Racism: It’s Not Personal

This is in response to Ron Ron’s post, below.

Although I’m sure none of this would be news to Hollinger, Einhorn, or Martin, I think that these discussions can almost invariably be clarified by making the distinction between personal and institutional racism. Here is how Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton parse it (they call use the term “individual racism” to refer to what I call “personal racism”) in their still-useful book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967):

When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individualism racism, widely deplored by most segments of society. But when in that same city–Birmingham, Alabama–five hundred black babies die each year because of lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.

It seems to me that the overwhelming fact about racism in the United States since World War II is that personal racism has decreased enormously while institutional racism remains strong. So, we just elected a black president, white people rarely use the n-word, and if you are applying to Harvard your application is probably helped, not harmed, by your being black. On the other hand, it is undeniable that we still live with racial apartheid and that blacks lag far behind whites in almost every indicator of welfare we have.

My understanding of Hollinger’s position is that he thinks we have largely got beyond personal racism and that we should no longer accept its terms (i.e., we should discard “identity politics”). This is how he begins the epilogue of Postethnic America:

No industrialized nation has so large a percentage of its population in prison as does the United States. And no such nation is producing so many mixed-race people. These two facts about the United States are not directly related. Yet they bear mention together because of the antithetical implications these two realities have for a postethnic America.

Mixed-race people are an emblem for our conquest of personal racism: we have literally loved each other so much that our old categories of race no longer apply (this is Bulworth’s “voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction”). Our black-heavy prison population is an emblem of the presence of institutional racism or, more generally put, the failure of our society to provide opportunities for those on the bottom, regardless of race. Too often, the two truths symbolized by our mixed-race and prison populations are simply lobbed at each other (“Racism is dead!” “No, it’s not!”).  But those two truths are not contradictory.

It seems that one of the most effective ideological props in bolstering economic and racial apartheid is the declaration that because personal racism has declined, all racism behind us, and any failure of black people to achieve must have something to do with their genes, culture, or attitudes. So that’s an argument for the Martin/Einhorn position. But Hollinger also has a point: when we dig in our heels and insist that racism is thriving in our society, we often end up turning toward shrill identity politics that fracture our intellectual landscape and make it harder for us to address the real structural problems, which are racially inflected but which are not entirely racial in their origin. There may indeed be some tactical advantages to insisting on an “explicitly black politics” but there is also something a little nineteenth-century about continuing to draw bright racial lines where few actually exist and where, as we have seen from Obama, race and racism can mean very different things depending on where you fall in the class pyramid.

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