Today in class got me thinking more about racism. While we touched on it briefly, I wanted to raise the points of "active" and "passive" racism. I'm not sure whether these are actual forms of racism or not, but it's another way of thinking of racism instead of just "You are racist" and "You aren't racist"; in fact, I think Dr. Fathman brought up the idea of a continuum - how racist is one sentiment/idea over another? Can they even be rated?
But what I wanted to touch on was something that struck me when Kelly brought up the notion of sin. She said that to perform a sin, one must know ahead of time that they are doing wrong AND they must freely choose to do it. We then applied this to racism, and Patricia had a great way of putting it: Racism is the exercise of prejudice or biases, usually based within a power differential. Therefore, if I see someone different from myself and admit a a racist thought or say it, I'm exercising my prejudice over them. I'm considering this as active racism. However, we also brought up the idea of racist notions that could be passive. In Kelly's case - maybe a child that says something they don't know or understand yet, and in Patricia's case regarding the little boy down the street that called her son an unacceptable name. That is, they are already being conditioned by culture to say or do these things, but they aren't really aware of the consequences of their actions.
However, can we really consider this passive racism, whether they know what they are saying or not? Many would say yes, but I think others would argue otherwise. While they weren't knowledgeable of what they were insinuating, they still performed an action that in many cases would cause censure or disapproval. Many wouldn't wave it off as, "Well, they're just a child, they'll learn in time" - they would most likely be corrected and given a reason for the correction. What about adults that subconsciously act racist and don't have much control over it - maybe because they are conditioned by culture as well. Are we to suppose that that level of racism is to be at the level of "passive racism" the child performed? It seems pretty analogous to me. Take me, for example (uh oh). When I was reading Hartigan, he mentioned racial profiling (I believe around Bonilla-Silva's colorblind racism). Blacks in our country are given harder times at an institutional & individual level than whites from - ranging from school officials and police officers. However, Hartigan said that in our society this is a negative correlation: that WHITES are actually more likely to bring weapons to school and traffic marijuana, crack, cocaine, and other drugs. Yet blacks are profiled and selectively chosen to be singled out by officers. My point is this: I wasn't surprised blacks were more likely to be chosen by police officers, but I was surprised that whites are the ones that are more likely to traffic drugs, etc. - to the point I almost questioned where Hartigan was getting his quantitative data! (But now that I think about it, it depends on how one qualifies "white" and "black" - as in, is this just based solely on skin color and not background).
I don't believe myself to be racist - well, actively racist. I've had a diverse group of friends and always try to base my relationship off the individual and personality, not superficial characteristics. Yet here I think I was CLEARLY giving off a form of racism - like we talked today in class, is every thought of someone different from us racist? If so, I easily fall into the category with these thoughts. Am I to be held accountable for this racism - as active racism? Or does this fall under the subject of the child we mentioned earlier - a form of passive racism - something that obviously exists but isn't as serious? And if it isn't as serious, why isn't? Shouldn't it be serious? And if so, how would one go about changing this form of racist thinking - given that it is possibly a form of cultural construction? I sure didn't intend to offend anyone by having this thought as I read, it just sort of... popped into my head!
Thoughts?
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There are several concerns held by people in class and as expressed by Chris in this post that the thought of even thinking of someone of a different race as different from one self may make one a racist. This I believe is not true. Racism, as defined by Hartigan, involves the “belief that these races are hierarchically ranked or differentially valued in terms of capacities (e.g., intelligence) judged inferior and superior.” Thus, thinking of someone from a different race to be different is not racist in my opinion. This is simply being racially conscious. It would actually be impossible to think of someone of a different race as being exactly the same as one self. And I would think someone who doesn’t acknowledge that there are differences between people of different races have not experienced race enough. For example, as an Asian American, I never knew what soul food was until I visited my friend’s house. She is African American and soul food is a cuisine traditional to the African American community, especially in the south. Vice versa, she learned something new when she came to my house because she had to take off her shoes. In many east Asian cultures, it is expected that you take off your shoes when you enter someone’s house. Of course these are all generalized; not every African American eats soul food and not every Asian house requires the guests to take off their shoes. But these acts and customs are particular to different race so it is hard not to notice we come into contact with people of a different race.
