Arguments to challenge your inner racist
These three common responses to racism must be deconstructed until something ... clicks
One of the reasons why it is hard to admit that you are racist is because you know that being a racist is a morally bad thing to be. It takes monumental honesty to admit that you are vicious, that you have work to do on yourself, and that many of your beliefs and attitudes that go to the heart of who you are, are indecent.
The consequence of this fear of admitting to one’s moral indecency is that we end up pushing back when we are called out for racist actions. Related to habitual pushbacks is an unwillingness to self-examine — without being prompted to selfexamine — our beliefs and actions. Instead, many of us have developed unhelpful responses when racism is discussed or when we are judged to be, either as individuals or as corporates, nakedly racist.
It is worth explaining a few of the most unhelpful and dishonest responses to racism. we should and should not respond to a long history of racial oppression.
Race does not need to be real scientifically in order to be really salient in our social and political lives. You cannot respond adequately to racism by refusing to speak about race at all.
Some people who are uncomfortable with race but who do not want to be seen to take racism lightly try to square the circle by suggesting that race talk can be dropped, and that we only need to talk about the economic needs of people.
This, too, is wishful thinking. The racism of Clicks is an excellent counterexample to this viewpoint.
Most of us who are rightly angered by Clicks running an advertising campaign that is anti-black don’t have a socioeconomic need that is unmet. It is our group dignity as black people that is trampled on by a company that naturalises white aesthetics as standards of excellence.
Clicks has a racism problem. It does not have an economics problem. It does not have a class problem. The fantasy that the core of racism’s wrong can be indirectly accommodated with class-based analysis is ridiculous. The pain the racist Clicks advert has caused cannot be fully appreciated and described without an acceptance of the power of race as a social construction.
The relationship between race and class might be complex and interesting but the constant pretence by some people that all that is wrong with racism is a matter of money, is not convincing.
Racism’s victims want at least two things. We want, firstly, an appreciation of what it means to live in black bodies in a world in which white supremacist structures have, for too long, gifted political and economic power to white people. We need to have our lived experiences lifted to the surface. It means listening to, affirming, understanding and chronicling our stories of being black in this unjust world.