Okay, But Why Are We Still Talking About Racism?

When James Baldwin went on the Dick Cavett Show in 1969, he was asked a very loaded question: why aren’t Black people more optimistic? Jim Crow laws had been outlawed, Black people were becoming mayors and successful businesspeople… so why was he still talking about race?

Obviously racism didn’t “end” with the Civil War, or the Civil Rights Act, or Obama’s election. In fact, Donald Trump has spurred a resurgence — there’s been a nearly 50% increase in white supremacy groups just in the past few years. And yet he’s waging a war on Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs, Critical Race Theory, and the very notion that racism still exists.

But racism – and anti-Blackness in particular – is still a powerful force. It’s built into the very structure of the country. It shows up in politics, medicine, sports, education, and even eBay.

In this week’s episode of Okay But Why, we explore the history of anti-Blackness in America, how it manifests to this day, and what we can do about it. If you want to learn more, there are so many books, films, and podcasts out there! Check out Code Switch, The 1619 Project, Stamped From The Beginning, The Black Friend, White Tears/Brown Scars, Hood Feminism, or the upcoming The Race Track: How The Myth of Equal Opportunity Defeats Racial Justice.

For a transcript of this episode, please email comms@redwine.blue.

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Transcript

Okay, but why are we still talking about racism?

CLIP: James Baldwin: “It is not new for me. It is new for you. And if we were white, our heroes would be your heroes too. Nat Turner would be one of your heroes. Malcolm X might still be alive.
What the American public has always tried to do is accommodate me into a system that has always meant my death. They want me to be an accomplice to my own murder. That is what you really mean by integration. What integration really means is white supremacy. The truth is, we’ve been integrated since we got here.”

Narrator: Most of us can agree that America has a racist past. We enslaved other human beings, and even after the Civil War, injustices like lynching and Jim Crow laws persisted. But despite the troubling resurgence of white supremacy groups (with a nearly 50% increase since 2022), many Americans still believe that racism is a thing of the past. “This is America,” they say. “Everyone has an equal opportunity.” Or “talking about race is what’s actually racist.”

CLIP: Trump: “The first time I heard of Black Lives Matter, I said that’s a terrible name. It’s so discriminatory. It’s bad for Black people. It’s bad for everybody.”

Narrator: Unfortunately, racism – and anti-Blackness in particular – is still a powerful force. To be clear, this is not a personal condemnation of anyone watching or listening right now! It’s built into the structure of the country. Like imagine that there’s a guy who builds a library but doesn’t believe in accessibility, so he doesn’t include any wheelchair ramps. Then, 20 years later, another person buys the building. That person has no problems with disabled people - some of her friends and family are in wheelchairs! But she doesn’t have the budget to remodel the whole building. Even though the new owner is a good person who believes in equality, that’s not much of a comfort to wheelchair users who still can’t access the library. In some ways, that’s what’s happening here in America. Even if individual people are anti-racist, the system has inequality built in and until we rebuild the dang library, it’s gonna stay that way.

So how did we get here? Let’s do a quick jump back in time to find out – keeping in mind that there’s way too much history here to cover everything in depth. If you’re interested in learning more, we’ll share some resources in the show notes.

In 1619, a Dutch ship landed in Virginia carrying around 20 Africans who were then sold to British colonists. That began almost 250 years of enslaved labor, with more than 12 million people kidnapped from Africa and sent to the Americas. Although the Founding Fathers talked about equality, with Thomas Jefferson writing that “all men are created equal,” Black people were not included in that vision. Jefferson himself refused to free his own slaves and wrote that Black people are “inferior to whites in endowments of both body and mind.” It’s a lot easier to justify owning another person when you believe they’re inferior to you.

After slavery ended in 1865, new laws called Black Codes were enacted – laws like “no person of color can pursue any other trade besides farming, manual labor or domestic service” or “no person of color can testify against a white person in court.” Black Codes were then replaced by Jim Crow laws that mandated separate schools, bathrooms, restaurants, and parks. It wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that those laws were repealed.

It’s tempting to think “oh, racism is just an issue in the South.” But there were Jim Crow laws in effect in every state, and many places – even in the North – explicitly kept Black people out. The entire state of Oregon had laws against Black people moving there until 1926, and as recently as the 1960s there were thousands of “sundown towns” across the country where Black people weren’t allowed after sunset.