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ReplyDeleteI agree with Thoa in the sense that thinking differently of another person because of race, even if there is a gap in social staus, is not necessarily racist.
ReplyDeleteI think of racism more as an act of self-justification or self-importance, where a person is drawing upon known words or acts of degredation to not only validate himself socially as being "superior," but also impose a position of social inferiority on the other individual. Maybe that's more of active racism.
As for the passive, using your example, I think that would come in to play more if the parent did not correct the child's racist comment, rather than the comment happening in the first place out of ignorance. If knowingly not corrected, though, the parent is reinforcing the idea of superiority/inferiority between people because of race.
I agree -- thinking of others as being in some ways different from you is not inherently racist. We think that about others who are culturally different, linguistically different, politically different, etc. Our society is a racialized society in that one of the essential(ized) ways we differentiate others is according to race. We cannot help it, and no amount of calling for "colorblindness" by well-meaning folks is likely to change that. However, what we can try to change is the connotations that we associete with different racialized groups. The fact that Chris questioned Hartigan's statistics about white versus black crime is a case in point. It's also why that poster I showed in class is so effective. We have been conditioned as a society to associete crime with blacks. This conditioning is achieved through media images and stories that emphasize black involvement and DEemphasize white involvement with crime. It becomes "natural" to think that young black men are responsible for most of the crimes committed in the US because that is what we hear about in the news etc.
ReplyDeleteRacism includes an unquestioning acceptance of the connotations that get associated with a group because when we don't we are as much as accepting that one's race, which we determine by skin color, etc. also determines a whole host of other traits like criminality, laziness, studiousness, morality, and so on.
The job of racial activists is to decouple race from those connotations.
The job of ethnographers is to understand when, where, and why it happens.
Chris I believe that you have shed light on the way that the distinction between "passive" and "active" are applied in our society. However, I often find a considerable gray-area when one attempts to distinguish between the two. Which brings me to something that Dr. Fathman mentioned in class today: the idea that sometimes racism is characterized as only being a trait applicable to the group that is institutionally empowered and dominant. In my Social Justice class last semester we used such an operational definition of race, whereas prejudice was a trait exercised by both the dominant and dominated groups. I think that Chris hits upon the debate that underlies his original thought about active versus passive racism: the ways in which we are taught to define, operationalize, and apply the categories (that we love oh so much in our society) of racism or prejudice. If this distinction can be cut though, I would hope that it could help us all to shed some light on the predicament that Chris, and many of us, often have with the active and passive distinctions.
ReplyDeleteMax at al,
ReplyDeleteIt is true that most (almost all) definitions of racism limit it to the dominant group. That's the definition that informs most social science and activist discussions of racism.
What Hartigan is asking us to ask ourselves is this: What is your experience of racism? In the example of the school at the end of chapter 2 the whites in the Detroit suburb claim that they are the victims of racism because blacks control local politics, school districts, business, etc. which makes the whites feel both disempowered and discriminated against. One way to interpret that reaction is to point out that on a larger, national scale, whites are still the dominant group and therefore the whites in Detroit cannot be experiencing racism because they belong to the overall majority. That interpretation focuses on one kind of absolute definition of racism.
The Hartigan interpretation might claim that to the whites in this part of Detroit, racism is defined as the in-power racialized group discriminating against the subordinated racialized group. In other words, the whites in that example, who are the racial minority, feel discriminated against because of their race, and feel unheard when the workshop facilitators tell them that they can't be feeling that way because racism doesn't work that way.
I'm not sure that is the same as talking about an active and a passive racism as much as it is talking about the definition of racism and the scale or scope of that definition.
Maybe it's time for a new post about that.