The River of American Racism

In Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste, there’s a story about a Black boy who was allowed into a swimming pool with his white teammates only after all the white swimmers had gotten out of the water. And the terms under which he was allowed “in” the pool were that he be placed on a rubber raft and pushed around the pool by a white lifeguard, who repeatedly warned him not to touch the water.

The white people had such a visceral feeling about the boy’s blackness that they could not tolerate the idea of white people getting into the pool if the water had touched that Black skin.

I feel sympathetic with people who are captive to feelings that operate at that visceral level, because I’ve got some visceral feelings of my own, learned early on, that I wish would disappear and leave me with a feeling I would prefer because I think it wiser and because it would make me more at home in the world.

I can look at how I’m responding, and tell myself that’s not healthy, but the response comes whether I like it or not.

It seems that what got planted early on in life can be permanently established.

I’m imagining that some share of white American racism is entrenched at THAT VISCERAL LEVEL. People are not going to get argued out of feelings like that.

Some people with such visceral feelings might feel as I do about some of mine, wishing they didn’t have them—that they’d prefer not to have their racist feelings poisoning their relationship with the Black Americans with whom they share a country and a history.

But if that visceral feeling was instilled early on deeply enough, the motivation to deal with Black people in a racist way could take possession of the person and call the shots. No sense that they should feel otherwise.

But there’s more than visceral feelings involved. It seems simply to be a fact that a significant portion of people have a need to see some other group as morally bad and/or otherwise inferior to their own.

That need has manifested itself not only in the treatment of Blacks, but also of Native Americans and, in the latter half of the 19th century, in dealing with the Chinese immigrants who came to help build the railroads.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was in large part racist in motivation. And it is revealing how determined white Americans of that time were to see the Chinese as inherently stupid, now that we can see that Chinese Americans have excelled in fields requiring high intelligence.

Which connects with how there was, not very long ago, a general feeling that Blacks simply did not have the intelligence to be great quarterbacks. A Black running back? Yes, they’ve got speed. But, it was widely thought, Blacks would not be smart enough to process the information and exercise the judgment required in a quarterback.

Now, of course, the NFL is full of great Black quarterbacks, because it turns out that the notion of mental inferiority of Black people wasn’t about the truth, but about the need some people clearly have to contort reality in order to make the other people something negative, and to make one’s own image that of superiority.

I have enough of a need to think myself “better” than some other people in some way to feel sympathy for those who have that need to see Chinese, or Indians, or Blacks in negative ways, and to direct negative feelings against them.

Even if that requires a falsification of reality.

It isn’t a happy thing to have that need—it is an attempt to repair some damage. In a perfect world, no one would have a NEED to claim falsely that one was superior and that others deserve hostility.

There are not happy reasons for people to claim a superiority they do not warrant, and to see in some OTHER something that one then feels HOSTILE toward.

While racism may meet SOME need, it also diminishes the quality of a person’s life– damaging the racist’s relationships with other human beings, and contributing to the poisoning of their society.

Racism is, for the most part, something that happens to people.

It’s part of how, in general, culture happens to people. We learn the language of the family and community into which we happen to be born. Likewise with powerful attitudes embedded in one’s surroundings.

Not everyone goes along with everything, but the majority of those born and raised in a culture where racist attitudes are strong and widespread will absorb those attitudes.

Whether racism arises from visceral feelings or from a psychological need to see oneself as superior to some OTHER, the forces at work are not easily changed. Feelings planted deep in childhood cannot simply be wished away. Nor can a psychological need—presumably rooted in some injured sense of self, and motivating a distortion of reality that proclaims one’s superiority—be readily dissolved by demonstrating that the beliefs it generates are false.

The difficulty of changing these deeply rooted cultural currents helps explain why the river of American racism has flowed so powerfully for so long—from the colonial South, through slavery, through the century of Jim Crow and racial terrorism that followed emancipation, through the resistance to the civil rights movement, and into our own time.

Generation after generation, the river of American racism has been replenished by the transmission of feelings and psychological needs too deeply rooted to be easily changed.

If racism is, to a considerable extent, something that happens to people, that understanding should shape how we deal with it—both those who oppose racism and those who carry this unfortunate American inheritance.

Those who oppose racism should recognize how much depends on the circumstances into which people are born. Just as people caught in an epidemic have less chance of remaining healthy, people raised in a culture saturated with racism have less chance of escaping it. Recognizing this should temper our judgments of their responsibility for the feelings they’ve acquired. There is a “there but for the grace of God” element here that should inspire compassion for those afflicted, even as we oppose the racism itself.

And those who harbor racist feelings can recognize that they need not be on the side of their own racism.

They may be unable to rid themselves of those feelings, however much they wish to—just as I cannot simply wish away some of my own unwanted visceral feelings. But they can recognize that the feelings are not worthy of governing their behavior. And they can resolve not to pass those feelings on to their children.

The key to weakening that river over generations is to stop passing racism on to our children.

We need not imagine that racism can be eliminated from American life. But we can imagine something both more realistic and enormously valuable: that fifty years from now, the great river of American racism might have become something closer to a trickle.