Tag: Race

Grand Theories of Everything

Posted on by jabittan
In the United States we have often seen our country as destined for greatness and we often see great success as a guarantee in our own lives. There is something special about being American and about living in the middle or upper class in our society. Many people see their success and place in society as evidence of their own greatness, ignoring the fact that much of their success is random. Ta-Nehisi Coats looks at these perspectives in his book, Between the World and Me, and examines the way that our history set up our country at the expense of black people.

 

In a letter to his son looking at national attitudes today he writes, “We live in a ‘goal-oriented’ era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory.” Coats is arguing that the general approach most people have when looking at America, our nation’s role in the world, and our lives within our country is to see our success as a guarantee, somehow guided by a divine plan. In reality, according to Coats, American success is in no way guaranteed, and was kickstarted two hundred years ago by the exploitation of slave labor. “America understands itself as God’s handiwork,” he writes, “but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.”

 

Coats looks at the exploitation of slaves and the discrimination and inequities suffered by black men and women brought to this continent during the slave trade and sees connections to our lives today. After slavery ended, black men and women were still exploited in many ways, denied opportunities, restricted in where they could live, and often not able to advance in careers. The criminal justice system often singled out black men for crimes that occurred in equal numbers between black and white men, limiting freedoms and creating a caste-like system in our country.

 

It was this historical vision that eliminated the view of America as a country destined for greatness. Coats absolutely sees great possibilities for our country, but his visions are sobered by the realization that American exceptionalism is partly random and partly driven by the huge sacrifices and work of the oppressed. There is no mystical force pushing any of us individually or collectively toward greatness, there are only our decisions, our reactions, and the tremendous work of only a few to propel us.

 

When you abandon religious views, you stop asking how things are ‘supposed’ to turn out, and you give up the question of why a higher power would decide that things ‘should’ be certain way. This perspective contributes to Coats’ ability to see the world clearly, and to see not just the tremendous decisions and incredible men that led our country from its inception, but also the lives lost and the injustice suffered by countless men and women who have held up our nation all while being scorned and rejected. His views align with those of Joseph Ellis, whose book The Quartet I recently finished. Ellis looked at how four men, Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay brought about the constitution as we know it today, and while he did not focus on the inequities of slavery, he did acknowledge how such a system allowed for our countries founding, and he did acknowledge that the visions and efforts of a few drove the true change and better future of our country. The decisions of our founding fathers were certainly, in Ellis’ view, not providential (as we like to believe looking back at history) but political and human, and they made decisions which sealed the fate of black men and women and elevated the opportunities for white men and women. Coats and Ellis both understood that it was luck, decisions, and efforts which afforded our country the comfort experienced today, not a pre-ordained destiny of greatness. Coats however, goes further in his writing and acknowledges the crucial role that exploitation played and has continued to play in shaping America and allowing for some people to exceed.

The Body’s Experience of Inequality

Posted on by jabittan
In his book, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coats describes the physical toll of racism. He looks at how we make abstractions and create philosophical thought out of ideas, reactions, and prejudices. In his view, violence and physical manifestations of inequality are hidden and explained away in our thought processes and communication, saving us from having to acknowledge the true human cost of racial tribal behaviors.

 

“There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

 

Coats’ passage above has numerous points that accurately describe the world we live in today and the state of racial violence and injustice on our planet. In our country we are struggling with how we choose to remember the men and women of the Confederacy who were not just Americans, but were soldiers, mothers and fathers, and even patriots. This is the idea of heritage that is meant to be preserved and honored by their current day descendants, but Coats reminds us that this heritage is built on a legacy of violence against black people. A violence that existed at the whims of men in power one hundred and fifty years ago and a violence that selectively destroyed the human bodies of black men, women, and children. The reality, which Coats’ quote does not directly address, is that the heritage and legacy being protected today, is a heritage of fighting to preserve a place of honor for men who fought to preserve a system in which black men were enslaved, controlled, and tortured for the economic benefit of white men. There was no divine truth or scientific backing for the racist behaviors of men in the past, there was only tribalism, instincts of self preservation, and exploitation.

 

What Coats’ passage is truly meant to focus on, however, is the way in which our prejudices, known or unknown, manifest in the real world, outside of our minds. When we marginalize groups of people, we begin to look at them as less then human, as less than a whole human being. In this context, the human rights that we defend in our Bill of Rights and claim to protect for all people, are discounted and discredited for those who we view as less than ourselves. This happens to minorities, poor people, and those who serve as scapegoats to pacify the tribal part of our brain that wants to protect our group and denigrate those who are others.

