Why Can't We Have a Smart Conversation About Race?

On Friday, the press rejoiced over the strangely dubbed "beer summit" between President Obama, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley -- as if a photo op could generate the national conversation about race that we truly need.

We live in an age when the United States has elected a black man as President, and where open bigots and racists are driven from the public square. Yet the so-called "colorblindness" that now rules our conversations about race makes engaging in a mature, reasoned, meaningful discourse about the persistence of racism even more difficult.

Negotiating this dynamic is a process akin to that of viewing a shadow projected onto a screen. In this example, one group sees the original object, what is in fact a concrete example of racism. The other group only sees the shadow. Through learned experience one group comes to understand race and racism as lived realities. Simultaneously, the other group sees racism as an outlier of sorts, an inconvenient experience, the result of overly sensitive minorities looking for any excuse to be aggrieved, or as an example of a simple misunderstanding where race is not truly operative as a relevant variable.

In keeping with President Barack Obama's appeal to a "teachable moment," the arrest of leading African American scholar Henry Louis Gates outside of his home, as well as the gender and racial dynamics at play in the Judge Sotomayor confirmation hearing represent a rare and privileged opportunity for White America to see race clearly--as something more than a set of shadows or projections.

The Quiet Indignities of Racism in a Colorblind Age

The spectacle of these events--their explicitly public nature--has made visible the racism and sexism that many black and brown Americans endure as a matter of course as they diligently pursue the good life and the American Dream. For these strivers, class mobility or professional accomplishments offer little protection against the indignities of racism. In fact, these all too frequent annoyances have come to be expected as a fee for entry, as one more set of unstated obstacles to be negotiated as one climbs the ladder of success in America.

The use of the word indignity to describe the racism of a colorblind age is a carefully chosen and measured one. It captures how the reality of race has changed over time, while also signaling to the particular ways that race continues to operate in the present. In its most benign examples, the latter operates through such euphemisms as "driving while black;" "shopping while black;" "renting while black;" or the many other seemingly benign and polite turns of phrase that disguise how race continues to contour everyday life. Similarly, the ways in which racism appears in the workplace where behavior that would be rewarded in white men is described as "arrogant," "uppity," or "aggressive" when displayed by people of color (and in the case of the latter, women) further speaks to these quiet indignities that must be suffered and negotiated if one is to be successful in America.

In the most pernicious examples, as the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York City tragically demonstrated (apparently black men should never reach for their wallets when questioned by the police lest they be shot 41 times), a failure to learn the informal lessons of race can have horrible and unexpected consequences. Thus, the rite of passage that greets young black boys on the cusp of adulthood is quite often a conversation about how to interact with the police. This talk involves a set of guidelines and rules about deference, speech, and conduct. In short, it is a lesson on how to survive, and continues as a ritual that has in some form or another likely existed up from slavery into the present. This right passes on the long held experience and knowledge that as a black man you will always be subject to violence, accusation, or threat at the hands of white authority figures regardless of your demeanor, dress, or affect. The pleading by black parents to their young boys that they should "not get themselves killed by the police"--the fact that one group of citizens proceeds forewarned that their lives are often imperiled when interacting with the State--is perhaps the most damning indictment of the persistent reality of racism in twenty-first century America.