How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy, and the Racial Divide

by Crystal Marie Fleming

I had many of the qualities both major parties look for in minorities: respectability, ambition, a thirst for access and a thorough lack of political education. I had no serious critique of the Democratic Party’s implication in systematic racism, nor did I have a serious critique of the role of the media in whitewashing destructive US policies at home and abroad.

Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent,

Making a mockery of his Nobel Peace Prize, Obama authorized 563 drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia—ten times more than his Republican predecessor—killing hundreds and possibly thousands of innocent people, children included.10 This bloody number doesn’t even encompass other drone strikes authorized by Obama in Libya, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.11 And in one of the most terrifying abuses of executive power in modern history, Obama used the office of the presidency to justify killing US citizens in Yemen without trial by remote control.12 War crimes we can believe in.

It is now well known that Obama deported more undocumented people (most of whom are of Latino descent) than any other president in US history.13

Despite the sustained uprisings and political mobilizing of activists in Ferguson and throughout the country, Obama never acknowledged or condemned systematic racism and unchecked police violence.

maintaining the hegemony of white male capitalists with the help of superficial identity politics and a rainbow coalition of historically illiterate fools. This is what is generally meant by neoliberalism: pushing free-market capitalism, deregulation, competition, and individualism for the purpose of enriching the 1 percent.

To put it simply: neoliberals elevate the economic interests of corporations and billionaires over marginalized people. The main difference between neoliberals in the Republican and Democratic Parties is that the former capitulate to private interests proudly, whereas the latter pretend to care about working-class families while supporting laws and macroeconomic policies that favor the super-rich. Another difference is that Republicans typically mislead working-class whites into supporting a neoliberal agenda that undermines their economic security by using overt and covert racism to draw attention away from the enrichment of the capitalist class. Republicans accomplish this by using racial stereotypes and appeals to white racial resentment to blame brown and black people—instead of white elites—for their plight.

Learning about and critiquing the bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism is, quite simply, one of the most important things we can do to become less stupid about racial politics.

“Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Retreat of American Liberals,”

I find it odd when the US is compared to other nations and portrayed as a society that values diversity. In fact, this country’s majority population has proven to be highly resistant to racial and ethnic equality for centuries.

generations. At most, you could say the US superficially values diversity—as long as it doesn’t challenge political and socioeconomic white supremacy.

Black Lives Matter caught Obama between a rock and a familiar hard place: the competing needs to calm white fears and signal black authenticity.

Being critical about our racial politics requires being painfully honest about how political parties and corporate interests prey on our own racialized emotions, wishes, hopes, and dreams to enrich the 1 percent.

Barack Obama, led the most successful and devastating presidential attack on journalists and whistleblowers in modern history. It is well known among legal scholars and advocates for the free press alike that Barack Obama launched a horrifying campaign to criminalize journalistic activities, undermine First Amendment protections, and shroud government activities behind a veil of unprecedented secrecy. As a Washington Post headline declared: “Trump Rages About Leakers. Obama Quietly Prosecuted Them.”

The history of the United States actively recruiting, employing, and arming everyone from actual Nazis and perpetrators of the Holocaust to dictators, war criminals, and terrorists across the globe is harrowing. It’s also a history that is essentially unknown to the vast majority of US citizens.

Operation Paperclip,

For millions of white people, “being racist” is somehow completely unrelated to articulating racist views and supporting racist policies.

The visible association between blackness and Democratic politics led to the perception, particularly among working-class whites, that the racial politics of the two parties were starkly different. For the first time in decades, white supremacist views became a factor in partisan politics, thus creating a political opportunity for an enterprising demagogue to use racism to win the support of angry white racists.

despite the valiant efforts of white observers to blame the election on the economic anxiety of white workers, study after study has confirmed what people of color already knew: Trump’s appeal to whites was primarily driven by race—and racism—not class.

Political scientist Vincent Hutchings reminds us that Obama specialized in “conciliatory racial politics,” meaning that he deliberately crafted a political identity and watered-down racial agenda that would put millions of white people at ease.

Du Bois argued that white elites sabotaged both labor movements and black advancement during the Reconstruction era by offering poor and working-class whites the “psychological wages” of feeling included in the so-called “master race”—even as they were being exploited and paid low wages by the white ruling class.

