what I know of his reaction after the comedy club incident, I have no doubt that at some point in his life, Richards made a conscious decision to reject racism, and has probably thought of himself as anti-racist ever since. But how can this be possibly be reconciled with his obviously racist behavior? The CNN study on children and racial attitudes holds the answer.

We live in a society that is utterly overflowing with racial imagery and concepts so commonplace that we don't even notice most of them--by "we" I mean white people for the most part, who I feel safe enough to characterize because I am white; in contrast, my sense is that black Americans are far more attuned to racial imagery than whites are, for obvious reasons, but I'm pretty sure that some of those racial messages even fly under the radar of the people they oppress.

Now try to imagine, if you can, what this environment must be like from a child's perspective. What does it mean to see black kids at school getting into trouble more often than white kids? What does it mean to see black kids not performing as well as whites at school, due to racial bias, or poverty, or other issues that aren't readily understood by children, in terms of academic achievement? What does it mean to see your parents behave differently with black people than they do with white people? What do countless other examples along these lines mean to children, especially when there is no pre-existing intellectual context in which to understand them?

The results of this study do not surprise me at all. These racial messages get into kids' heads, whether we like it or not. It is the necessary result of existing within a racially charged environment. The real question here is how this affects us later in life. That is, it strikes me as very probable that the deeply embedded racial assumptions within our culture lay down an unshakable structure of knowledge within children's minds. We can consciously reject these concepts once we are enlightened as to the black/white power differential present in our society, but can we actually erase that earlier knowledge structure, the one that makes white kids smart and black kids mean?

My assertion is that we cannot eradicate childhood racist conceptualizations any more than we can forget how to ride a bicycle. We can reject them. We can repress them. We can infuse our very identities with the idea that racism is awful. But we cannot wipe the slate clean. Once you learn that the n-word is something that oppresses black people, you cannot unlearn the concept. It's there. Always. Forever.

And that takes me back to Michael Richards. I don't think he's a racist any more than I am. But am I a racist? There's the rub. I consciously oppose racism as a crime against humanity. Sometimes, however, when I'm angry with a black person, the n-word pops into my head. No, of course, I don't say it. But, in this specific circumstance, I think it, even though I don't want to think it. There's obviously something frightening going on with my subconsciousness. It would take more than an act of Congress to convince me that most white Americans aren't in the same boat. African Americans, too, to some extent, although I have no doubt that the dynamic is played out differently, with self-loathing taking the place of smug racial superiority.

The bottom line here is that we desperately need to rethink the notion of racism. For generations, we have all assumed that being racist is a conscious decision, and that ending racism is as simple as persuading racists that they've got it wrong. But it is beginning to appear that the problem is far, far more complicated than that. Racism may be less of a horrible idea than it is a biological condition: malevolent images and concepts warping the synapses and electrochemical reactions of the childhood brain, forever imprinting themselves onto the human mind, causing untold social damage later in life, perhaps the ultimate mental illness.

Very depressing, I know, but there is some good news coming out of this study. Black parents taking the time to talk with their kids about race seems to minimize the psychic damage. I strongly suggest that white parents start doing the same thing with their kids immediately.

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