What Do We Make Of American Racism After Donald Sterling?

The Donald Sterling spectacle and his ultimate removal from the NBA has sparked a very disappointing by illustrative conservative backlash. The Washington Times trying to deflect by focusing on Larry Johnson is a typical response. In doing so, they bring out the hoary trope of "black racism," a lurking threat that has never actually materialized in the last 300 years. 

First things first, "black racism" is one of the most awful terms from the history of US race relations. White victim-hood, in particular, is a really challenging topic as it has often been used to justify some of the most horrendous acts of violence we've ever seen. Lynchings, for example, were justified because they protected the "purity of the white race" against miscegenation. In more recent debates, the concept gets trotted out to dismantle affirmative action or policies aimed towards reparations. The Atlantic has a very instructive history of the term in that context. To quote Stanley Fish,

What I want to say, following Bush's reasoning, is that a similar forgetting of history has in recent years allowed some people to argue, and argue persuasively, that affirmative action is reverse racism. The very phrase Reverse Racism contains the argument in exactly the form to which Bush objected: In this country whites once set themselves apart from blacks and claimed privileges for themselves while denying them to others. Now, on the basis of race, blacks are claiming special status and reserving for themselves privileges they deny to others. Isn't one as bad as the other? The answer is no. One can see why by imagining that it is not 1993 but 1955, and that we are in a town in the South with two more or less distinct communities, one white and one black. No doubt each community would have a ready store of dismissive epithets, ridiculing stories, self-serving folk myths, and expressions of plain hatred, all directed at the other community, and all based in racial hostility. Yet to regard their respective racisms--if that is the word--as equivalent would be bizarre, for the hostility of one group stems not from any wrong done to it but from its wish to protect its ability to deprive citizens of their voting rights, to limit access to educational institutions, to prevent entry into the economy except at the lowest and most menial levels, and to force members of the stigmatized group to ride in the back of the bus. The hostility of the other group is the result of these actions, and whereas hostility and racial anger are unhappy facts wherever they are found, a distinction must surely be made between the ideological hostility of the oppressors and the experience-based hostility of those who have been oppressed.

Not to make that distinction is, adapting George Bush's words, to twist history and forget the terrible plight of African-Americans in the more than 200 years of this country's existence. Moreover, to equate the efforts to remedy that plight with the actions that produced it is to twist history even further. Those efforts, designed to redress the imbalances caused by long-standing discrimination, are called affirmative action; to argue that affirmative action, which gives preferential treatment to disadvantaged minorities as part of a plan to achieve social equality, is no different from the policies that created the disadvantages in the first place is a travesty of reasoning. Reverse Racism is a cogent description of affirmative action only if one considers the cancer of racism to be morally and medically indistinguishable from the therapy we apply to it. A cancer is an invasion of the body's equilibrium, and so is chemotherapy; but we do not decline to fight the disease because the medicine we employ is also disruptive of normal functioning. Strong illness, strong remedy: the formula is as appropriate to the health of the body politic as it is to that of the body proper.

Even without the disgusting historical record, the image of a black racist is dangerous because it plays up a false equivalence. Racism is a lot more than just "mean things said by this guy." This is a mistake that many (Conservative) white people make. They believe that racism is what happens when people say mean things to you because of your race. You are "hated" for being white. It helps that most "racism" scandals in the US, like Donald Sterling's, are reduced to this definition. This definition is behind a lot of the crazy beliefs like "white people are greater victims of racism than black people." A majority of white Americans actually believe this.

I would say a better and more fundamental definition is this: Racism is things actually happening to you because of your race. 50 years ago, that means lynching, beatings, getting slowly but surely robbed by racist property owners, employers and financial institutions. Even if a lot of those things don't happen any more, there are continuing effects from this kind of racism.

For example, you can't explain the existence of ghettos without white violence. As black people migrated to Northern cities at the beginning of the 20th century, they were certain to have their property destroyed, if not be killed, if they didn't live in the poorest most crime ridden neighborhoods of the cities. When they didn't, riots happened. Up until the 50s, you could expect one every couple of years. The Cicero Riots, for example, were an international scandal. Today, they're hardly even remembered. But their effects still reverberate in segregated neighborhoods and racially-limited options for getting a mortgage.

Black poverty, urban crime, diminished educational expectations and terrible health outcomes all have some thread dating back to the Jim Crow South or Northern Apartheid. Despite all of our best intentions, those evils of the first half of the twentieth century are institutionalized and do not go away easily. I think it would be very strange to believe otherwise, especially looking at data of racial attainment, and witnessing the huge lag for African Americans in every social sphere.

