How Racism Wins

TO MOST WHITE AMERICANS living today, racism has—until recently—managed to keep itself somewhat hidden. For decades, white people perpetuated the myth of an unbiased meritocracy, lauded laws that officially criminalized segregation and discrimination, embraced a token form of multiculturalism, and accepted a tincture of color in their overwhelmingly white world of power.

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the United States tipped but didn’t topple. Klan Wizard David Duke ran for national office several times but never won. Two generations after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the country elected a black president. For 40 years, if you believed you were white, you could act as though the lie of skin superiority was largely a relic of the past.

Racism and white supremacy sold the same lie the devil wants told about all manner of evil: Look at the light; there is nothing in the shadows. All is well, move along.

We know the sentiment better, perhaps, from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, in which it is said, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The poet Charles Baudelaire, however, first came to this idea in his prose poem “The Generous Gambler.” The narrator of the 1864 poem spins a tale of an evening spent with the devil. They drink and gamble, the devil wins, and the narrator loses his soul. The night ends with the narrator alone in his bed, begging God for mercy.

For a fleeting, illustrative moment, however, the devil displays weakness. He tells of the only time he felt fear: a sermon wherein a preacher enjoined his congregation to beware praise of progress and light, reminding them that the devil excels in his ability to stay hidden in the dark. The devil flinched here, it seems, though apparently without losing a single step—the preacher went unheeded.

America has long had unheeded prophets, from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X to Ta-Nehisi Coates—voices crying in the wilderness. Tupac Shakur said, “I see no changes, all I see is racist faces. Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races.”

So long as our prophets go ignored, and we keep our eyes averted from the shadows, the devil has little to fear.

Inside my soul

The election of Barack Obama was a hinge. Although it appeared at first as proof that racism had ended long ago, it stirred enough emotion to enable some of us who believe we are white to finally see something resembling the truth. A blatantly disrespectful vein of political punditry fed a vituperative social media that burned through the stories of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Then a school year began with Michael Brown, ended with Walter Scott, and had its summer vacation torn apart by Dylann Roof.

Suddenly, white Americans knew what black Americans have never been privileged enough to be able to ignore: Despite the light we see, racism persists. President Obama sang, “I once was blind but now I see,” and for a moment, the devil must have blinked, fearful that he would be found out.

He might have worried that white people finally were able to face their demons, exorcise the ghosts of America’s original sins of slavery and holocaust. Perhaps a national conversation would begin, one in which a difficult look at prejudice and implicit bias would prove powerful, engendering apology and reparation and finally bearing the fruits of forgiveness and healing. Perhaps white supremacy would lay down its weapons and open its arms. Perhaps black Americans would finally have reason to trust their white siblings.

Instead, we got the so-called “alt-right.”

It appears that we are in a new phase of racism in America, one in which these vocal white nationalists and their attendants serve as a sort of inoculation. Yes, the racial politics played out over the past decade have caused a perturbation: Racism today can no longer hide like Baudelaire’s devil. Those who call themselves the alt-right, however, serve as a cartoonish diversion from the larger evil at hand. White people see these vestigial descendants of the Klan marching with their Confederate flags and Nazi tattoos and stage a collective sigh of relief.

“This is what racism looks like,” we say to ourselves. “Racism screams at people of color in the streets. It bullies and threatens, trolls and tweets. I do none of these things.”

And the devil whispers: “Therefore, you cannot be racist.”

Who could believe in a personal devil when the notion causes most of us to imagine silly Halloween costumes or a frantic Bugs Bunny arguing with his conscience? Similarly, what logical person could be incriminated in the story of racism when, at the word, most of us picture monsters marching in the streets, holding high their symbols of hate? Let just a moment of suspicion sneak in—“Maybe this story has something to do with me”—and watch the devil distract with extremity and hyperbole.

