I read an excellent diary today on the racist subtext of the right wing's extended temper tantrum over Health Care Reform specifically and Obama's Presidency generally. The diary contains valuable insights and I recommend it. However, in the discussion racism was repeatedly described as a "disease". It isn't.
I read an excellent diary today on the racist subtext of the right wing's extended temper tantrum over Health Care Reform specifically and Obama's Presidency generally. The diary contains valuable insights and I recommend it. However, in the discussion racism was repeatedly described as a "disease". It isn't.
It's understandible why people of good will would seek to define racism as an illness. On the one hand it allows a comforting distance between the racist and "un-racist" parallel to that which lies between the healthy and un-healthy. It mutes the necessity for directly confronting individuals in the grip of racism by positing them as "victims" of illness in need of treatment rather than exponents of a social and political evil that must be combated. The comparison fails because the opposite of racist is not "un-racist" but anti-racist. A society can no more endure as both racist and anti-racist than it could endure as half slave and half free.
Racism is not a disease. It is a political construction that exploits both positive and negative human characteristics which is what makes it both effective and corrosive. It perverts the impulse for community and solidarity into a racially exclusive and oppressive force. It incites fear and hatred to bolster a privileged status based on invented, mythical racial categories.
Racism persists, not because of some imagined "original sin" or mortal flaw but because it serves the interests, whether material or perceived, of those who promote it. It is a system of political and social control that battens off of human weaknesses. It serves the status quo of power by dividing the many against one another, the better to be manipulated and exploited by the powerful few.
Yes, it's important to recognize the underlying human failings (prejudice, bigotry,ignorance, etc.) that make racism viable. However, if such recognition leads to treating racism as a "natural" or "innate" phenomenon that impacts all equally, it becomes a species of social and political blindness.
The horrific truth about our history is that the US was built upon a foundation of white supremacy, despite the sometimes heroic resistance of an enlightened minority. Even the conflagration of Civil War and the abolition of slavery were not sufficient to excise this cancer from the body of the republic. Rather, its efficacy as a means to promote national "unity" and as a mode of social control insured that it would retain its ideological dominance, corrupting the social and political institutions of the republic well into the 20th century.
The destruction of de jure white supremacy was a milestone on the road towards cleansing democracy of this corruption, as was the election of Barack Obama. But as the town hall disruptions show, we have not yet reached our journey's end.