Why the Fight Against Racism has to Start With Owning it
I can't remember a time in my thinking life when I wasn't aware of my own racism. I don't say that with shame; it's just a fact—I'm racist, you're racist, even babies are racist. And I suppose I've always felt, particularly as a person of color, that acknowledging this aspect of our very flawed human existence was the best chance to undermine its power.
That's why it's been so strange to hear people insisting of late that they are not not not racist. Even as I write "people," I realize I mean all of us, but especially white folks. From President Trump to law enforcement officials, high school vandals to hipster parents—no one has a racist bone in their body, apparently. And horrors like the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas—in which authorities say a 21-year-old white gunman killed 22 people and injured dozens more after posting a manifesto that decried "race mixing" and a "Hispanic invasion"—only make the unracist more convinced: Racist shooters and extremists are the problem, not real, regular Americans who'd never dream of behaving so abhorrently.
Yet, more and more, I feel I'm drowning in racism—a kind of casual, consistent, visible and visibly mounting racism that's all the more confounding because it won't admit it exists.
What's going on here?
It starts with language. Racism in my world encompasses everything from overt bad acts carried out by avowed racists to the countless instances of unconscious bias I'm sure I commit every day—instinctively opting for the black or brown yoga teacher over a white one, say, or assuming the white guy's our pilot when it's the black guy behind him wearing the uniform. That's how my professors framed it, how my community talked about it and how I've always envisioned it. But this is not, thinker after thinker told me, how many white people experience the word "racism."
"The mainstream definition of 'racism' is when an individual consciously doesn't like people based on race and is intentionally mean to them," said academic, Robin DiAngelo. "Who is going to own intentional meanness? That definition is the root of virtually all white defensiveness."