“I never even think about race.”
I didn’t think about gender much as a young person and only slightly more so as I got older. I had the luxury of not having to think about it. Because I’m male. I needed a series of wake up calls to think about it regularly. I didn’t have to think about it and some people can make it through life just fine not thinking about gender. Those people are called men.
If one group has to think about something all the time and one group doesn’t, you can guess which one of those groups are in power. And if that group is in power, you can imagine how the people who are not in the “in” group appear to many people who are in the “in” group.
I’m pretty sure that Egyptians didn’t think much about being Egyptian. But I bet the Jews thought a lot about being Jews. I expect the Egyptians also spent some time thinking about Jews, the other, the concern. Similarly, I expect that white people might not spend much time thinking about being white, I expect that they do spend at least some time thinking about black people, the other, the concern.
If you think arbitrary things like race and sex don’t matter, do me a favor and look through the Netflix/Hulu/HBO programming list. Don’t look for race, which has been temporarily artificially inflated at present but will probably drop back down to nil when all of you stop paying attention in a few more weeks. Just skip all of those for now. Look at the programs that are normally up front. Look at the main character (not side characters) for each show and do a little math. Graph these ratios:
- – male vs female
- – light hair vs dark hair
That’s it. You’re done. Of all of the data that you totally didn’t just collect because you already knew, how many leads are white men with dark hair or white women with light hair? If you’re a white man with naturally dark hair or a white woman with naturally light hair, I expect you don’t think too much about your hair color. But light-haired white men and dark-haired white women probably do. And you probably think about their hair color in a particular way, too. You can do this for other arbitrary things like height, age, and weight.
Things that don’t affect you directly still matter. They matter to people making decisions and it matters to the audience with the greatest influence. It matters, whether or not you pretend that it doesn’t.
Even M. Knight Shyamalan knew that, if he was going to make movies in America, his lead characters had to be white males. If they’d looked like him, most of you never would have seen his films.
“Slavery is Over.”
Old Town Alexandria in Virginia was the biggest slave market in the country. Enslaved black people from all over were funneled through there and out on foot to the farthest parts of the burgeoning nation. There and in the places they went, were black quarters, parts of town where enslaved and free black people lived in squalor so that they would be away from the wealthy white people that lived in those areas but still close enough to quickly be of service.
When slavery ended, those quarters remained because, without Lincoln’s plan to empower this newly-freed population, there was no agency, no economic power, no recompense for labor, no ability to move. Black people ultimately did the same work for the same people and in roughly the same conditions as when they were slaves.
Walk around towns like Old Town Alexandria today. Apart from the lights, cars, and modern clothing, what do you see? Wealthy white people in one part of town and black people living in squalor in another, still close enough to provide services. Are all of those black people lazy, stupid, and dishonest? Are all of those white people, hard-working, brilliant, and noble? No and no.
I generally don’t subscribe to binary answers for things, but consider a simple binary question just this once: Either black people are genetically inferior to white people so they are not able to take advantage of the most affluent nation in human history OR they are equal to every other person on the planet but there is something artificially tipping the scales down for one group and up for another.
It would be great if none of this racial crap mattered. None of us wants to be shouting about race. We want to do the same crap people who don’t think about race are doing. But here we are, because the world still works the way that it does and race is still important.
Genetically-speaking, race doesn’t exist – race is a construct, not a reality. People all throughout human history have died over things that do not exist, things that were mere constructs that allowed us to justify our choices. Some bad, but also some good.
I grew up living next door to my great grandmother. Her parents had been slaves. My family has participated in every US war from the Civil War until today. But if any of us walked down the street with a rifle on our shoulder, we’d be dead before we cleared three blocks. An immigrant coming to this country might generally have a rough time belonging in the first generation but is just fine by the next generation. My daughter is the fifth generation since slavery ended. And, as I’ve expressed, that lack of belonging is still there. Still metastasizing. Still sucking the life out of the country.
“Black folks are doing fine.”
My daughter is living a pretty comfortable, normal life; to the degree that she complains about things that I think are comical. Kid is damned near Hilary Banks. I’m envious of that life, of the freedom to complain about the nothings as if they’re important. Maybe she’ll grow up and just… expect things to be fair and good. And so maybe they will be. If so, then it was worth my life to help make that so.
Things have indeed been getting better, slowly, each generation, and at minimal cost to people who most benefit from the inequity. There’s enough overlap now that we actually managed to have a black president and like a dozen black billionaires since the turn of the century (out of 621 according to Forbes). Historically, when a few black people start doing better than a few white people, white people think it’s time to go backwards a few years. And here’s where I talk about math. Bear with me.
If you’ve studied any math, then you’ve probably heard of an asymptotic function. It’s a function (equation) that, when graphed, approaches but never quite reaches a specific value.
Plug this into google:
graph 1/((x^2)+1)
When the graph pops up, get as close as you can to the x axis. Go as far in either direction as you want. The line of the function will never reach zero. That’s the progress of black people. We will almost certainly keep making small strides forward (barring little retrogrades like the crack boom or the Donald), getting closer and closer to equality. But we’ll never actually get there this way. We will always be less. A little less, perhaps, given enough time. But still less. And some white people will care less and less as we get closer to zero, because it won’t seem worth it to just make shit fair.
During slavery, black people were considered 3/5 of a person. That’s 60%. 60% of a person. Would you be okay being 60% of a person?
At what point would you be happy? 75% of a person? 90% of a person? 95%? 99%? 99.99% person? That’s just like a real person.
Look at any college faculty, any list of conference speakers, any mainstream organization of any kind. In order of appearance, it will be roughly this:
- – White men (likely with dark hair)
- – White women (likely with light hair)
- – Indian or Asian Men
- – Indian or Asian Women
- – Black men and women (depending on where you look, you may be more likely to find black women)
Go look at any college, any technical conference, any political function, and review the people speaking, the people putting it together, the attendees. You’ll find the same pattern. And those people will have titles commensurate with those opportunities, connections galore, and sufficient wealth to be comfortable and make their families comfortable. I expect they’ve all worked hard, but they could not have gotten there if they didn’t look a certain way, speak a certain way, and join the appropriate gang.
You can’t entirely blame the organizers of these things. You can a little, but not entirely. The structure that moves people into positions where they are available for things like this does not carry black people with it. And, Catch-22, without representative people in those places, there is no one in those places interested in diversity.
This will not get fixed without a hard look at the infrastructure that creates this disparity and actions to correct it.
-CG