I am a racist

This statement perhaps the one most pervasive facts about my participation in American society and yet it is also one of the most subdued, stigmatized, and avoided statement I could make in American society. It represents both the construction and the detriment of our society. So naturally after class on Thursday, Jyo and I paraded around our next class declaring our racist nature and the permeation of racism throughout American culture – “I’m a racist! Are you a racist?”

You can imagine that this startled most of our classmates and professor, putting them on edge, waiting for an explanation of our bold statement. So as not to be lynched as self-proclaimed potential lynchers, we imparted the wisdom of Frantz Fanon to our class, who uncomfortably acknowledged it and quickly moved on to less stigmatic topics of conversation.

To even consider myself a racist seems to contradict my lifestyle and my mannerisms. I started school as a minority and was fully inoculated against racial bigotry and white supremacy since I learned to write my name. And yet at the same time, I do hear what Fanon is talking about. I am aware of my position in society and my privileges. I am aware of other races’ lack of position and privilege. And I’m sure that awareness affects my judgments and actions in ever so subtle ways. I know that it is not unconscious, but present and accessible in my thoughts. However, I also think that my own education and rearing has limited its influence to only an awareness of difference. Yet, is that awareness enough to call myself a racist?

Then I realize that my definition of racism has relativity to the heinous acts committed before, during, and even still after the Civil Rights Movement. Similar to Alain Locke’s realization of the evolutionary formula, in which he realized that cultures were evaluated based on the white, Western standard rather than on their own individual benefits apart from any comparison to other cultures. My understood definition of racism was based on a standard that involved atrocities committed against other races, active and conscious demeaning of other people – things like lynching, the holocaust, segregation, unfair hiring, malicious police harassment, verbal assault, etc. When I think of racists, I think about the bathroom walls where kids slander other kids because of their race. I think about Gobineau’s “law of repulsion” when kids separate into racial groupings at lunch. I think about racism when people are unwilling to be open to other races and cultures – unwilling to make friends. But what I didn’t think about was that racism could be as small as just being aware of someone else’s race.

But that’s an important thing to include because my awareness certainly helps to sustain the racial barriers and delineate the divide between the races. Sure, I easily step over the lines and will make friends with anyone, but I am aware of the lines and that helps emphasize them. I am aware of my race and of others’ races, which adds to the divide and in turn supports the actions of more extremists. I think about Martin Luther King, Jr. and his struggle to impassion the “white moderate” – those neutral people who don’t actively harm, but in their lack of action, indirectly harm the cause. And I wonder are we not all somehow in that category? In our stigmatism of racism, have we just become racial moderates, not hurting each other but indirectly helping the status quo?

I strive to integrate and to improve society, but someone could just write that off as exoticism or blind naivety. You could ascribe any sort of motivations to my thoughts and actions, and the only defense I have is only I know why I do what I do. Yet, we all know one thing about each other that permeates all of us within this society. I am a racist.