The Persistence of Racial Hierarchy and Why It Matters
White Americans Have a Responsibility to End the Systems of Oppression They’ve Created
White Americans Have a Responsibility to End the Systems of Oppression They’ve Created
The opening paragraph of Randall Kennedy’s New York Times op-ed Thursday sparked a memory for me. Kennedy focuses on a 27-year-old death sentence that has been tainted by overt racism. I oppose capital punishment and am willing to endorse any efforts to prevent executions. The death penalty is immoral, an acceptance of state violence that only further contributes to the growing violence of our society. It codifies revenge, rather than justice, and is racist in its application.
But that’s not what struck me about Kennedy’s column. As I said, it was the opening paragraph:
Several years after Keith Tharpe was sentenced to death for murder in 1991, a juror in his case signed an affidavit stating that there are two types of black people: good ones and “niggers.” The juror, who was white, put the defendant in the latter category and said that he wondered “if black people even have souls.”
I’ve heard this line of argument before, more than once.
I remember a conversation with a young white kid. I think he had only recently graduated high school and was working with me at the Mexican fast food place in the year or so between my leaving grad school and beginning my career as a reporter. My conversation, therefore, was contemporaneous with the Tharpe sentencing, though, as I said, I don’t view it as a relic of the past.
I don’t recall what triggered the conversation — perhaps it was a story in one of the New York tabloids (the Post and the Daily News) that were always present, mostly so we could follow the New York sports teams. Perhaps there was a story about the Central Park Five in the tabloids, or about the Tawana Brawley case. Both were in the news at this time. Or it could have been something else, something unrelated.
What I can remember is the kid, a somewhat burly, though not muscular stoner with long, greasy blond hair and glasses. He was a talker. I think his name was Rich, and he proclaimed that he had black friends, that he had no prejudice. But he had no problem with the n-word. There were two kinds of blacks, he said, almost quoting word for word a paragraph that Randall Kennedy would write nearly 30 years later. Good ones and the n-word. He went farther, explaining that the good ones were like “the rest of us” — clean and diligent and hard working. They spoke well. They weren’t thugs — a word that has come to stand in for the n-word on cable news, these days, but was just coming to be used as a racial epithet. Those he would describe with the n-word — I’m trying to avoid using the word, leaving it only in quote marks when quoting other sources — spoke in dialect, he said, showing off their lack of intelligence. They were dirty and uncouth, he said.
His absurd dichotomy fit the media stereotype of the time, which was used to justify the fear-based violence of a guy like Bernard Goetz (who became a hero to some, mostly white Americans after he shot four black kids in the New York subways in 1984), or the rush to judgment in the Central Park Five case, which sparked the term wilding. Far too many politicians and opinion makers bought into this: George H. W. Bush supporters ran the overtly racist “Willie Horton ad,” which Bush did not disavow. Jesse Helms made overt racist pleas against affirmative action (see his “white hands” ad). Bill Clinton created the Sistah Souljah moment when he used an angry remark by the rapper/author to demonstrate his willingness to target African American activists in his quest for the White House. Donald Trump’s racism was evident during this earlier period, as well, when he paid for full-page ads calling for the five kids accused in the Central Park case to get the death penalty (he has refused to show any remorse for his blood lust even after the kids were exonerated). Hillary Clinton was not exempt from what I’ll call the “racist moment,” calling black youth “predators” at one point during her husband’s presidency.
We are poisoned as a culture by racism, we have too long a history of creating hierarchies of race and Americanness that we have yet to dispatch to the past. This taxonomizing of minority groups is alive and well and continues to poison our politics and culture — with blacks, of course, along with Latinx, Jews (I have been called a good Jew because I don’t fit the money-grabber stereotype), Muslims, and other groups being measured against an invisible, but mostly white Christian norm.
Think about what Trump said in announcing his candidacy: Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Let that sink in. “Some, I assume, are good people.”
Think about what Trump said in announcing his candidacy: Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
And think about how the narratives surrounding the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and so many other African American men are framed. The focus quickly shifts to a blame-the-victim argument as not just the police or defense attorneys but the media as an institution turns its attention to the biographies of the dead black men (and women). They died, the implication is, because they were not part of the class we might call “the good ones.”
This is racist thinking manifest in action. Racism is not just about hate, but about systems that create hierarchies, that enforce the differences.
This is one of the points Ta-Nehisi Coates makes in Between the World and Me. Coates writes that “race is the child of racism, not the father” (7). The American project for much of its history has been about hierarchy, about privileging some at the expense of the other, of African Americans. It is why nearly every new minority group that has come to the United States eventually is mainstreamed, eventually is recast as white. The Irish once were depicted as apes, as dangerous rowdies who were a threat to order. Once slavery was abolished, however, they were normalized, remade as white. The same trajectory held for Italians, Poles and, in a more fraught and tenuous way, Jews; all were given entry into what Coates calls “the people who believe themselves to be white.” White as a category is a relatively recent invention — see Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People — and is part of a broader maintenance of racial hierarchy in the United States. That’s why Coates describes whites as he does (it is one of the lesser-remarked-upon aspects of an otherwise well-discussed book).
As Coates says, “the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy” (7).
