White Racism

The Basics

Joe R. Feagin, Hernan Vera, Pinar Batur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000143331
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de las minorías

This book incorporates a range of new material on racist events and incidents across the United States. It includes a few new concepts and some of the original concepts about individual and institutionalized racism in the United States.

1 The Waste of White Racism

Introduction

On the Martin Luther King holiday, January 17, 2000, some 46,000 protesters, black and non-black, marched in downtown Columbia, South Carolina, protesting the flying of the Confederate battle flag atop the South Carolina state house. Since the days of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, no crowd this large had gathered to protest what has become one of the nation's major symbols of white privilege. The march was a loud cry against racism. On this occasion, it had only been a week since 6,000 white supporters of the Confederate battle flag had demonstrated in front of the state house in celebration of the symbol, which they claimed to be part of their southern heritage.

The white demonstrators argued that the battle flag symbolized for them the southerners' courage to secede from the union. They were proud because South Carolina is the only state to still fly the battle flag on its state house. Moreover, as of mid-2000, South Carolina is also the only state in the country without official recognition of Martin Luther King Day. One black state employee, who took a discretionary day off to march along with her eight-year-old daughter, said "my little girl has to see that flag every day on her way home from school. But now she can see that her people is stronger than any flag." Indeed, the voice came loud and strong from 46,000 marchers, and the voice was calling for an end to all elements of white racism.¹

In the United States "white" racism is a centuries-old system intentionally designed to exclude Americans of color from full participation in the economy polity, and society. Here we place the word "white" in quotation marks to problematize the term. Those called "whites" in the United States and across the globe are really not white in skin color but rather are some shade of brown, tan, pink, or mixture thereof. These truer-to-life skin colors, however, are not generally associated with the qualities—such as purity, innocence, and privilege—to which "white" skin is often linked, "White" people do not really exist in the flesh; they are a social construction. In the rest of this book we will generally leave off the quote marks for this word so as not to make the text cumbersome, but the reader should keep the quote marks in mind whenever this word is used in our text or elsewhere.

Today, racial prejudices and ideologies still undergird and rationalize widespread white discrimination against people of color. We realize that this view of a racialized and white-dominated America is not popular among most white analysts and commentators in the twenty-first century. More popular is the belief that African Americans and other people of color have made great progress, so much so that white racism is no longer a major barrier in most of their lives. Indeed, few whites are aware of how important racism is to their own feelings, beliefs, thinking, and actions.

When we presented the outline of this book to the editors of another major New York publisher, they rejected it and complained that our book did not deal with black racism. From the perspective we take in this book, black racism does not exist. We conceptualize racism in structural and institutional as well as individual terms. From its first use by Magnus Hirschfeld as a term to describe European ideas and actions against people conceptualized as biologically inferior in Europe in the 1930s, the concept of "racism" has meant much more than personal prejudices and scattered episodes of individual discrimination.² In its fullest definition, racism is a system of oppression of African Americans and other people of color by white Europeans and white Americans. There is no black racism because there is no centuries-old system of racialized subordination and discrimination designed by African Americans that excludes white Americans from full participation in the rights, privileges, and benefits of this society. Black racism would require not only a widely accepted racist ideology directed at whites but also the power to systematically exclude whites from opportunities and rewards in major economic, cultural, and political institutions. While there are black Americans and other Americans of color with antiwhite prejudices and sporadic instances of people of color discriminating against whites, these are not central to the core operations of U.S. society.

What is often referred to as "black racism" consists of judgments made about whites by some black leaders or other commentators of color to the effect that "no white people can be trusted" or "the white man is the devil." But these critical ideas or negative prejudices are not the equivalent of modern white racism. The latter involves not just individual thoughts but also widely socialized ideologies and omnipresent practices based on entrenched beliefs of white superiority. The prejudices and myths used to justify antiblack actions are not invented by individual perpetrators, nor are they based only on personal experience. For centuries now, these widespread ways of feeling, thinking, and acting have been deeply embedded in a white-centered society—in its culture, major institutions, and everyday rhythms of life.