Racism was built into the suburbs too. For decades, Black families weren’t allowed to buy houses in suburban neighborhoods. It was fully legal to just say “nope, you can’t live here” to people if they weren’t white. Black families were also denied access to home loans in a practice called “redlining.” And this wasn’t just by private lenders - it was by the government too. In the 1940s in Detroit, for example, the Federal Housing Administration refused to approve a new housing development unless the developer built a concrete wall to separate it from a nearby Black neighborhood. They split a community in half just to keep Black people out. And in cities across America, not just in the South, communities drained their public pools and filled them in with dirt rather than be forced to allow Black kids to swim alongside white kids.

“Okay,” you might be saying, “but we’re still talking about the past. We can all agree things are better now.” But honestly, we can’t even agree about the past! As we saw in the recent political uproars over Critical Race Theory and now Diversity Equity and Inclusion, extremists are claiming that teaching students the history we just mentioned here promotes division and makes white kids feel bad. Some of Trump’s first Executive Orders were to shut down DEI programs. Meanwhile, memorials for victims of lynching like Mary Turner are routinely vandalized and shot to pieces. 

And again, this is bigger than individual perpetrators – two hundred anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress in the first half of the 20th century and exactly zero of them passed. It wasn’t until 2022, under President Joe Biden, that the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act was passed. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black boy murdered by white men in 1955, and lest you think this is all ancient history, the highway marker remembering Emmett Till has had to be replaced four times because of vandalism. It’s been spraypainted with the letters "KKK,” covered in black paint, and shot up so often that organizers finally put up a bulletproof memorial in 2019.

Redlining may no longer be legal, but to this day 73% of white Americans are home-owners, compared to 42% of Black Americans. Black Codes may no longer be a thing, but police violence and incarceration rates are way higher for Black people. When it comes to marijuana laws, as one example, Black people are 3 times more likely to be arrested for possession, despite the fact that usage rates between Black and white people are almost identical. Sundown Towns may no longer be officially legal, but Black people still need to carefully check their maps before a road trip to figure out what places are safe to stop for gas or a meal.

There are inequalities in healthcare, including the fact that Black moms are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth than white moms. As recently as 2016, a study found that half of white medical residents believed in biological differences between Black and white people, including that Black people have thicker skin or a higher pain tolerance.

There are inequalities in politics: a 2018 study found that even within the same party, white candidates were about three times more likely to win than Black candidates. It’s in sports: a 2019 study found that basketball commentators were more likely to discuss the mental abilities of lighter-skinned players and the physical strength of darker-skinned players. It’s even happening on eBay: people selling iPods received 21 percent more offers if a white hand was holding the iPod in the photo rather than a black hand. And who can forget the disgusting lie that Black Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs?

Unfortunately there are many kinds of racism that are still pervasive, from Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants to the rise of hate crimes against Asian-Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic. But anti-Blackness is so inescapable, it touches every system and structure in our country. One of the most effective ways to turn Americans against a program or policy is to convince them it benefits, or was proposed by, someone who’s Black. To this day, the “Affordable Care Act” is much more popular with voters than “Obamacare” despite them being the exact same thing. Other minority groups like Asian-Americans get compared to Black people as a way to judge their character or work ethic, drawing on stereotypes that are harmful to both groups.

So. We just said a lot here. It’s hard to know what we can do to help – if systemic racism is structural, what can we do as individuals to stop it? For one thing, white Americans can start by listening. When Black people talk about their experiences, don’t immediately say “oh but that’s not me. I’m not racist.” Just listen. And if you hear racist comments from your friends or family, say something so they know that’s not okay. And vote! Voting is the most direct way we can make real structural change.

We were all born into a system that was built on inequality; there’s nothing we could have done to avoid it. But if we want to fix it, we need to start by acknowledging that it’s real - something that the Trump administration is trying its hardest to pretend isn’t true. And all of that is why people are still talking about racism.







 



Sources

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https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/how-nations-schools-taught-white-supremacism/

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https://navigatorresearch.org/the-affordable-care-act-remains-widely-favorable/

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