Take Dylann Roof. He might have been the final straw for white people, his outrageous acts causing scales to fall from our eyes and allowing us to see, finally, that racism still pervades our world. And yet he also provides an easy way out of introspection and self-recrimination. “This is what a real racist looks like,” we think, “this silly man with his manifestos and semiautomatic weapons. He might as well be wearing red tights for all he has to do with me. I cannot believe that anything remotely like him resides inside my soul. He is the lunatic fringe: He could never be me.”

This is how racism wins.

A lifelong project

We must learn to see racism not just in the ways that are so highly visible, like white nationalists on the march, but in our own day-to-day lives.

I am white and teach at a high school in southwest Atlanta that is 98 percent black. I have been there for almost 14 years now, during which I have read hundreds of books on race and racism, earned a doctorate on race in the public schools, and published articles and essays especially focused on black students and white teachers. Throughout this time—which entirely encompasses the Obama era and the spurious idea of post-racism—I have had countless conversations with white people, too many of which ended similarly. They told me that the problem in America is no longer about race; rather, it’s about class. All we have to do is fix poverty and we’ll see that prejudice will end.

Like the siren’s song, this sentence is appealing, but wrong. Racism is inextricably intertwined with class, as blacks are close to three times more likely to live in poverty than whites. Racism is also confounded with employment and educational and health outcomes—all areas where blacks significantly lag whites for reasons that are not statistically explained by differences in income. The mere fact that my school exists—an almost all-black school in an almost all-black part of town that’s beset by poverty and lagging academically—is evidence of the racism that pervades our country. As Kanye West once said: “The devil is alive, I can feel him breathin’.”

If we’re honest, racism is woven into the lives of most white people. Because, on the whole, if one is white, then one lives next to white people, socializes with white people, is related to white people, worships alongside white people. If one is white, then one has limited opportunities to process the racism one might feel during that horrible moment in a public place when a reaction to a black stranger will dredge up all sorts of prejudice and stereotype.

I am pretty sure most white people have these moments, because they still happen to me sometimes—this after years of deliberate scholarship, countless conversations, and an almost all-black senior class who voted me “Favorite Teacher” last year. Negotiating otherness is difficult work because it is, by definition, about difference. I have come to realize that it might be a lifelong project for those of us taught to believe we are white.

The devil wants us to not worry about any of these things, structural or personal. “Racism is out there,” he says, “but that’s not you.” Instead, he lurks behind us—listen to him breathing—and tries to focus our attention on Dylann Roof and public events featuring white supremacists and neo-Nazis. These kinds of racists are worthy of attention, of course, but when we turn our eyes too far toward the extreme edge, we let racism win. Because so long as the structures of inequity prevail—inequities of education, health, employment, wealth etc.—and we believe that racism only operates on the crazy margins, in the screamers and the trolls, so long as we think we have nothing to do with the system of white supremacy that lurks in the minds of white people like a symbiotic virus, benefitting us even as it sickens, so long as we keep our heads low and soldier on: Racism wins.

How racism loses

Racism loses when we look it straight in the face. When we flinch at the black stranger and, instead of comforting ourselves by imagining vast distance between us and the nature of Nazis, turn and rebuke ourselves: “Get behind me, Satan!” Call that thought out for what it is: racism—the belief that black skin is inferior to white. Say, “I didn’t mean to react that way, but I did. That is prejudice, and I can defeat it only by calling it out by name.”

It loses when we repent. Maybe to a friend or in the privacy of our prayers. Maybe to the human being we wronged by believing ourselves better.

It loses when we wake up tomorrow and try to do it all over again.

We must not let Dylann Roof, Nazi tattoos, Confederate flags, or blackface yearbook photos convince us that this story has nothing to do with us. We must not believe the lie that a nation predicated on centuries of chattel slavery has healed itself magically in the space of two generations. We must not continue to tell ourselves that the devil of racism is nothing more than a cartoon, a halting vestige of what he once was, an impotent fool in red tights.

Look for the devil in the shadows, not on Twitter or television. Look inside your mind, under the structures of your mostly white spaces of safety. Look behind you and listen for his breathing.

Otherwise, racism wins.