By Tim Wise
(CNN) —There's an old saying that
it's hard to know what you don't know, the premise being that when
you're ignorant about something, you aren't likely to realize your blind
spots.
But I'm not so sure. Sometimes, knowing what you don't know just requires a certain degree of humility.
For
instance, I don't know calculus, because I never took it in school. But
here's the thing: I know that I don't know calculus; and as such, I
would never presume to know it, let alone to tell others for whom it had
actually been their major that I knew it better than they did.
How
nice it would be if white Americans would exercise a similar restraint
when it comes to the topic of racism and discrimination in America. For
although we have rarely had to know much about it -- and though most of
us, by our own admission, socialize in nearly all-white environments
where we won't benefit from the insights of persons of color who have,
indeed, had to major in the subject -- we continue to insist that we
know more about it than they do.
To wit, a just-released poll from
CNN and the Kaiser Family Foundation, which finds that white Americans
are far less likely than persons of color to believe that racism remains
a serious problem in the United States.
While roughly two-thirds
of blacks and Latinos believe racism is a big problem in America today,
only about four in 10 whites agree.
Even a simple recognition of
ongoing racial inequities in life chances differs markedly across racial
lines, with clear majorities of African Americans perceiving that the
typical black person is worse off than the typical white person in terms
of income, education and housing, while about half of all whites fail
to perceive such inequality of condition.
So despite the fact
that African-Americans are worse off than whites in every single
category of well-being, and despite the research indicating that these
disparities owe significantly to discrimination both past and present,
most whites believe there are few, if any, ongoing inequities in need of
being addressed.
Who gets discriminated against
For
instance, even though young blacks with college degrees are twice as
likely as similar whites to be unemployed, regardless of their field of
study, most white Americans don't appear to see much of a problem (or
actually continue to insist that it is we who are discriminated against
in employment).
Despite the fact that white male high school
dropouts between 18-34 are more likely to find work than black men that
age with two years of college, most white Americans don't see much of a
problem, or again, insist that "reverse discrimination" is the real
issue when it comes to racism.
Despite the fact that the typical
white family has about 16 times as much wealth as the typical black
family -- and that even white households headed up by a high school
dropout have, on average, twice the wealth of black and Latino
households headed by a college graduate -- most white Americans don't
see much of a problem.
Despite the fact that black children are
about three times as likely as white children to be suspended or
expelled from school, even though the rates of serious school rule
infractions are largely the same (contrary to popular belief), and
despite the fact that black children are about twice as likely as white
children to be taught by the least experienced teachers, most white
Americans don't see much of a problem.
According to the survey,
whites are also far less likely to believe the Voting Rights Act is
still needed, even as several states have moved to create impediments to
voting that will disproportionately affect voters of color.
And
while the overwhelming majority of blacks see biases in the justice
system, only about half of whites agree; this, despite the racial
disproportionality of police-involved shootings, and the blatant
disparities within the so-called war on drugs, whereby blacks, for
instance, are four times as likely as whites to be arrested for
marijuana, even as rates of usage and dealing are virtually identical.
It
apparently doesn't register as a "big problem" in the eyes of most
whites that there are roughly 160,000 black folks arrested for drug
possession annually who wouldn't be were it not for the
racially-disproportionate way in which African-Americans are targeted in
the drug war.
Likewise, it fails to give us much pause that
there are also about 160,000 whites who would be arrested for possession
each year if arrest rates actually mirrored rates of drug law
violations. It's apparently no big deal that in recent years, persons of
color have been subjected to massively disparate treatment by police
stop-and-frisk policies, even though such policies almost exclusively
target innocent people and are unconstitutional.
Isolation the problem?
That
white Americans don't by and large see what people of color see doesn't
mean that white folks are horrible people, of course; nor does it
suggest that whites are all inveterate racists who don't care about the
impediments to opportunity still facing our black and brown brothers and
sisters. But what it does suggest is a degree of isolation and
provincialism that should lead us to think twice before pontificating
about a subject that we simply don't have to know nearly as well as
those who are the targets of it.
When more than half of blacks
and a third of Hispanics report that they have experienced unfair
treatment in public places at some point just in the last month because
of their race, for whites to deny the seriousness of racism in America
is to say, in effect, that folks of color are hallucinating, irrational
or ignorant about their own lived experience.
It is to say that
we white folks know black and brown reality better than those who live
it -- perhaps because we are more intelligent or level-headed (which
arguments would be inherently racist of course).
Sadly, white
denial of this sort has a long and ignoble pedigree. Even in the early
1960s, prior to the passage of the monumental civil rights legislation
of that decade, most white Americans didn't really see the problem.
Though civil rights icons like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are venerated
as heroes today by most, including by large numbers of whites, when King
was alive, most white folks saw very little need for the movement of
which he was such an integral part.
In 1963, for instance, more
than six in 10 whites told Gallup pollsters that blacks were treated
equally with whites in their communities, a number that grew to 75% the
year before Dr. King was killed (but at which point the Fair Housing Act
still hadn't been passed). Even more tellingly, in 1962, fully 85% of
whites told Gallup that black children had the same chance as white
children to obtain a high quality education.
Such beliefs might
strike us as delusional in retrospect, of course, but that's the point:
Unless we believe that white Americans have somehow become amazingly
attuned to the experiences of persons of color in the last half-century
(and more so than those people of color are, with regard to their own
experiences) -- even as our parents and grandparents clearly failed to
discern truth from fiction -- it seems that we should probably think
twice before trusting white perceptions when it comes to the state of
racial discrimination in this country.
If we were so oblivious
even when racism was formally embedded in every fiber of the nation's
being -- when the U.S. was an official apartheid country -- what in the
world would lead us to believe that we had suddenly become keen
interpreters of black and brown folks' lives?
Dangerous denial
Although
white denial has been a constant throughout American history, one thing
about today's version of it seems potentially more dangerous than that
of past generations, and it is this fact more than any other which
should give us pause.
In the past, white obliviousness was of a
more genuinely naive sort -- in other words, most white folks really did
think, absurd though it sounds, that everything was just fine, not only
for ourselves but for black folks too -- but today's denial comes
wrapped in a patina of resentment and anxiety.
Today, it is not
just that whites fail to see the obstacles still faced by persons of
color; rather, too many of us apparently believe the tables have turned
and now it is we who face those obstacles.
Denial mixed with
perceived victimhood and an unhealthy dose of nostalgia is far worse
than denial of a purely ignorant type. For whites to not know black and
brown reality is bad enough; but for us to literally invert black and
brown reality with our own, and to believe that we are the ones who are
being victimized, is a recipe for increased tension and acrimony. It is
certainly no way to build multiracial democracy.
Only by
challenging white denial -- and that means we white folks challenging
our own -- can we turn back the rising tide of white anxiety, which has
manifested most recently in the campaigns of Donald Trump, the backlash
against Syrian refugees and the growing hostility to Black Lives Matter
protesters.
In moments like this, we must proclaim not only that
black and brown lives matter, despite a society that has rarely acted as
such, but that facts matter, too; and as always, the facts suggest that
white America still has some waking up to do.
![[The human brain]](http://cdn1.medicalnewstoday.com/content/images/articles/303/303279/the-human-brain.jpg)
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