We need to talk about racism. Or more specifically, we need to talk about how we talk about racism.
But first let’s lay a groundwork.
Racism is an active and prevalent force in America. This shouldn’t really be up for debate but that’s not stopping some people from debating it. I won’t go so far as to say that every person questioning the existence and/or prevalence of systemic racism is doing so in bad faith. But a significant number of them are, especially those on YouTube. Even if you don’t want to take the word of Black people or treat their lived experience as admissible evidence, there are an overwhelming number of data points that serve to demonstrate the point.
And of course there is the little matter of American history.
History is written by the victors, and straight white men haven’t really taken an L yet. Therefore much of what we learn of our nation’s past is sanitized and course corrected to mask what our national project is based on. It’s based on racism. And trust me, I get it. That’s not a fun thing to hear. It sounds extreme and reductive. “What about all the great things America has done?” you might ask. Well those great things were fine and dandy but they don’t change the facts on the ground.
America didn’t become the dominant world power because we were smarter and more virtuous than everyone else. Virtue has never been a defining trait of those who attempt to exert dominance over the world at large. America became a superpower because it had money. America had money because it stole land, resources, and labor from Black and brown people and brutally murdered anyone who had a problem with that arrangement.
Of course exploitative settler colonialism isn’t unique to America. We learned it from our imperialist English daddies. But our relationship to racism is unique in that our country simply wouldn’t exist without it. It informs how we see ourselves and the rest of the world. That’s not to say that it’s impossible for us to overcome this societal genetic defect, just that we won’t be able to do it by pretending it no longer exists.
In short, our nation's past is not something about which we can say “Whoops, sorry about that!” and then act like everything is fine now. It is very much not fine.
One of the ways we know it’s not fine is the reality that Donald Trump was elected president, and after four years of incompetent management, doing blatant crime, helping others do blatant crimes, and ultimately allowing a global pandemic to needlessly kill over 230,000 people (and counting) for purely political reasons, he only lost re-election by the slimmest of margins. Not only that, but the republicans who enabled him paid no meaningful political price.
If you ask a Democrat right now why the 2020 election was so close they will probably tell you that it’s because of racism. They will wax poetic about the dire mental make-up of half the population. They knew racism was a problem, but they just didn’t know how racist this country really was. Black pundits made the rounds on cable news to excoriate white America for its ignorance of its own sickness. No one will offer any remedies for this moment. They have none to offer.
There is just one tiny problem with blaming Trump’s political perseverance on pure racial animus: Trump got the largest share of the minority vote that any Republican nominee has gotten since 1960. He added four points to the percentage of Black people who voted for him in 2016. He added even more to the Hispanic vote. It was still just a fraction of the minority vote, and it wasn’t enough to swing the election to his favor. But it was enough to hurt Biden in Florida and that is going to matter for Democratic politics going forward.
Something is clearly going on here and it’s more complicated than America possessing a critical mass of white people who hate minorities.
The problem is a conception of racism and how it works in the real world that is simplified for Twitter and cable news but is inadequate for describing real-world dynamics and completely useless for prescribing solutions. For all its talk about systemic issues, the neoliberal consensus still sees racism as a product of individual failings. For all of its rhetoric about unity and healing, Democratic leadership immediately pivoted to left-bashing and vote shaming in the wake of their anemic showing in the house and failure to capture the senate. The idea that the democrats’ electoral shortcomings can be attributed to this concept of “racism” is an easy one to posit. Invoking America’s original sin has power and gravitas and a lot of truth. It’s just not the full truth.
The full truth is that neither minorities nor the white majority are monolithic demographics that view their experience solely in terms of racial identity. Racial identity is how society interacts with people, not the other way around. People with racist views are inculcated in how our society has historically and systematically coded race. You can send every white person to a corporate anti-racism training and they are still going to go home and watch their local news program disproportionately report on crime attributed to Black people. The majority of Black people don’t experience racism as a function of shitty jokes and microaggressions. Racism is manifested through gentrification and a predatory real estate market, discriminatory lending practices and access to capital and markets, the fact that Flint still doesn’t have clean water, and perhaps the most pressing: the police and the criminal justice system.
Definitions and explanations of racism differ depending on who you are talking to. For conservatives and (ahem) classical liberals, racism is a choice individuals make. People decide to be racist. And where people choose not to be racist, no racism can exist. For liberals and anti-racists, racism is the sea that we all swim in. A sea where Black people can only swim against the current while white people swim with it. This kind of analysis is better at describing the systemic nature of racism. However, in this view of racism the only remedy is for individual white people to spend all of their time and energy trying to not offend anyone. Systems are left intact, but nobody is wearing blackface so it’s all good.
So what is racism? The answer is never going to be one thing. Racism manifests in this country in a million ways, big and small. And most people are going to pick the definition of racism that best helps whatever argument they are trying to make at the time. So maybe trying to define racism isn’t the most important question. What if we should be asking something else instead?
What purpose does racism serve?