 

Once we have established that the outsiders no longer have rights that matter, and that they are less than human, we can stop respecting their physical body and the space in which they exist. We can physically abuse them because our moral standards do not extend to this person who is less than human. Our excuses about human nature, about economics, and about personal responsibility are just thoughts, but they are brought into the world through our physical actions, landing on the body of the oppressed as described by Coats. Our thoughts may live inside us, fully justified in the echo-chamber of our mind, but our actions (and our inaction) bring about physical realities and consequences stemming from the mental models we harbor.

Ignoring Other People’s Problems

Posted on by jabittan
Another section of James Comey’s speech shared in Cory Booker’s United stood out to me. Former FBI Director Comey spoke about racial tensions and the state of race relations in our country. He acknowledged the difficulty that many people have in accepting that there are racial challenges in our society today, and he was critical of the way people pushed the problem away from themselves. Most white people in our country today seem to discredit race problems, and often they don’t see a race problem as their own problem, and chose instead to ignore the problem all together.

Comey writes, “As a society, we can choose to live our everyday lives, raising our families and going to work, hoping that someone, somewhere, will do something to ease the tension—to smooth over the conflict. We can roll up our car windows, turn up the radio and drive around these problems, or we can choose to have an open and honest discussion about what our relationship is today—what it should be, what it could be, and what it needs to be—if we took more time to better understand one another.”

What Comey explains is that we prefer to drive past racial conflicts and problems, doing our best to ensure we never notice the inequality that has grown within our society. We ignore the problem and pretend that it does not effect us. Ultimately, this pushes us to a place where we live in our own bubble, reflecting our thoughts, beliefs, and views onto the world around us. We begin to assume that everyone has the same experience that we do, that everyone thinks the way we do, and that everyone has the same problems and goals. When this happens, we fail to see the challenges that other people face, and we fail to see the dangers of our nations current racial problems.

In a wold where we ignore the problems of others and focus only inwardly on what we want and what problems we have, we fail to see how our lives and actions impact our larger society. Comey’s quote hits directly at this problem. In our society we live complacently in our homes watching television shows that portray the life we want to live and show us what we want to see. We lose touch with the experiences of others and we may know there are problems in the world, but we don’t see how it is our responsibility to tackle those problems. We do not seriously understand the problems, and we don’t understand the people who face such challenges. Rather than try to better understand our world, we speed past people, problems, and inequity as we commute through life, and then we blame individuals for ending up in their situation, without ever offering a hand or any assistance.

Some Thoughts from MLK

Posted on by jabittan
In his book, United, Senator Cory Booker speaks about social activism and racial tensions in the United States. He shares some thoughts from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that helped him make sense of the difficult state of race relations in the United States. A passage from Booker with influence from King Jr. reads, ““It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary decent housing conditions. He condemned riots and violence as “socially destructive and self-defeating,” creating more problems than they solve. But he also called riots “the language of the unheard.””

The Civil Rights Movement is looked back at with fondness from both white and black people in the United States today. We have somewhat romanticized the time period, elevating figures like Dr. King Jr. and remembering demonstrations as solely peaceful. In our minds, freedoms were quickly forthcoming and there were no violent riots and protesters had a clear message and simple demands for fairness.

I have not studied the Civil Rights Movement in depth, but I have a sense that this idealized notion of the movement does not match the reality of the time. We want to look back and believe that all demonstrations were non-violent from the start, but I’m not sure that is the case. This is important because how we look back on that period of time shapes the perceptions we build regarding racial minorities today.

In 2017 there seems to be less of a racially charged atmosphere than existed in 2015 when multiple black men died in police interactions as a result of police officer discretions and interpretations of the situation. The response has been demonstrations, calls for greater recognition of institutional racism, and in some instances riots. What I have seen from our society is a lack of understanding of how we should respond when racial minorities call for action, demonstrate, or even riot. I agree with Dr. King that riots become devolutionary and take the focus off of the issue originally being pursued and limit the discussion that we should be having regarding race relations in the United States, and at the same time I agree with the last part of the quote that Booker shared, that riots are the voice of the unheard. I have seen many marches and demonstrations at the University I attend and across the country, but non of the non-violent demonstrations seem to get much attention, and most often the responses I hear from white people are dubious of the claims of solved racial disparities in our society.

Turning to riots and violence seems like a logical response for a group that has been ignored and criticized when demanding acknowledgement of injustice. I think we ought to ask ourselves not just whether we think a group has a right to demonstrate or riot, but how a group should behave when they perceive that they are being victimized. We all love a peaceful protest, but at what point does a group demand more and allow frustrations to bubble over in the hopes that a message is truly communicated or at least addressed?