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Posted on Thu, Mar. 3, 2011 Living in fictional land of color-blind America False
view of equality blinds us to remaining issues. By
Charles A. Gallagher David Mamet's play Race is
ostensibly a bare-knuckled, brutally honest conversation about race
relations, a topic most Americans, particularly white Americans, would like
to avoid. His four central characters all broker in a bundle of race, class,
and gender stereotypes, so that by the end of the play everyone is somehow
complicit in the mistreatment, misunderstanding, and oppression of the
others. As with the movie Crash,
Mamet's takeaway point, directed at his overwhelmingly white audience, is
that we are all racist and harbor bias toward one another because we are
human. Acknowledging this shared bias should and can bring us together. Alas, Mamet joins the long list of
artists, politicos, and neoconservatives now close to 65 who have a narrative
of race (and the platform to present it) that is decades behind the vast
changes that have taken place in U.S. race relations. What Mamet missed or chose to
ignore is that much of white America is beyond the black-white, good-bad,
shame-guilt tropes of race that play well on stage. An increasing number of
white Americans believe that racial equality for all has been attained. With some minor caveats, what has
moved to center stage in our national dialogue on race is the idea that the
goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved, with Exhibit A being
the election of the first black man as president of the United States. White
Americans can point to President Obama as proof of this new racial
egalitarianism, cementing the widespread belief that we are indeed a
color-blind nation and that white privilege is a prerogative of the past. Indeed, in many political and
cultural corners, it is argued that there has been a reversal of racial
fortunes, where whites have lost out socioeconomically to racial minorities
because of government programs that, as U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) recently
put it, "favor anyone who does not happen to be white." Consider these figures from polls
of white Americans: 71 percent were satisfied with the way society treats
blacks (Gallup 2007); 43 percent said that racial discrimination toward
blacks is not serious; 55 percent believe that racism is not widespread, but
42 percent believe racism against whites to be widespread (Gallup, 2007,
2008). A 2010 New York Times poll found that close to half, 48 percent of
whites, agreed with the statement that "discrimination against whites
has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other
minorities." Much of white America believes we
are a color-blind nation even though every single quality-of-life indicator -
on health, employment, home ownership, incarceration, longevity, etc. -
varies by race, with racial minorities being on the short end of the stick.
But there has been a convergence of factors that have shifted the idea of color
blindness from abstract legal principle or cultural goal to one viewed by
many whites as a social fact. Many young Americans have been subjected to an
endless loop of color-blind imagery on television, in popular culture, and in
the press. If color blindness is taken to be
a fact, raising the question of racial inequality is bound to invite
resistance or denial, because many believe such inequality no longer exists.
With color-blindness as the accepted racial frame, any race-conscious
remedies by the government will be construed as discrimination toward whites,
who will see themselves as the target and victims of reverse racism. I have witnessed such pushback,
almost exclusively from my white students, when discussing racial inequality
in the university classroom. Students challenge any talk about institutional
racism with the "What about Obama?" retort, which implies we are
beyond race because there is a black man in the White House. This is a fair
question from 18-year-old college students, many of whom were raised in
almost exclusively white, middle-class suburbs. But we must realize that for
many whites of all ages, "What about Obama?" is now the default
answer to questions about racial equality in the United States. This reframing of the issue by the
media and political elites around a narrative of color-blind egalitarianism
reflects how systems of racial oppression can maintain white privilege by
simply redefining institutionally based racial stratification out of
existence. Color-blind egalitarianism as a perspective and ideological
conviction will mean that any substantive discussion of racial justice in the
United States and the programs required to ameliorate
these inequalities will be met with resistance, shock, or most likely disgust
by the growing population of whites who truly believe we are a color-blind
society. Mamet's play suggests we are
blinded by color, when in fact many of us are living the fiction that we are
now color-blind. Charles
A. Gallagher is a professor of sociology and the chairman of the Department
of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice at La Salle University. He
can be reached at gallagher@lasalle.edu. |
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