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Did you hear the one about the Louisiana Justice of the Peace who refused to marry an interracial couple? I did. These stories just sort of pile up on us like loads of dirty laundry, and this one took me down the treacherous path of "I am not a racist but." (Note: You'll find part 2 of this post at this link.)
Before I go farther, let's address tit-for-tat mentalities and examine the question "Can black people be racist?" We have to do that so we don't spend time in the comments section, if this post should get comments, with complaints such as "Why are you always talking about race. Black people are racist too. You're a racist because you see race. I don't see color," and so on and so forth. You've probably seen such comments before, the ones that treat any discussion of race like we're back on the schoolyard where we may cry, "Johnny hit me too," and that explains everything.
Can black people be racist? I lean toward "not yet." At least not in the same way that white people have practiced racism, and if we're evolving as a healthy species, then black people will never practice in America the kind of racism white people have practiced because we'll all agree we'd prefer to go forward rather than backward--that this is America, the land of the free, the home of the brave.
Can black people commit hate crimes, as in beat up a white person because he or she is white? Sure, they can. But that kind of retaliatory hate is not the stuff of what we shall speak in this post.
Racism and its practice and perpetuation within the context of this post is viewed as part of a bigger framework that includes access to society's sanctioned forms of power, our current construct that has not yet passed away with a black president ushering in a mythic post-racial America. So, while we may agree that black people can be biased, can subscribe to forms of racial bigotry, are known sometimes to be xenophobic, and may also sometimes prejudge whites based on past experience with racist attitudes, we may conclude that regression to tribalism or acting out with similar hate in response to oppression is not automatically the same as promulgation of white supremacy racism, the belief that the white race is superior and the reality that having such power as a group they are able extend favor and benefits.
BlogHer CE Prof. Kim Pearson once explained the complexity of racism within the context of power this way.
Racism = prejudice + plus power. In this country, historically, the dominant racist ideology has been white supremacy. The belief in white supremacy is not restricted to people who are socially constructed as white. White supremacist discourse has permeated our laws, and culture, so its not surprising that there are people of color who live down the stereotypes they have been taught to believe about themselves. That's called internalized oppression.
Personally, I think that helps to explain the complicity of women and people of color.
The point here is that the individuals cited here are engaging in racist discourse and then exercising their luxury of claiming ignorance about what they are doing. (Professor Kim in BlogHer comments, 2008)
She was responding to someone on Maria Niles's excellent post, "Racism and the race: What's white privilege got to do with it?" The person to whom she wrote had said, "I'm not denying that racism exists. I am saying, though, that it is not limited to one race, or to people without color."
Next, please evaluate the following statement that I included in a response to someone else on BlogHer who, she agrees, misinterpreted something I wrote. She assumed that I was saying people who didn't vote for Obama are racist despite my clear statement that some people consciously did not vote for him based on ideology.
If your quibble is that you don't believe you have subconscious racial fears, then you may wish to take that argument to the psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists who assert that "fear of the other" is a survival instinct and humans with "normal" survival instincts have varying degrees of this fear.
Can anyone of any race honestly say they have no subconscious racial fears or bias? The word "subconscious" modifies the fear to mean a fear of which
