Morning Ed: United States {2016.08.18.Th}

J_A says:

As you know I am not USA born, and I have the opportunity to live in and to travel to countries with large black minorities.

There is racism everywhere. There are places, like Trinidad, with lots of racism, much more than here. In these places, racism means “I don’t like this people, I don’t want to associate personally with these people”. The word “personally” carrying a lot of weight here. Racism in Trinidad or Brazil or Cuba or the UK is of the personal nature. I, as a person, don’t like blacks, and therefore I won’t marry blacks, won’t become friends with blacks, and, as much as possible, will avoid black colleagues at work.

But the racism in the USA is of a different nature. It’s societal. It’s less personal, and more baked in the institutions. There is no so much that racists are saying “I don’t want to be friends with blacks” but that the societal institutions built during the decades and decades of segregation, in their South and North varieties, have been baked in, and remain in place, invisible, but still affecting black people.

Non blacks -including me- are mostly blind to the societal tripping blocks that pervade the USA and make it more difficult for blacks to progress. No one will suspect me if I’m opening my front door. They might suspect a black neighbour because they don’t expect blacks to live here. When the police stops me they are courteous, when I apply for a job my Spanish name does not bother them, except to apologize for not being able to handle so many Rs. I don’t think my
black colleagues have the same experiences. But it’s difficult to ask, because in a 250 employee office there are two black people, and one is the receptionist (but we have do scores of Asians, Chinese, Japanese and Indian, and plenty of Hispanics chatting in Spanish at all hours). I guess this is what people call white (meaning non-black) privilege.

But blacks must also somehow address the pathologies of black culture. I do believe they (or some of they) try to do so, but there’s a lot of self inflicted harm. Conservatives (and racists) do have a valid point. The institutions (family, churches, black colleges, the black middle class) that blacks had built for themselves for generations during segregation crumbled when segregation ended. I think there’s a mix of correlation and causation in there, but the result is that the “separate and unequal” black community turned into a small black middle class immersed within the majority of the country, yet not fully integrated with it, and a larger black underclass that were unable to make this transition, but whose communities lost the support -and the positive example- of the educated black middle class.

tl/dr : Racism in the USA, is not racist people disliking blacks. It is something that segregation baked within our society’s structure, and therefore it can be invisible to most of us. How to go back and change things that have been there for more than a century is a major society endevour. That’s the black on white conversation on race. But there is a black on black side to the conversation on race. The black community has a lot of self inflicted wounds. There is nothing non blacks can do about that.

The people that don’t like blacks will still be there, and able to do a little mischief, but, like in most places with black minorities, they will not be able to stop black people participating fully in society. They are not the problem. Eventually, they will be gone.Report