| Although similar to the earlier process, the later rewriting process is distinctly different in two major ways. First, there is, generally speaking, no attempt to retain the old ideological core of unambiguous overt racism, as there was in the first rewriting. Instead, the aim is focused on establishing a new interpretation of "equality" that is fundamentally racist in terms of perpetuating structural inequality, and preempting even the possibility of engaging in critical discourse attacking that false equality. Such an interpretation allows the election of a black president, but only if he keeps his mouth shut about race, even as his political opponents use his race as an integral part of their largely irrational attacks against him. Second, this rewriting process is part of a larger rewriting process aimed at altering all of Western, and indeed world history to conform to a radical right view in which the tradition of political liberalism that gave birth to the modern democratic political order does not exist in any coherently recognizable form. Books such as Liberal Fascism are examples of this revisionist project.
Consider three items as illustrative of what's going on. First, a perceptive presentation of what's actually going on in the contrasting cases of Reid and Lott. Second, a reality-check about the intense differences that differences in black skin tone can make. Third, a sobering look at the deep differences between how blacks and whites evaluated and make judgments about racial progress & the continuing costs of racial inequality.
Restoring Common Sense Comparing Reid and Lott
First, from the Situationist blog, is "Reporting Social Facts vs. Pining for Jim Crow: No Comparison Between Reid and Lott" by UC Irvine professor Eric D. Knowles. He begins:
Imagine a scenario. An African American lawyer, we can even call him "Barry," has applied for a job at a prestigious firm-one that has never before hired a Black person. You eavesdrop on a couple of partners talking about the candidate. Question: Which, if either, of the these overheard comments is the more racist?
"I don't know... Barry's facing an uphill climb at an all-White firm like this. However, he just might have a shot given the fact that he's fairly light-complected and doesn't speak using African American Vernacular English."
"This firm's going to hell if it hires a Black guy. I wish Strom Thurmond were the head of the hiring committee."
The analogy may be a bit crude. But those paying attention to recent political news will recognize the partners as stand-ins for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and former Senator (and Majority Leader) Trent Lott, respectively.
Actually, I don't think the analogy is the least bit crude. It's spot on. But I want to fast forward a bit to the last paragraph of the post:
This episode says a great deal about how Americans talk (or fail to talk) about race. Most illustrative were comments made by Liz Cheney on ABC's This Week. Ms. Cheney found herself sparring with, of all people, conservative commentator George Will over the Reid affair. Cheney contended that Reid's comments were "outrageous" and "racist." When Will countered that Reid's comments contained "not a scintilla of racism," Cheney responded-and this is telling-"George, give me a break. I mean, talking about the color of the president's skin..." For Cheney, the mere mention of race is tantamount to racism. It's worth pausing to appreciate how pernicious this extreme form of color-blindness is. If we can't talk about race, we can't talk about racial inequality-and if we can't talk about racial inequality, we're guaranteed not to do anything about it. Perhaps this is exactly what some people want.
No "perhaps" about it. That's precisely the intent of colorblind racism, a subject I've blogged about on various different occasions. Racism has always insisted on controlling the discussion of race, making it into a taboo in most social situations. Unequal enforcement of the taboo then becomes a key part of the process of controlling the discourse about race, and by controlling the discourse, one ensures that certain ideas remain anathema and unthinkable. Expunging those ideas from one's consciousness, it then becomes possible to construct whatever sort of fantasy one desires-including reinventing Dr. Martin Luther King as a conservative Republican.
Being A Light-Skinned Black Really DOES Make A Difference
Our second item is intended to redress an oversight that most white people--even progressives--are largely oblivious to.
