Race Still Matters

The Reality of African American Lives and the Myth of Postracial Society

Yuya Kiuchi, Yuya Kiuchi

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781438462745
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

More than half a century after the civil rights era of the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, American society is often characterized as postracial. In other words, that the country has moved away from prejudice based on skin color and we live in a colorblind society. The reality, however, is the opposite. African Americans continue to face both explicit and latent discriminations in housing, healthcare, education, and every facet of their lives. Recent cases involving law enforcement officers shooting unarmed Black men also attest to the reality: the problem of the twenty-first century is still the problem of the color line. In Race Still Matters, contributors drawn from a wide array of disciplines use multidisciplinary methods to explore topics such as Black family experiences, hate crimes, race and popular culture, residual discrimination, economic and occupational opportunity gaps, healthcare disparities, education, law enforcement issues, youth culture, and the depiction of Black female athletes. The volume offers irrefutable evidence that race still very much matters in the United States today.

part 1

Race

1

Reverse Racism

A Discursive History

Tad Suiter

Introduction

In 1975, for the seventh episode of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, the guest host was Richard Pryor. Pryor was the first Black host, the short list of prior hosts having included George Carlin, Lily Tomlin, and Candice Bergen. In perhaps the most memorable sketch of the night, Pryor is interviewed for a job as a janitor. On the other side of the table sat Chevy Chase. There was one last test in the interview, Chase told Pryor: a simple word association exercise. The exam begins simply enough—“Dog” elicits the response “Tree,” to “Rain,” Pryor responds “Snow,” and so on. The interview quickly takes a turn, however:

Chase: Negro.

Pryor: Whitey.

Chase: Tarbaby.

Pryor: [Pryor looks dumbfounded. Surely he misheard.] … What’d you say?

Chase: Tarbaby.

Pryor: Ofay.

Chase: Colored.

Pryor: [Increasingly angry.] Redneck.

Chase: Junglebunny.

Pryor: Peckerwood!

Chase: Burrhead.

Pryor: Cracker!

Chase: Spearchucker.

Pryor: White trash!

Chase: Jungle Bunny!

Pryor: Honky!

Chase: Spade.

Pryor: Honkey honkey!

Chase: Nigger.

Pryor: [Immediately.] Dead honky!

By the end of this interaction, Pryor is visibly livid, his face twitching. Chase’s character, on the other hand, quickly ends the word association. He attempts to dial back, offering Pryor a job, but Pryor is just too angry, shouting, “Your mama!” at the offer. Finally, Chase sputters out, “$15,000, Mr. Wilson. You’ll be the highest-paid janitor in America. Just, don’t … don’t hurt me, please. … ” Pryor, still angry, nods. “Okay.”1

In some ways, this sketch gives lie to the very notion of “reverse racism.” Chase’s character represents a systemic impediment to Pryor’s employment. Pryor’s anger is reactive, his rage coming not necessarily from any prior prejudice, but to the racism of the word association test. One might imagine Chase’s character’s fear at the end of the sketch being attributed to Pryor’s “reverse racism”—after all, he was just doing his job, administering the word-association test. Pryor is the one that took it badly, made it personal—Pryor is the one who had an emotional, negative reaction. But that argument would only hold water if we accepted the notion that he was completely oblivious to the (comically exaggerated) racism represented by the test. Moreover, such a reading would draw a false moral equivalence between the insults, one that is divorced from any historical reading. Pryor grows more and more angry as Chase slowly ups the level of racism. In perhaps the funniest moment of the sketch, Pryor simply runs out of words: the only response he has to “Spade” is “Honkey honkey!” There are only so many terms of contempt for white people, the sketch suggests, and these are fewer and far less loaded than the terms of contempt white people use for Blacks.

One might hope that the racial politics of America today are more advanced, more evolved than those of a late-night comedy show over thirty years ago. But unfortunately, there are signs that the opposite may be true. In 2013, during the murder trial of George Zimmerman for the shooting of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, CNN aired a special on “The N-Word,” where at one point, the chyron underneath the panel of discussants read “N-WORD VS ‘CRACKER’: WHICH IS WORSE?”2 It should go without saying that it is a sad day when this question even needs to be asked.3

In the years since the late seventies, the dialogue on race in America has fallen victim to a pernicious myth of “reverse racism.” It is often deployed as a term to silence or derail discussions of racism, or as a “dog-whistle” term, by which one can communicate discomfort with other races gaining any sort of advantage not likewise afforded to whites, under a veil of “color-blindness.” This chapter aims to elucidate why this phrase is not productive, how it can do real damage to our discussions about race, and why people should stop using the phrase altogether.

