Yet another call has gone out – as it seems the previous ones kept getting a busy signal – for national conversation on race in America. OK, so I’ll answer the call.
I am a white male. And I refuse to pay the ideological price of admission – charged by the faculty lounge – to the national conversation on race in America. Here is what I mean:
{mosads}Tickets to the conversation are priced in ideology. In the university today the academic definition of racism is “prejudice plus power.” It goes like this: We naturally generalize about our experiences with people who are not like us. This is “prejudice.” White America, being the majority, has the “power” to order society around these prejudices (also called “white privilege”). Therefore, white America is “racist.”
This is simply nonsense. And until we disabuse ourselves of it and decisively take this conversation away from the faculty lounge and bring it back into our communities where it belongs, we will sentence ourselves to repeats of Ferguson and New York.
Identity politics is the heart of this definition. And when this is challenged, its proponents fall back on the history of racism – defined as prejudice plus power. The logic is circular and provides an unending supply to the racial grievance industry. We are pushed away from each other and from this needed conversation. We are left isolated to nurture suspicions about each other instead of being drawn closer to clarify perceptions.
This is the Trayvon Martin tragedy in a nutshell. George Zimmerman’s actions made perfect sense – to George Zimmerman. He was a neighborhood watch volunteer trained to be a good witness. And you cannot witness what you cannot see, so you follow. Trayvon Martin was an African-American young man to whom the ill intentions of Zimmerman were also self-evident. Both nurtured their suspicions of the other long enough for them to simmer into tragic confrontation. Neither made an effort to clarify their perceptions.
These are the fruits of the faculty lounge and their cultivation of grievance and victimhood. They teach us to nurture the pain of the past rather than how to build a truly just future with open hearts and minds.
And it seems to me that one with an open mind should not have too much difficulty grasping the source of this mistrust. On November 20th in Cleveland, Ricky Jackson – a black man – was released from prison after serving almost 40 years for a crime he did not commit. The story of how he was convicted – on the basis of the uncorroborated testimony of a 12-year-old child – is nothing new to the black inner city. The 12-year-old child, now grown up, recounted how police told him something bad would happen to his family if he did not stick to the story.
The American ideal is one of equality – especially before the law. It is an ideal that we can easily agree on, at least in the sense that we know what equality under the law means. We read the same history books. The words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution do not appear nor are they read any differently by eyes behind black eyelids or white eyelids. But the significance of what we read is colored by experience, if not by skin.
Frederick Douglass spoke of this disconnect on July 5th, 1852. He affirmed the common meaning of our national creed. But he passionately decried how impossible it was in light of slavery for that creed to signify the same thing to a black slave as to a white person. This history, along with Jim Crow laws and the struggle for civil rights, is not going away. While we have certainly come a long way from these things, Ricky Jackson’s unjust conviction and sentence is only the latest example of how desperately different the significance of our ideals can be between the races. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the grand juries in Ferguson and New York, nor their decisions. It has everything to do with the reactions.
This is the “soft racism of invisible barriers.” The “hard racism of ill-intentions” is easy enough to recognize. We see it occasionally, but it is easily pushed back into the dark shadows of American life by an appeal to the dignity of our common humanity. The “soft racism of invisible barriers” is offered, though, as a direct challenge to the faculty lounge’s “academic definition” of racism. In it we might find a mutual invitation to this needed discussion.
Horst is author of Community Conservatives and the Future: The Secret to Winning the Hearts and Minds of the Next Conservative Generation and blogs at http://www.communityconservatives.com. Horst is treasurer of the Mira Mesa Town Council in San Diego and chairman of the Mira Mesa Community Planning Group. He works as a software engineer and is married with two high school age boys.