Modern Racism
There are two attitudes that have come to define the modern American perspective on racism. The first preaches that racism is a hideous moral crime and that anyone who is racist is a monster on a par with a killer or a child molester. The second flaunts racism as a badge of authenticity, and suggests that anyone who is forthright about his or her racial prejudices is an honest voice, an iconoclast, a freedom fighter and and true patriot. Although these two attitudes seem like polar opposites, they are in fact closely linked. In addition, both are equally misguided, and equally dangerous.
Those of us born subsequent to the end of the Civil Rights Movement have no living memory of a time before the commitment to reject racism became a foundational plank of the collective American moral platform. We typically do not realize, therefore, that it did not come about as a spontaneous flowering of enlightenment. Rather, it was was crafted with great difficulty and considerable sacrifice by the members of the Civil Rights Movement.
The key to producing a national consensus against racism was to smash the polite, genteel, agreement-among-friends facade of racial prejudice to reveal the horrors beneath. The peculiar genius of Martin Luther King, Jr., was his ability to stage events of pyschosocial theater capable of producing stunningly visual images of segregation’s previously hidden raw brutality. As King knew, the entire Southern caste system ultimately rested on a belief that black people were less than human and could be treated like animals or property at the whims of their paler neighbors. For years, however, this underlying belief had been hidden under a veneer of civility. Yet when pressed to their limits, the enforcers of segregation reacted with savage attacks upon unarmed protesters of all ages in a way that plainly revealed both their contempt for the humanity of their victims and the ways in which racism had compromised their own humanity.
It was the collective recoiling of the nation from this hellish vision that produced the myth of the racist monster. Rather than accepting the truth that we all carry racial prejudices and all make race-based decisions, and thus are all complicit in the larger narrative of racial conflict, a new American myth was created of the monstrous Southern Racist, a lowlife creature animated solely by an unreasoned hatred of others based on their skin color. As incarnated in figures such as Bull Connor, this useful scapegoat became the bearer of all the nation’s racial sins. In collectively rejecting, despising and casting out the Southern Racist, we symbolically became cleansed of all prejudice, and a new nation emerged, forever freed from all race-based inequities –at least in our hopeful imaginations.
As the events and the images of the Civil Rights Movement receded into history, however, a realignment began to take place. “Racist” remained a reliably powerful epithet for a generation or so, as people continued to symbolically reject the Racist monster in lieu of reexamining their own behaviors and attitudes. With the rising to adulthood of a new generation, however, a backlash against the willful simplicity of this notion began to build.
Rather than a step forward into examining the silent-but-deadly realities of racial inequity, however, it was a reactionary backlash aimed at rehabilitating the image of prejudice itself. This in turn led to the notion that openly prejudicial statements were signs of a bold, courageous honesty, an authentic, free-thinking antidote to the hypocrisy of a previous generations’ pious condemnations.
As we attempt to move forward into a new era of shifting racial realities, it is time for us to say goodbye to both of these myths –the myth of the Racist Monster and the myth of Heroic Prejudice. We must never lose sight of the fact that prejudice is ugly, not noble –but that what makes it monstrous is the soul- and sometimes body-killing impact it has on people’s dreams, self-image, opportunities and lives.