In 1890 Cecil Rhodes formed a diamond monopoly in South Africa. Perhaps you've heard of it. A diamond, after all...is forever. At this particular time in the history of British colonialism, the English generally treated the people whose lands they occupied with some modicum of respect. They were big on the rule of law and they were able to see Africans as humans who deserved lawful protections. This was a problem for Rhodes because it meant that the Africans who worked in his diamond mines were free to work for as long as they needed to and no more. They were able to own their own land and grow their own food for sustenance and thus were resistant to having their labor exploited and stolen.
Cecil Rhodes was the ultimate racist. He viewed non-English people as inferior and suitable for white dominance. He rose to power in the colonial government of South Africa and used his influence and wealth to install a set of racist laws that would come to be known as Apartheid. While this suited his racist worldview, the primary result of rendering Africans subhuman was Rhodes’ ability to amass a fortune from the exploitation of African labor.
The story of Cecil Rhodes is the story of racism. More specifically, it’s the story of why racism persists. Racism exists to produce a permanent underclass of exploitable and disposable laborers for those who hold wealth. There is a social component to why so many people supported Trump. A lot of people just like the fact that he says racist shit. But there is also a material component to Trump’s support, and that is the most useful factor in analyzing Trumpism.
Turns out that it’s not so much poor white people who support Trump as it is poor white people who have more than those in their immediate area. It’s small business owners and non-college educated people who inhabit the middle-class economic bracket. These people don’t really care about Trump’s offensive nature, but rather value the idea that Trump will preserve the permanent underclass on who’s cheap labor they rely. The fact that Black people and other marginalized communities disproportionately inhabit this underclass provides an easy justification for its existence. In this worldview, poverty is a function of failed culture. No amount of checking one's privilege or curbing microaggressions is going to fix it. The myth of meritocracy has replaced the myth of genetic inferiority, but the resulting conclusion is the same.
Some people exist to produce profit for others.
I bristle every time I see a celebrity or a corporation say that we need to “end racism.” Because I know by racism they actually mean the actions of individuals who judge others by race. This does not in any way address the function of racism in our society. A bank can dedicate time and resources to training their employees to not touch a Black person's hair, but as long the real estate market that drives their mortgage-lending business continues unabated, Black people will disproportionately suffer from housing insecurity.
I see a lot of people rejecting the notion that economic insecurity drives racism. Primarily this comes from Black professionals who experience racism in spaces where economic insecurity is not really a factor. But this is a false dichotomy. Racism is meant to produce economic insecurity. Economic insecurity is what motivates people to work grueling jobs for starvation wages so that a dwindling number of people can live comfortably. It’s why people are serving you food in the middle of a pandemic. This is what Trump supporters want to preserve. The fact that it disproportionately puts Black people in harm's way is an aesthetic feature of this system. Those who belong at the bottom are conveniently color coded. Cultural signifiers of racism, like the way Trump treats Black women or how whiteness is seen as normal, are second order effects of racism fulfilling its original purpose.
People voted for Trump’s racism not because they necessarily hate minorities, but because they believe that Trump’s racism will ensure their own material status. And subsequently they believe that addressing racism in ways that Liberals and the left are attempting will hurt their material status. This is why you can find Black people who support Trump. This is why people voted for him in spite of his historic incompetence. This is the purpose of racism and the best way to fight it is to understand it as such.
However, there are some important details about minority support for Trump and conservatism at large that we should probably talk about and that is why this is only part one.
Stay tuned.
Solidarity Forever.
I appreciate the thought that unexpected people and groups voted for Trump because they thought their personal trajectory would be better than if they voted for Biden. The Spokane WA newspaper described Trump in the most abysmal terms and then said vote for him because it will be better for the economy. But now with studies of health statistics about states that accepted ACA money for medicaid increases vs states that did not, we shall see what is better for the economy. It seems to me that there is a lot of thinking that what is good for ME, the individual, is the most important deciding factor. Not enough how the greater good improving, can actually improve the individual good. And the sea of racism in which we all swim is going to take a lot of concerted effort on the part of white people to understand the systemic privilege and centering of whiteness that drives our experience before anything substantial shifts. Keep on helping us see Akil, if you can bear it.
i feel like the idea that some white people who support trump, many of whom see their presents and children's futures dwindling before their eyes, do so because it keeps them attached to goods from above, so they think, and keeps them above those below. it's possible/likely that the 4 years of right-out racist talk they've heard and to some extent adopted has strengthened, and even in some cases initiated, the kind of brutal attitude at the individual level that some limit racism to. i say this because of how quickly, when faced with leaders crying mortal threat, people in bosnia and rwanda got capable to transforming neighbors into enemies. in bosnia it really took little time.
but i think a lot of people, including a lot you'd see as neoliberal, see racism as a system, or rather systemic racism as the giant tree over the road. the systems maintaining it, as you say, are so old they easily seem invisible to all who benefit from them, and they miraculously interlock.
are you saying the black people who voted for trump did so because they want to maintain higher status than other people of color lower down economically? are is it because in addition to being black, and more to the point, they also hate abortion or don't trust big government, or whatever else trump does stand for.
l look forward to your thoughts about what i'm saying about the prevalence of the systemic analysis of race, or is that me in a liberal blind spot?