Critical Inquiry Assignment
Intentionality and Racism:
Active Efforts for and Against an American Institution
Of all controversial topics in contemporary American discourse, the topic of race and racism remains one of the most contentious. The combative history over the definition and state of race in the United States has always been a shifting and often idiosyncratic pattern of integration and reinterpretation of what it means to be white, and what non-whiteness means in the larger context of society. To discuss race in the United States is to discuss whiteness, as the construction of rigid lines of embodied value arose in response to a need for social control and justification of atrocities. I argue here that the story of race and racism in America is the story of protecting and valuing Whiteness at the expense of other races. This aspect of American history is not accidental, and more so it was not inevitable. Because race and racism in the United States have been shaped through intentional choices made by individuals throughout history, the actions to undo this system of oppression must be equally intentional. History will not simply undo itself. In this essay I explore how racial oppression has been actively and intentionally protected in the realms of governmental structure and enforcement, as well as in the symbolic language and rhetoric of the social conditioning of white Americans.
The centrality of slavery in the US economy had massive impacts on the structuring of American life and governance. Government institutions that are commonly viewed as benevolent checks for a free system were explicitly implemented to ensure the continuation and expansion of human bondage in the ever manifesting destiny of the United States. The Census Bureau, Supreme Court, and US Senate were heavily pushed by slaveholding lawmakers in the early days of the American republic in order to take diligent count of enslaved humans (in conjunction with the 3/5th compromise), codify racial prejudices into the legal canon, and de-democratize legislation, respectively. Given the early vitality of a slave-based economy, it is no mystery that there are numerous “slavery-shaped” elements of both United States culture and law (Feagin 2013).
Even past the abolition of slavery, government intervention in the lives of black Americans (as well as all people of color within the US) has been a hallmark of the economic and social developments that benefit white people. While the obviously unjust and oppressive Jim Crow system is important to note, less visibly racialized programs like the New Deal, Social Security, and the GI Bill more clearly illustrate the covert nature of racial politics in the United States. These were constructed to be explicitly exclusionary to non-white Americans, with their subsequent racial integration (and in the case of welfare, re-racialization) being political ploys to sell an image of justice in relation to failing or otherwise neglected social safety nets (Katznelson 2006). In the realm of housing, there were similar efforts by local and state governments, private businesses, and neighborhood associations to deny people of color the opportunity to buy homes (an element of wealth accumulation that is vital to the construction of “The American Dream”) by denying loans, creating racial covenants, and stirring fear amongst white homeowners in neighborhoods that have begun to integrate (Rothstein 2017). All of these efforts were politically informed and intentionally carried out to eliminate competition for white Americans, creating long-lasting effects that reach into the inequity of the present day.
As foundational as the institutions of slavery and legal segregation have been to the development of the United States, the generations of land theft and genocide executed before and in tandem with chattel slavery created the environment for a system of human bondage to flourish. Native/Indigenous Americans are in many ways the most invisible oppressed group in American society due to a history of disease, systematic annihilation, extreme geographic isolation, and cultural erasure that has been directly carried out and supported by the United States government, as well as many private citizens (Feagin 2013; Tatum 2017). This narrative has similarly been suppressed and reinterpreted over centuries, often depicted as overly exaggerated, the product of zealous individuals, and/or so distantly in the past that nothing can be done. The simple fact is that this racial reality was part of an extensive program by the United States government that began in the eighteenth century and extended well into the twentieth century (and could be argued, the twenty-first). Native children that had already been moved to remote reservations were then subject to forced removal from their families, and transported to government-funded Indian Boarding Schools that served to literally beat the language, culture, and pride out of the most vulnerable members of this community. This process that started in the 1870s continued through the New Deal, not even being stopped by the General Citizenship Act of 1924 that first granted universal citizenship for all Native Americans (Child 2016). This history — that is so often painted as being distantly removed — was still being carried out well into the adolescence of my grandparents, illustrating just how connected the contemporary world is to this shameful past.
Racism in the United States is about more than just the material and legal conditions that have constructed racial systems. Narratives about this history equally serve to obscure the reality of the past and present. Placing racial oppression in the past is not just modern ignorance. This process is a direct result of historical revisions designed to both justify and falsify the role of the white supremacy in the expansion of the United States. Textbooks, as well as the American public school system in general, are probably the most common places that this historical revision can be seen. Educational institutions possess much power in that they are seen to be monumental sources of intellectual authority, as well as being one of the most robust spaces for the socialization of children. Discussions of slavery, for example, are often phrased as being about “bad” or “exceptionally cruel” slaveholders (Brown and Brown 2010). While there is rarely an explicit phrasing of “good slaveholders”, the implicit messages of this narrative actively downplay the extreme brutality of chattel slavery and serves to reinforce the idea that slavery was, all told, good for those in bondage. Similarly, narratives concerning the westward expansion of settlers are often phrased as the productive claiming of “uninhabited lands” erasing the existence (and subsequent violent killings) of the native peoples inhabiting these lands and pushing a culturally imperialist notion of white virtue and epistemological supremacy (Feagin 2013).
Racial framing in the United States has never been a static conversation, and the way that these topics are understood continues to adapt for the times. Most notably the concepts of a “color-blind” or “post-racial” United States have gained a considerable amount of traction as part of the mainstream American race consciousness. These dominant racial frames are understood by most white people in the United States as representing both a progressive ideal as well as a tangible racial reality. This view of the world (on a rhetorical level) minimizes the difference between groups and stresses commonality and humanity but does not recognize the structural, cultural, symbolic, or psychological elements of racism, focusing exclusively on individual prejudice and overt racial bigotry. This framework is rooted deeply in a white racial frame, one that does not see everyday occurrences of marginalization and micro-aggressive behavior as being “about race”, but rather interprets instances of oppression as being either unimportant, or relating to anything but race (often placing the target as directly responsible) (Sue 2015). Colorblind ideology may, to some, seem to be simple white arrogance and ignorance, but it is part and parcel of a system of white forgetting and representative of how controlling the conversation is vital to white supremacy (Feagin 2013).
Put simply, the ways in which racism shape the United States, as well as the people who live within its borders, is an often unseen and misunderstood project. The elements of ideological and governmental standards that produce unequal and unjust outcomes are carefully masked by both political elites as well as cultural institutions. For one to successfully combat this system it is not sufficient to simply “overcome one’s prejudice”, but rather it requires an intentional and critical examination of the ways in which power in the United States affects (positively or negatively) one’s life. Whether it be the racial composition of one’s neighborhood, the implicit messages about people and history learned and embodied through socialization, or even how conversations about race and racism are framed, there is always opportunity to look at the complex system of internalized and externalized factors of one’s social position.
Citations
Brown, Keffrelyn D. and Anthony L. Brown. 2010. “Silenced Memories: An Examination of the Sociocultural Knowledge on Race and Racial Violence in Official School Curriculum.” Equity & Excellence in Education 43(2):139–54.
Child, Brenda J. 2016. “Indian Boarding Schools.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 13(1):25–27.
Feagin, Joe R. 2013. The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing. New York: Routledge.
Rothstein, Richard. 2107. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Sue, Derald Wing. 2016. Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. 2017. "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" and Other Conversations about Race. New York: Basic Books.
Yuill, Kevin and Ira Katznelson. 2006. “When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality.” The American Journal of Legal History 48(3):327.