What we name ourselves and others matters. The language used by those in power has the force to create reality. Politicians know this. Think the “death tax” or the contemporary use of “chain migration” (as opposed to its use in sociology). These words frame the debates in which they’re used, altering public opinion with their underlying connotations.
The same is true of the n-word. It’s rare now that whites use the word, even in private, a disappearance that only masks the continuing racism that plagues American society. We’ve developed new words to take the place of the n-word, cleaner more polite words, deracinated ones used mostly in politics, designed to provide plausible deniability to the speaker while signaling to supporters where the speaker stands. I’m talking about the repeated and decontextualized use of thug, banger, gangsta, the purposeful conflation of welfare with black women, the use of “hard working” and “white working class” to describe Trump voters.
This racism lies at the root of much of our social disfunction, from our willingness to tolerate obscene levels of poverty to the proliferation of guns. Christopher Keelty in his essay, “Racism Is Driving Modern American Gun Culture,” makes the point that arguments about self-defense and liberty offered by gun-rights supporters are code for protection from other races.
His essay opens on a conversation he had with a gun-owning friend.
I asked why he felt the need to keep a pistol beside his bed. “Because,” he said, “someday, some thug is going to come for me and my family, and I need to be ready.”
A variation on the male power fantasy that motivates many gun owners, yes, but the part that struck me was the choice of word, “thug.” I’d seen him use this word before, on Facebook and in conversation. It always meant the same thing: A black man.
“Thug” is the new n-word, taking on the n-word’s connotations and history — and its problematic and complicated use within the black community. When a white student uses the n-word or thug as a pejorative to demean visiting black students after a basketball game, the use is framed by the history of white supremacy and signals not just racism but an effort to maintain the structures of white supremacy that have marked us as a nation. When used by African Americans, its use is more complicated.
Derrick Z. Jackson, in The New York Times in 2005, quotes Def Jam founder Russell Simmons describing the use of the n-word by blacks as “very positive”:
“When black kids call each other ‘a real nigger’ or ‘my nigger,’ it means you walk a certain way, … have your own culture that you invent so you don’t have to buy into the U.S. culture that you’re not really a part of. It means we’re special. We have our own language.”
When Kendrick Lamar uses it in “Blacker the Berry,” a song that turns ugly stereotypes on their heads in an effort to reclaim a sense of power, of moment of personal supremacy, he is tossing it back in the white mainstream’s face: “You sabotage my community, makin’ a killin’ / You made me a killer, emancipation of a real nigga.”
Lamar’s use is similar to Richard Pryor’s early in his career, I would argue. Pryor eventually stopped using the word. He told an audience that it was a word used “to describe our own wretchedness” — a reminder of the effects of white supremacy. It made him uncomfortable, made him feel degraded. He was done.
Jackson is critical of the “just slang” argument. The word, he said, has not “helped black people to rise above achievement gaps in schools or helped black males to be respectful to women and responsible to babies they father out of wedlock.” This critique, though, betrays a generational bias — think Barack Obama’s attack on baggy pants, or Kennedy’s defense of respectability politics in Harper’s.
I’m not sure where I stand — or if it is appropriate for me to do anything more than listen and let the people most effected hash this out. What I do know, however, is that the word is out there, and that it — as Rhinold Lamar Ponder, a Princeton-based artist and lawyer, told me — is “deep down, part of our inheritance.” That inheritance is a stubborn white supremacy.
Ponder has made the n-word a central element of his art, which brings it to the forefront and forces us to see how it distorts our efforts on race. Part of the problem with the n-word, he says, is that it disguises what we are inheriting. It disguises — when the focus is on the n-word, we forget to focus on the system that it is the brand for, a system of exploitation of people of color first and people of all colors in general.
The word, he is saying, can help reinforce the hierarchies, while also obscuring the larger debate. “There is no thing called race,” he told me in an interview.
It does not exist except that we created this as a fiction, a fiction of domination. We continue to replicate the same power structure by using what we’ve inherited to recreate and reinforce the same doggone structure. How do you get from this inheritance to becoming an anti-racist, while you are fighting over “nigger,” when your real fight should be over white supremacy? How do you have this fight without replicating the same power structure?
I don’t have an answer, as I said. As a white, middle-class Jew, I have a level of privilege not afforded to most African Americans. If stopped by police, for instance, I don’t have to worry how the encounter will end. So, I am perhaps climbing onto a perch I should abandon, and preaching from a privileged space about something known all too well by African Americans — but often ignored by whites, who fail to see (refuse to see) the broader historical and systemic constraints that have been placed on blacks, constraints we’ve rendered invisible because they hold down a portion of the population we’ve already denigrated as not even having a soul.
But I do know that racism’s tentacles reach far deeper into the American soil than individual hatred. It is systemic. These hierarchies are real, and have real consequences — in housing policies, policing, schooling, and so many other ways. Keith Tharpe is just one man convicted unjustly. Michael Brown is just one man whose life was taken by police on the slimmest of grounds. Trayvon Martin is just one teen viewed through the lens of race and who paid with his life.
We — meaning the white majority — created these hierarchies and biases. We have taken them and entrenched them in law, in culture, in every area of our society. That is why it is us — the white majority — who have a responsibility to address them, to fix them, to end them. We created them, and we have to end them.