Today, the racism that I'm talking about is mass incarceration. Black people are 30 percent of the population and 60 percent of the prisoners. Today, there is no doubt about widespread bias in treatment from recruiters, doctors, teachers and schools. Looking at CEO's, top managers, politicians and leaders in almost every sphere, it's hard to deny the huge professional achievement gap. And most obviously, you cannot talk about persistent income and wealth inequality in US without taking race into account too.

Both races experience the first kind of racism I described above. But whites do not experience the latter. That's why I think it's more appropriate to call the latter "real racism." If someone says a mean thing to you, tough shit. Or if they say they hate you because of your race, you won't experience material harm.

Either way, it's not nearly equivalent to being slammed up against the wall in New York because the explicit policy of the police department is to harass people of your race. Or having every basic civil right stripped from you by a racist drug war. Or struggling to get by when you are stuck in segregated schools and broken neighborhoods. There's a whole different scale here.

Going back to The Washington Times, you start to get a real picture of the problem when they try to cast Larry Johnson as a "black racist."

• Johnson is talking about black ownership in a country that has intentionally limited black wealth for almost all of its history.
• Sterling has a much broader history of harmful racist behavior, and this is more important than words.
• The concept of "black racism" tries to mix up the two kinds of racism I described. The Washington Times is trying to make people believe that the "real" racism of social discrimination and mass incarceration isn't nearly as terrible as it is in reality. This is part of a conservative political agenda.

A thought experiment might help here too. Ask yourself whose racism is worse: Mayor Bloomberg or Cliven Bundy.

Now, Cliven Bundy has some really abhorrent views of African Americans and has said some really terrible things about them. It's further evidence that any story starting with "Let me tell you something about the Negro" is bound to end badly. Mayor Bloomberg has never done anything like that. In fact, it would be hard to find any evidence of Bloomberg's " ignorant belief of ones superiority i.e..skin color, religion, sexual preferences," to use a common (white) definition of racism.

But Bundy, even though he said racist things and has seemingly racist beliefs, has never caused the harm to African Americans in any meaningful sense. On the other hand, Bloomberg is the chief advocate of Stop and Frisk, a program that has been devastating to the African American community in New York. We're talking about thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lives ruined by absurd drug sweeps and racist targeting. If you make someone a drug felon after busting them with a dime bag, their life is ruined. And it is revolting to think that someone would want this to happen over and over, but that's exactly the result that Bloomberg was looking for.

As Jamelle Bouie writes, only Bloomberg's racism really matters to the well-being of actual people. And that's what makes it so insidious. Not only it is less visible, it is far more damaging.

When it comes to open bigotry, everyone is an anti-racist. The same Republicans who question the Civil Rights Act and oppose race-conscious policy are on the front lines when it’s time to denounce the outlandish racism of the day. “I wholeheartedly disagree with him,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul in response to Cliven Bundy’s digression on “the Negro.” Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality who championed Bundy’s cause of free grazing rights, blasted Bundy for his “ignorant, racist, repugnant, despicable” comments.

Indeed, the mere hint of racial insensitivity is enough to bring the hammer down, as we rush to refute and repudiate the transgressor. This can go too far—see the most recent controversy over Donald Rumsfeld—but it’s an understandable impulse, and on the whole, a good one.

At the same time, we all but ignore the other dimension of racism—the policies and procedures that sustain our system of racial inequality. The outrage that comes when a state representative says something stupid about professional basketball players is absent when we learn that black children are punished at dramatically higher rates than their white peers, even as preschoolers. Likewise, it’s absent when we learn that banks targeted minorities—regardless of income—for the worst possible mortgage loans, destroying their wealth in the process.

In turn, this blinds us to the racial implications of actions that seem colorblind. In a world where racism looks like cartoonish bigotry, it’s hard to build broad outrage for unfair voter identification laws or huge disparities in health care access.

Conservatives prefer to talk about individuals. It's politically convenient. Under their rubric, "racism" is going away because open bigots are now rare and can be found among all races. And while "racists" can be punished, doing anything about real racial injustice would be considered "government overreach." Obviously, the Washington Times doesn't want something like this, so they make cartoonish bigotry seem ubiquitous (or at least equally distributed), although real harm is exclusively concentrated among one group.

But therein lies the rub. Racism matters when it hurts people, as when a slumlord robs his tenants for decades because they're black and easily exploited. You have to fix it with laws. And that's hard. It's easy to condemn Cliven Bundy's or Larry Johnson's racist words. It's much more important to do something about Bloomberg's or Sterling's. That's why the latter is "real" and important, while the former is just a distraction. And in the end, understanding this tricky distinction is the heart of the debate for real reparations.