Let’s talk
by Tom Sullivan
Nicholas Kristof this morning calls for an American Truth and Reconciliation Commission in “When Whites Just Don’t Get It, Part 5.” He cites most of the articles I had collected to write about race anyway, so as he says, let’s talk.
We had an experience recently that showed us just how much we don’t get it. Commenting on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ stunning “The Case for Reparations,” I wrote:
On a long drive in the last year or so, we were trading notes with a friend about where we were born, how long we had lived in North Carolina, and something about our family history. It was all pretty light conversation until our friend remarked that her knowledge of family history went back only as far as her great-grandparents in the Caribbean. She didn’t have to explain why. Because before that was Africa.
In white America many take pride or at least an interest in family history. We mostly take it for granted. I certainly did. What jerked us up short was realizing that our friend didn’t have one and why.
Three-quarters of whites have only white friends, Kristof begins, one big reason “we are often clueless.” Then there is the everyday racial profiling we never see. Like being followed around by security in a department store, as our friend experiences, or the professor falsely accused of shoplifting in a chain store here last year. Kristof writes:
“In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” a 23-year-old black man wrote in May 1992. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall, they follow me.”
He described an incident when he was stopped by six police officers who detained him, with guns at the ready, and treated him for 30 minutes as a dangerous suspect.
That young man was future Senator Cory Booker, who had been a senior class president at Stanford University and was a newly selected Rhodes Scholar. Yet our law enforcement system reduced him to a stereotype — so young Booker sat trembling and praying that he wouldn’t be shot by the police.
This kind of underground railroading is invisible to a white America where “racism is over” is the new “I have a black friend.” This is the era of racism without racists.
Yet ProPublica reports that young black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than young whites. And we can watch as police seconds after arriving gun down 12 year-old Tamir Rice, but merely chase down a large, white adult who fights with two officers even after being tased.
Kristof continues:
White Americans may protest that our racial problems are not like South Africa’s. No, but the United States incarcerates a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South Africa did. In America, the black-white wealth gap today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the peak of apartheid.
Most troubling, America’s racial wealth gap, pay gap and college education gap have all widened in the last few decades.
This country needs to address the problem with something more than categorical claims of color blindness, and more self-aware and coherent than Chief Justice John Roberts‘, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Somebody is in denial and that somebody is us.