I’m a white male of Scandinavian ancestry. I will never be discriminated against based on my appearance or my ethnic heritage. I will never really understand what it feels like to be treated badly because of my skin color or language use. But as a responsible citizen, I’m trying to understand what some of my friends, neighbors, and other fellow Americans still experience today.
I do know it is naïve to pretend people do not still make judgments based on our appearance and where our ancestors came from. Race is a very real part of human interaction.
It’s become common practice to label any attitude or behavior related to race as “racist” if you disagree with the attitude or behavior. It’s also becoming common to pretend we’re all given absolutely equal opportunities and those who don’t succeed are somehow just playing the victim or are inherently lazy.
“Biased” and “racist” are two very different things. Everybody is biased to some degree. We support our friends over strangers, we are more comfortable with people and things we’re familiar with, and we cling to long-held beliefs without critically analyzing them.
People are using the word “racist” when they should say “biased.” Supporting somebody because they come from the same background you do is not the same thing as wanting to banish or kill somebody because they don't come from the same background you do. How can we use the same word to describe both the voter who thinks it would be nice to have a Jewish president AND the monster who wants to shoot all the Jews? Our language is richer than that. Let’s reserve “racist” for the blind, angry hatred perpetrated by some people against other people.
It’s racist to assume an entire racial group is inferior to you based on the behavior of a few members of that group. As a white person, I don’t want to be judged by the behavior of Timothy McVeigh or Adolph Hitler. Or Larry the Cable Guy, for that matter.
It’s racist to use hateful words historically related to ethnic heritage or appearance as insults, especially when those words are spoken by members of the majority culture.
It's racist to take hostile action against somebody based on their skin color, heritage or ancestors’ origins.
It’s racist to prevent underrepresented populations such as black and Latino Americans from having a level playing field in gaining opportunities. Pretending we’re already treated equally ignores the realities of being underrepresented in America today, where we still have elementary school teachers who do not provide the same level of attention to non-white children as they do to white children, where public school districts in less economically healthy areas get fewer tax dollars than schools in suburban, mostly white, areas.
Maybe we should fire every public school teacher who fails to offer the same level of attention to all students regardless of race. We should calculate school tax dollars at the state level, per capita by enrolled students statewide, and provide exactly the same number of dollars to local school districts per student regardless of geographic location within that state. These measures would take about three decades to have any effect, but are likely to be more successful than many of our after-the-fact affirmative action procedures.
Those well-intentioned people who just want to “put it all behind us” don’t understand that in terms of cultural impact, slavery was YESTERDAY. People believed they owned other people in America. It will take much longer than now to completely eradicate the effects of that horrible time in our relatively recent history.
I won’t ever experience this feeling myself, but I assume when you’ve been on the outside of all the leadership roles in the nation for over two hundred years, you might begin to feel a bit left out. Consider the historical and current racial composition of the Senate, the House of Representatives, the federal judiciary, the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, the governing boards of most U.S. companies, and academic administration in major universities.
Until white people no longer dominate over eighty percent of all leadership roles and positions of power in America, white people should stop making embarrassing allegations about being racially discriminated against.
I assume that unless we've been called filthy names in public because of our skin color or where our ancestors came from, we don't really understand racism. Unless our great-grandparents were allegedly owned by others because of their appearance and heritage, we don't know racism. Unless we’ve been judged based on the behavior of the worst examples of our cultural group, we don't know racism. We can say the word, but we don't know what the word means.
As a nation, we're not finished working it all out yet. But I’m thankful that my friends and neighbors of color have allowed me to stand with them as I try to make sense of it all.