This chapter is also strongly informed by the belief that words and phrases have histories, that their meanings shift over time. It is informed by Sam Wineburg’s imperative in “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts” that we must see the concepts represented by a word or phrase “not as transcendent truths soaring above time and place, but as patterns of thought that take root in particular historical moments, develop and grow, and bear traces of their former selves but emerge as new forms with successive generations. …”4 In other words, it is important to understand the history of the idea of “reverse racism,” to look at how it is deployed in discourse over time, rather than to simply accept or reject the term out of hand.

While much history has been written that uses race and racism as integral to the narrative of history, relatively little has been written on the history of “racism”—which is to say, there is still much research to be conducted on how the term racism is deployed and understood over the years. Many readers may be surprised at how short the history of “racism” is; according to Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown, the phrase began to be widely used first in Europe, in French critiques of German nationalism in the twenties and thirties. The rise of Nazi racial systems, along with a mounting body of science that disproved that ideology, brought more people to speak out against it. Especially after the Second World War, when people were truly confronted with the horrors of Hitler’s “final solution” to what he described as the “Jewish question,” they needed a term to label, and thus distance themselves from, this racial ideology. The term they adopted was racism.5

Indeed, looking at Readex’s database of Historical African American Newspapers, one sees racism gaining far greater currency right around 1938—and people are quick to recognize the similarities of European racism abroad and American racism at home: a column in the Kansas City Plaindealer from 1938 quotes the (white) Catholic priest, Father John LaFarge, as saying, “European Racism brings to its American congener a new and glittering apparatus—in reality much of it the same old machinery furbished up and nickled over—to place at our disposal. But American anti-Negro Racism is not just a poor relative. It offers its virulent European cousin an ideological, not just a pragmatic, foothold on this side of the Atlantic. …”6 Racism may have been borrowed from the French racisme to describe a European ideology, but it quickly took hold in America to describe both European racism and its American analog—a phenomenon that had been described previously with terms such as prejudice and race hatred—because the phenomena were so inherently similar.

In order to look at the history of the phrase reverse racism, it is necessary to start with a representative corpus of text to be analyzed. I decided to focus on mainstream newspapers, as they tend to be a good indicator of public sentiment, as well as being neither too radical nor too reactionary—newspapers tend to court the center, even the ones with some ideological bias. To this end, I gathered articles from Proquest Historical Newspapers and LexisNexis Academic.7 After eliminating duplicates, false positives generated by optical character recognition, and articles that do not substantively deal with “reverse racism,” I was left with a corpus of over 270 articles—not enough to constitute a good statistical sampling, perhaps, but enough to track attitudes, issues, and themes over time. I then put them into DEVON-think Pro, a database program that allowed me to run optical character recognition to make the articles all searchable, as well as having a tagging feature that allowed me to code each article according to a somewhat idiosyncratic and subjective system, in order to be able to group articles by topic, rhetorical approach, and so on.

The first thing one notices, looking at this corpus, is the many different ways that the term reverse racism has been deployed throughout its short history. One quickly comes to recognize four distinct phases of how the term was used. Initially, in the early 1960s, reverse racism was used, almost exclusively by Blacks, in discussions of the problems of group Black identity and issues like bloc voting.8 This meaning persisted, but by the mid-to late 1960s it had become inflicted with ideas of Black Power and racial uprisings. By the 1970s, the phrase had been co-opted by white discussions of affirmative action. Finally, in the 1980s, reverse racism settles into the contemporary meaning, serving increasingly as a “dog-whistle” term to interpolate white listener’s frustrations at an imagined decline in white status.

Jackie Robinson and Pan-Africanism: Early Examples of “Reverse Racism”

One of the things that inspired this essay was the discovery that one of the earliest people to use the phrase reverse racism in the mainstream press—and certainly the first person to use the phrase who was a household name—was Jackie Robinson, best remembered as the player who broke the color barrier in modern professional baseball in 1947. It was shocking to see a phrase like reverse racism coming out of such a prominent Black figure—it led me to question what the term meant in the context in which Robinson used it, and how that meaning might be different from the meaning typically understood today.

By 1962, Robinson was retired, but was still viewed as an elder statesman of both his race and his sport by journalists. When the New York State Democratic Party nominated the Black Manhattan Borough President Edward Dudley for attorney general, it was the first time a Black candidate had been endorsed for a statewide offic...