The United States of Hidden Racists

How covert racism thrives in America

The Supreme Court upheld a ban on affirmative action in Michigan yesterday.

White people today like to pretend that they are “race blind”. That laws that take into account the color of a person’s skin are outdated and unnecessary. The supreme court made that clear when it upheld Michigan’s ban on affirmative action used in higher education yesterday, and also when it struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act last year.

The argument that we have eradicated racism is, at the very superficial level, a compelling one, and one that is being used to justify these changes to federal laws. However, that argument quickly falls apart when you simply look at the statistics. In the U.S., one of every three African American children and one of every four Latino children live in poverty— two times higher than the rate for white children. By age three, white children have a significantly larger vocabulary than black children of the same economic class. and whites report better overall health than blacks, Latinos, and Asians, even after controlling for poverty, education, and unemployment.

Instead of being a country with open racists, we have become a country of hidden racists, and it is much more difficult to fight an enemy you can’t see. We don’t talk about race (it is taboo), but we sure act on it. Cabs don’t stop for black men, white women cross the street if they see a group of black teenagers, black men don’t get the same jobs white men do, inter-racial marriages still shock us, and white men kill unarmed black children and get away with it. What causes these acts — Hatred? Anger? Fear? Or perhaps a little bit of all three.

Many white children today grow up without a single friend of a different race, and that only worsens with age. A fear of the unknown sets in and, to many, the African American culture is as foreign as another country. For some, when all they hear about is rap music and gang violence, then the assumption is that all black men listen to rap music and are violent. The same way that a foreigner traveling only to Texas would assume that all Americans like guns and listen to country music.

We know that these type of snap judgement are wrong, but it doesn’t stop folks from making them.

Many white Americans also get angry about paying for social welfare programs (these disproportionately benefit minorities) that are seen as contributing to a culture of laziness. It is a sense of “why you and not me, when I am the one working hard and paying taxes”. More than twice the number of black women receive welfare aid than white women. This sense of unfairness can also lead to anger.

Modern racism comes less from trying to protect white superiority and morality (as it did during the Civil War), but instead comes from fear and anger at a perceived black culture. In order to stop this hidden racism, we have to confront it and make conscious efforts to understand different cultures — not just through books or t.v (which dramatize and overstate) but by experiencing and befriending people of different cultures from our own.