Personal Voices: Facing Up to Race

Abercrombie and Fitch is back on the hotseat -- this time for racial discrimination in hiring practices. Last year the company was forced to pull T-shirts sporting slant-eyed Chinese laundrymen and the slogan "Two Wongs can make it white" when Asian-Americans protested. This time the stakes are higher. Nine Latino and Asian plaintiffs are suing Abercrombie for only hiring white people for sales floor jobs and pushing black, Latino and Asian applicants into stockroom jobs to project what the clothing company calls the "classic American look."

Here we go again. The media and American public are shaking their heads at the company, but this is hardly a new phenomenon. The case is simply another manifestation of the prevalent belief that "American" still means white. But instead of pointing fingers at flagrant offenders like Abercrombie, we should instead look in the mirror to examine the ways that we all participate on a daily basis in this racist hierarchy that places whites in the center and pushes those whose backgrounds are more "ethnic" to the margins.

Think about it. When you go to an expensive restaurant, the managers and servers are almost always white, while the busboys and kitchen help are almost always people of color. At most offices the managers are usually white, while people of color appear only among the interns and junior staff. Often when you drive by the carwash you'll see white and light-skinned people fanning themselves in plastic chairs while brown-skinned people are scrubbing tires and windshields. Diversity is great, but only when it happens at the lower levels of an organization so as not to challenge the skewed balance of power. The signs are everywhere: Race still plays a major if unspoken role in the way our society is organized.

Yet there are many people -- mostly white -- who refuse to believe this is true. Two students in my evening class told me recently that they didn't believe race was an issue anymore in America, or at least, not in the San Francisco Bay Area. The two are both white, liberal, educated, upper middle-class professionals in their 50s, and both live in exclusive neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Their argument: Since race relations are so much better today than they were thirty years ago, what are all these angry people of color complaining about? Besides, one of them argued, isn't inequality in America based much more on class than race?

It's true that race relations must be better than they were thirty years ago -- as a biracial person I probably wouldn't even be alive if they weren't. But someone who thinks that race is a dead issue must have their head buried pretty deep in the sand, or more appropriately, pretty deep in a wealthy white neighborhood.

I asked the students why a person whose great-great-grandfather emigrated from China 150 years ago is still called an "Asian-American," while a person whose father emigrated from Germany fifty years ago becomes just a plain old "American" in one generation -- not a "German-American" or a "European-American." We're all pretty recent transplants here (unless you're indigenous), so why is that only people of color are forced to face up to their histories of migration? Why is it that people of color are still treated like visitors in their own home? Because being American is still very much about being white.

I'm so tired of hearing these kinds of things from white people. It's like a skinny person saying that fat people aren't discriminated against, or a man claiming that there's no such thing as gender inequality. Is it so difficult to understand? One of the perks of being in a privileged position is that you don't have to think about it.

Racism is so ingrained in our dominant culture that we don't even recognize it for what it is anymore. And we're so squeamish about talking about race that we avoid it at all costs. So we tell ourselves that the profiling of Arabs and other brown-skinned people as potential terrorists is about weeding out religious fanatics, not about race. And although the low-income housing projects in town are filled almost entirely with black men, women and children who ride the bus, while the neighborhoods of trendy boutiques and overpriced cafes are filled with mostly white professionals who drive brand new SUVs, it has nothing to do with race and historic oppression; it's all about class, work ethic, and levels of education, right?