Ambivalent is one of my kids’ vocabulary words this week. It’s apropos to my feelings on some of what I’ve been reading.
The item in question: via both The War On Folly and Dr. Spence, I’ve seen this website, Racism Review. Now on the one hand, I generally take a fairly dim view of itemizing instances of racism, because I’m not sure what the point is, except to remind us that racism isn’t dead. But we know that. We been knew that. The occurrence of individual acts of racism doesn’t necessarily signify anything greater than the fact that there are individual racists out there. I certainly don’t think that the fact that there’s a Klan rally somewhere, for instance, signifies that The Master Plan ™ is working. Moreover, I don’t know that it’s productive to focus on something that has real, but limited effects on our progress - or maybe I should say limited effects, relative to the things over which we have complete control. Yeah, racism is real, and it’s really out there, but if we need there to be no racism for us to make progress, we in bad shape.
At the same time, because my general assumption is that people know and acknowledge the reality of racism, I’m always surprised when I see the reaction to racist actions. Take, for instance, this incident in Lancaster County, PA. What’s surprising to me is not what happened, it’s the reaction of the townspeople. They acted like nothing had happened. Even as I recognize that individual racism is not necessarily indicative of a conspiracy, I also know that racism is malicious, and when people who are not racist refuse to acknowledge its existence, racism has found the perfect environment in which to thrive. As it was once said, “The Devil’s best trick is to make people believe he doesn’t exist.” As long as people can sit idly by and chalk up cases of obvious, virulent racism to some type of ‘boys-will-be-boys,’ societal change is impossible.
So then, I have some type of reconciliation, right? It’s important to highlight instances of racism because it draws attention to it and makes people who would otherwise be unaware that it really does exist, right? Well, no. The people who believe racism exists don’t really need more evidence, and the people who need proof tend to not believe it even when they see it — unless it happens somewhere else.
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