Antiblack feelings, ideas, and actions are widely developed and disseminated by parents, peers, the media, and the educational system. They have been passed along from generation to generation now for more than three centuries. Whites can avail themselves of this racialized thinking as needed. Racial categories form part of this Eurocentric culture of off-the-shelf taxonomies that classify and organize certain features of the social world into a coherent whole. In this sense, racial categories form part of the social blueprint that whites, as well as other people, use to orient their actions. The broad availability of racist categories, prejudices, and myths helps to explain, to an important extent, how many new immigrants to the United States soon adopt negative images of African Americans (and often of themselves). Many immigrants from Europe and other parts of the globe hold antiblack prejudices and stereotypes even before they set foot in this country. These beliefs and myths are imbibed from U.S. movies, television programs, and publications, which are now viewed in nearly every country around the globe. The U.S. version of modern white racism is more than a national phenomenon, for it now encircles the globe.

This book probes the nature of certain cases that many have thought to be examples of white racism. Looking at these cases, we examine sets and series of events that show what many white Americans believe and feel and how they sometimes act in regard to African American men, women, and children. We look at who these whites are and make a distinction between active participants in racialized actions, those who are acolytes, and those who are but passive participants. We examine some of the causes of white racism and probe deeply its nuances. As we will see, racialized actions by whites are not always motivated by racial hatred. Fear, ignorance, a sense of personal vulnerability, the desire to carry out the orders of others, and jealousy can propel whites to engage in or passively acquiesce in such practices. As we saw in the opening of this chapter, many whites passively consent to racial rituals such as the flying of the Confederate battle flag that symbolizes racial oppression to black Americans.

In this book we examine a wide range of misconceptions and myths about African Americans and about whites themselves—what we call "sincere fictions." Usually unfeigned, whites' negative beliefs about and images of African Americans and other Americans of color still provide the make-believe, but no less effective, foundation for white dominance and supremacy. We -will show that the sincere fictions of whites encompass more than negative images of the out-group; they also involve images of oneself and ones own group. The key to understanding white racism is to be found not only in what whites think of African Americans and other people of color but also in what whites think of themselves. It is on these fictions that white privilege is constructed as a taken-for-granted base of U.S. society.

We focus mainly on the practices of white racism as it targets and exploits African Americans because that racism is an archetype for other subsequent patterns of white treatment of people of color. Our discussion is on white racism, which targets not only African Americans but also Latino, Asian, and Native Americans, as well as other Americans of color. These latter groups are often framed and exploited within the ideological and action framework that whites have developed over four hundred years of oppressing African Americans at the center of white society.

In paying this central and detailed attention to white racism as it is directed against African Americans, we are not adopting a so-called "binary white/black paradigm," a confused term sometimes used by analysts critical of an emphasis on issues of white and black Americans in the United States. We clearly recognize the oppression that whites have routinely imposed on Americans of color other than African Americans. However, the usual critiques of the binary black/white paradigm fail to note that the reality implied in the terms "black" and "white" here is much more than an abstracted scholarly paradigm. The underlying structural reality is the nearly four-hundred-year-old system of white-on-black oppression. This structural framework is the oldest system of racist oppression developed systematically by white Europeans for a non-European group that was central to the internal operation of their new society—the enslaved Africans, who from the mid-1600s onward were important to the labor needs within the new colonies of North America. The foundation for nearly four hundred years of subsequent incorporation and oppression of other non-European groups by whites was set in place in the 1600s in the importation, subordination, and exploitation of African slaves and in the subsequent elaboration and rationalization of that oppressive system.³ The oppression and exploitation of the Africans was contemporary with, if not predated by, the archetypal model of genocide that white Europeans developed in the process of stealing land from the indigenous populations of the Americas. In the early centuries of conquest and colonization Native Americans had their lands taken from them by chicanery and force. Most Native Americans were not incorporated into the white economy and society but instead were killed off in genocidal actions, driven westward beyond the boundaries of white interests, or restricted to segregated enclaves called reservations.