Blaming newly freed slaves for the economic precarity of the white working class laid the groundwork for the establishment of Jim Crow laws, as well as the dismantling of federal protections for African Americans.

The thing about white supremacy is that it socializes all of us to minimize its terror, to systematically deny or underestimate the harm. “We’ve come so far,” “Things are getting better,” “It could be worse”—all of these tropes minimize racial terror. Americans have been socialized to look on the bright side despite centuries of colonial and racial violence, torture, and the oppression of minorities. Our problem is not and has never been overreacting to racial terror. Our problem is the hegemony of under-reaction, denial, minimization. Ours is a society that has always socialized white folks to live in the midst of racial oppression but go on with their lives like normal. At every turn, those who oppose white supremacy have been met with denial, violence, “race card” accusations, or magnificent claims about progress.

White supremacy wants you to look at four hundred years of uninterrupted racial terror and conclude “Things aren’t so bad.”

Have you ever wondered how people lived with slavery, Jim Crow, and lynching but looked the other way? Look around right now. This is how they did it. They did it by going on with their lives.

White supremacy is, in fact, so normal, so systemic, pervasive, and taken for granted that it is almost never acknowledged, much less opposed, by members of the majority population.

the main lesson most whites absorbed from the civil rights era wasn’t that they have a personal responsibility to fight systemic racism but, rather, that they have a responsibility to maintain a public appearance of being “nonracist” even as racism pervades their lives.

It’s rather unfortunate that most journalists haven’t followed in her footsteps, acknowledging the systemic biases and inequalities that reliably shape the news.

Like too many well-meaning people, Common expressed the misconception that racism (1) is merely an interpersonal misunderstanding (and not a systematic and social reality); (2) only existed historically (and is not an ongoing feature of our society); and (3) can be solved by people of color loving white folks more intensely.

Loving across our racial differences involves learning about racism and taking a hard look at how prejudice and systemic discrimination continue to reproduce racial inequalities—not “a long time ago” but right now. Today.

Challenging and dismantling oppression cannot be achieved by pretending it is not happening or by cultivating a nice warm and fuzzy “feeling.” Real love, in the service of social justice, means having the ovaries to tell the hard truths, to face the depths of our individual and collective suffering, and to work together to reduce harm.

Becoming racially literate—that is, becoming less stupid about race—involves developing our critical thinking, increasing our awareness of how race permeates our lives, forming meaningful relationships across difference, and using our knowledge to organize for antiracist transformations. And it requires brutal honesty.

Once you realize that a racist society inevitably socializes its citizens to absorb racist ideas and behave in a discriminatory way, then you’re less likely to be preoccupied with adjudicating whether an individual is or is not “a racist.”

“Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,”

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

As antiracists, we have to cultivate concern and compassion for the suffering marginalized people in our own communities and on the other side of the world.

All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,

Project Implicit,

It’s a systemic problem that’s going to require collective mobilization to bring about enduring change—and youth have an important role to play in dismantling white supremacy.

nonwhites, at the present time, do not have the economic or political power to exercise or collectively benefit from systemic racism in the United States, and this, after all, is what it means to be racist.

If you’re not making powerful white people uncomforable, you’re doing antiracism wrong.

white supremacy persists, to a great degree, because of white folks’ refusal to aggressively challenge other whites on their racism. Because most whites live highly segregated lives, they typically face great social pressure to maintain smooth relations with white friends, family members, and coworkers—including those who routinely express racist views and behave in a discriminatory manner.

Shailja Patel, Sara Ahmed, Janet Mock, Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ijeoma Oluo, Issa Rae, Mona Eltahawy, and Rokhaya Diallo.

See Crenshaw et al., Say Her Name. See also Ritchie, Invisible No More, and Kate Abbey-Lambertz, “These 15 Black Women Were Killed During Police Encounters. Their Lives Matter, Too,” Huffington Post, Black Voices, February 13, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/13/black-womens-lives-matter-police-shootings_n_6644276.html.

https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/11/the-huffington-post-ending-its-editors-note-about-donald-trump-231044

on-media/2016/11/the-huffington-post-ending-its-editors-note-about-donald-trump-231044.