In white aka "mainstream" political discourse, the fact of prejudice being linked to shades of skin color is not simply subject to suppression by righwing ideology, as pointed out above. Even when it is acknowledged, it is not dwelled up. In contrast, for blacks-and other minorities as well-it is an inescapable fact of life, particularly for those who are darker skinned. This was vividly underscored by a recent study regarding the life-and-death significance of "blackness," Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes (pdf), by Jennifer Eberhardt, Paul Davies, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson. The abstract explains:
Researchers previously have investigated the role of race in capital sentencing, and in particular, whether the race of the defendant or victim influences the likelihood of a death sentence. In the present study, we examined whether the likelihood of being sentenced to death is influenced by the degree to which a Black defendant is perceived to have a stereotypically Black appearance. Controlling for a wide array of factors, we found that in cases involving a White victim, the more stereotypically Black a defendant is perceived to be, the more likely that person is to be sentenced to death.
Going into more detail, the study was divided into two parts, first studying cases with white victims, then cases with black victims. Significantly, there different results for the two parts:
PHASE I: BLACK DEFENDANT, WHITE VICTIM
....
In fact, 24.4% of those Black defendants who fell in the lower half of the stereotypicality distribution received a death sentence, whereas 57.5% of those Black defendants who fell in the upper half received a death sentence.
So, if you kill a white person (or, rather, are found guilty of killing a white person), then it makes a big difference how black you are. OTOH.:
PHASE II: BLACK DEFENDANT, BLACK VICTIM
....
Employing the same analyses as we did for the cases with White victims, we found that the perceived stereotypicality of Black defendants convicted of murdering Black victims did not predict death sentencing, F(1, 110)<1 (Fig. 2b). Black defendants who fell in the upper and lower halves of the stereotypicality distribution were sentenced to death at almost identical rates (45% vs. 46.6%, respectively). Thus, defendants who were perceived to be more stereotypically Black were more likely to be sentenced to death only when their victims were White.
So, skin tone doesn't matter if you're convicted of killing a black person.
Summing up: Our findings suggest that in cases involving a Black defendant and a White victim-cases in which the likelihood of the death penalty is already high-jurors are influenced not simply by the knowledge that the defendant is Black, but also by the extent to which the defendant appears stereotypically Black. In fact, for those defendants who fell in the top half as opposed to the bottom half of the stereotypicality distribution, the chance of receiving a death sentence more than doubled. Previous laboratory research has already shown that people associate Black physical traits with criminality (Eberhardt et al., 2004). The present research demonstrates that in actual sentencing decisions, jurors may treat these traits as powerful cues to deathworthiness.
In light of the above, given the wild-eyed fantasies that conservative elites have managed to propagate about Obama-a light-skinned-back, it's hard to imagine anything more serious than subject of how skin-tone effects white prejudice. Harry Reid may be many things, but when talked about Obama's skin-tone, he was simply being a moderately saavy political observer.
Black vs. White Views of Racial Progress & the Costs of Inequality
Our third item is a really explosive one, especially considering how unequivocally Barack Obama has shut the door on even whispering about the issue of reparations. Once again, we turn to an item from the Situationist blog, "Examining Why Estimated "Costs" of Racial Inequality Vary by Race", a post from early 2008, which began:
Situationist contributor and Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, along with Ohio State social psychologist Phillip Mazzocco, were the subject of a recent article by the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam, who studied recent research concerning unequal perspectives on racial inequality. Their research was contained in the 2006 article, "The Cost of Being Black: White Americans Perceptions and the Question of Reparations," DuBois Review, 3, 261-297. Their co-authors on the article were Ohio State's Timothy Brock, Harvard's Kristina Olson, and Gregory Brock.
We excerpt Vedantam's piece below.
Before looking at the article, here's the abstract of the paper:
White Americans have long resisted the idea of reparations to the descendants of slaves. We examine the psychological basis of such resistance, primarily testing the possibility that resistance may be a function of Whites' perception of the ongoing cost of being Black. White participants (n = 958) across twelve independent samples (varying in age, student status, and geographic location) were asked variations of the question: How much should you be paid to continue to live the remainder of your life as a Black person? Participants generally required low median amounts, less than $10,000, to make the race change, whereas they requested high amounts, $1,000,000, to give up television. To the extent that larger amounts were requested, support for reparations also increased. Attempts to educate participants about Black cost/White privilege had negligible effects on assessments of the cost of being Black and support for reparations. Together, these results suggest that White resistance to reparations for Black Americans stems from fundamental biases in estimating the true cost of being Black. The implications of our findings for color-blind and multiculturalist conceptual approaches are discussed.