African Americans became a central part of the new Euro-American communities. Their lives were soon governed by a legally protected system of oppression reaching across all societal institutions. The white economy polity, society, values, and religion, and even the white self, were constructed and reconstructed with the enslaved African Americans—and after emancipation those legally segregated—as a central point of reference. In North America a racist ideology was developed in hundreds of books and thousands of articles defending white superiority and African inferiority. This ideology has dominated white thought from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. White racism and the black struggle against it have shaped the character not only of the founding documents of the United States, such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, but also of a huge body of law and much social practice over the intervening centuries. From the 1600s to the present, a majority of white Americans have held a range of antiblack prejudices and images, which are webbed into a full-fledged racist ideology and which have played a dynamic role in implementing an extensive and institutionally buttressed set of discriminatory practices against African Americans and other peoples.

Over the intervening centuries since 1619 other non-European groups, such as Latinos and Asian Americans, have—to a substantial extent—been brought into this preexisting ideological and structural matrix of white-on-black oppression. We need to underscore the point that once this archetypal system of white-on-black oppression was put in place, other non-European groups that entered into the society later were oppressed and positioned by whites within the preexisting racist framework. Many of the problems with white racism faced by other groups of color stem from essentially the same source. It is within this antiblack framework that certain other groups have been assimilated, constructed, and oppressed. Subsequent non-European immigrants such as the Chinese and Japanese immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or Mexican and Central American immigrants since the early 1900s have also been defined by many whites as somehow subhuman, noncitizens without rights, or second-class citizens. Immigrant groups not of European background have found themselves defined and treated by whites more like African Americans than like Euro-American whites. Constructed and incorporated in a centuries-old racist framework, they have become "Chinks," "Japs," "Gooks," and "greasers." Eventually, some in these nonblack groups have been able to improve their status within the white-dominated society, but only because whites have come to see them as "better" in cultural or visual-racial terms than African Americans. Even so, "better" has never meant full social, economic, and political equality with Euro-Americans.

All types of white-on-others racism are important, and there is a great need to eradicate them all. Yet we believe that they cannot be adequately understood until we understand deeply the character and history of white racism as it has targeted African Americans. What is crucial to understand is racism's aim in creating and maintaining white privilege.

Traditional discussions often treat racism as a zero-sum game of power and resources, a view that assumes a scarcity of critical societal resources for which all groups inevitably contend. We depart from this narrow perspective to argue that white racism legitimates the squandering and dissipation of an important surplus of societal resources and human talents. On reflection, many whites can recognize some of the waste of black talent and resources brought about by discriminatory barriers, but few realize how great and painful this loss is for African Americans and their communities. Even fewer whites perhaps realize the huge amount of energy and talent that whites themselves have dissipated in the construction of antiblack attitudes and ideologies and in their participation in the system of racist discrimination. Even fewer still realize that living with white racism facilitates both direct and indirect participation in the erosion of possibilities for equality and social justice for all. In this book we explore the impact of omnipresent white racism on all Americans by emphasizing the dissipation of the energies and talents of racism's victims as well as of the discriminators themselves.

Clearly, however, the costs of racism are far greater for the oppressed than for the oppressors. Our argument about the costly character of racism recognizes that black and other targets of racist oppression pay a direct, heavy, arid immediately painful price for racism, while white discriminators and onlookers usually pay a more indirect and seldom recognized price.

We believe that U.S. society in general is paying a heavy price in material, psychological, and moral terms for the persistence of white racism. We demonstrate in this book that white racism is a system of institutionalized human waste that this society cannot afford. We depart from much mainstream research on racial relations to focus on specific events in particular places and on those whites whose actions have a negative impact on people of color. If white racism is so wasteful, why does it still persist? The answer lies in the fact that the system of racial subordination, exploitation, and privilege is taken for granted and woven into every maj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Waste of White Racism
• 2 Racism in Practice: Case Studies
• 3 Ghosts of Segregation: Discrimination in Restaurants
• 4 Racism and Murder: The Cases of Boston, Portland, and Jasper
• 5 The Racial Profile of Police Brutality
• 6 Racism in the Halls of Power: The Texaco, "Willie" Horton, and Sister Souljah Cases
• 7 Sincere Fictions of the White Self
• 8 Taking Action Against Racism: Problems and Prospects
• Notes
• Index