Such fundamentally biases are intutitively quite likely to be similar to the biases discussed last weekend about perceptions of risk related to global warming--they are biases that shap our perceptions of fact. We now return to the excerpt from the article, contained in the post, which begins thus:
Social psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Mahzarin Banaji once asked white volunteers how much money would cover the "costs" of being born black instead of white. The volunteers guessed that about $5,000 ought to cover the lifetime disadvantages of being an average black person rather than an average white person, in the United States. By contrast, when asked how much they wanted to go without television, the volunteers demanded a million dollars.
Mazzocco and Banaji were taken aback: The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person, and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks earn 60 cents to the dollar compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. The black poverty rate is nearly twice the white poverty rate. Blacks tend to die five years earlier than whites; the infant mortality rate among black babies is nearly 1 1/2 times the rate among white babies. And because of long-standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth.
"The point we were making is, whatever the cost of being black might be, whites are vastly underestimating it," said Mazzocco, of Ohio State University at Mansfield. "You throw in the 5-to-1 wealth gap . . . if you wanted to put a dollar-and-cents value on the difference, you would come up with a number much larger than $5,000."
The unusual experiment is one of dozens that have found that whites tend to have a relatively rosy impression of what it means to be a black person in America. Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to believe that the position of African Americans has improved a great deal. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to believe that conditions for African Americans are growing worse.
This long-standing war of perceptions created the perfect storm last week after sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright - former pastor of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) - painted a picture of stark inequality at odds with white perceptions.
I pointed out at the time that Wright was right, and that Obama's attempt to distance himself from Wright had a fundamentally dishonest aspect to it. Obama tried to (falsely) portray their differences in terms of Wright refusing to acknowledge progress--but that's just a way of avoiding the real issue here, which is that white people vastly under-estimate the ongoing costs of racial inequality. In fact, there's even evidence that blacks as a whole under-estimate such costs, though not by as much as whites. If blacks did uniformly understand the true costs, it is highly questionable that reparations could be kept off the national political agenda. The costs are simply that staggering, as indicated by some of the figures cited above.
The excerpt from the article concludes:
Mazzocco and Banaji, who teaches at Harvard, found that when volunteers learned about the disparities, they started to demand much larger sums of money.
"Many whites assume blacks are making use of old crimes to gain present-day benefits that are unearned," Mazzocco said. "Underlying this is a misunderstanding and ignorance about black costs and white privilege."
But knowledge about disparities is not the only reason whites and blacks have different perceptions about racial equality. Social psychologist Richard Eibach at Yale University has shown that whites and blacks often employ different yardsticks to measure racial equality. Whites tend to measure progress by comparing the present and the past - and America has made giant strides since the Jim Crow era. Nonwhites, Eibach found, are likely to evaluate racial equality in comparison with an idealized future. These yardsticks create entirely different perceptions.
When Eibach asked each group to use the other's yardstick - whites to focus on the future and nonwhites to think about the past - the differences disappeared. Now, everyone agreed the country had come a long way - and had a long way to go.
Now, to push a little bit past the rhetorical pseudo-reconciliation used to close that piece, let's consider what's actually going on here. When whites--particularly younger ones, who are (justifiably) proud of their freedom from prejudice--look at racial differences in terms of how far we've come, they are in effect taking credit for the results of other people's struggles, whereas blacks, looking forward, are thinking much more realistically about the struggles that they themselves--as well as their friends, families and future descendents--actually face.
Is there any question which group--blacks or whites--deserves to be considered the "reality-based community"?
And therefore, is there any question that any technique, procedure, political strategy or ideology that "brings them together" somewhere in the middle is a compromise between truth and lies?
And is there any question that a compromise between truth and lies is itself a lie? |
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