Awakening to racism seen in U.S.
LASTING SHIFT?: Black Americans are hopeful
The reckonings have been swift and dizzying.
On Monday, it was the dictionary, with Merriam-Webster saying it was revising its entry on racism to illustrate the ways in which it “can be systemic.”
On Tuesday, the University of Washington removed the coach of its dance team after the only two black members of the group were cut. The two women were invited to return.
On Wednesday, after a black race car driver called on NASCAR to ban the Confederate battle flag
from its events, the organization did just that.
On Thursday, Nike joined a wave of U.S. companies that have made Juneteenth, which celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S., an official paid holiday, “to better commemorate and celebrate black history and culture.”
And on Friday, ABC Entertainment named the franchise’s first black man to star in “The Bachelor” in the show’s 18-year history, acceding to long-standing demands from fans.
In just under three weeks since the killing of George Floyd set off widespread protests, what started as a renewed demand for police reform has now roiled seemingly every sphere of American life, prompting institutions and individuals around the country to confront enduring forms of racial discrimination.
Many black Americans have been inundated with testaments and queries from white friends about fighting racism. And antiracist activists have watched with as powerful white leaders and corporations acknowledge concepts like “structural racism” and pledge to make sweeping changes in personal and institutional behavior.
But those who have been in the trenches for decades fighting racism in the U.S. wonder how lasting the soul searching will be.
The flood of corporate statements denouncing racism “feels like a series of mea culpas written by the press folks and run by the top black folks” inside each organization, said Dream Hampton, a writer and filmmaker. “Show us a picture of your C-suite, who is on your board. Then we can have a conversation about diversity, equity and inclusion.”
“Stop sending positive vibes,” begged Chad Sanders,
a writer, in a recent New York Times op-ed, directing his white friends to instead help protect black protesters, donate to black politicians and funds fighting racial injustice, and urge others to do the same.
The protests have so far yielded some tangible changes in policing itself. On Friday, New York banned the use of chokeholds by law enforcement and repealed a law that kept police disciplinary records secret.
Cultural power
But their power is also cultural. A run on books about racism has reordered bestseller lists, driving titles like “How to Be an Antiracist” and “White Fragility” to the top. And language about American racial dynamics that was once the purview of academia and activism appears to have gone mainstream.
In a video released June 5 apologizing for the NFL’s previous failure to support players who protested police violence, Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the league, condemned the “systematic oppression” of black people, a term used to convey that racism is embedded in the policies of public and private institutions. The Denver Board of Education, in voting to end its contract with the city police department for school resource officers, cited a desire to avoid the “perpetuation of the school-to-prison pipeline,” a reference to how school policies can lay the groundwork for the incarceration of young black Americans.
“One of the exhilarating things about this moment is that black people are articulating to the world that this isn’t just an issue of the state literally killing us; it’s also about psychic death,” said Jeremy O. Harris, a playwright whose “Slave Play” addresses the failure of white liberals to admit their complicity in America’s ongoing racial inequities.
He added, “It’s exhilarating because for the first time, in a macro sense, people are saying names and showing up and showing receipts.”
Sensing a rare, and perhaps fleeting, opportunity to be heard, many black Americans are sharing painful stories on social media about racism and mistreatment in the workplace.
The feeling of a dam breaking has drawn analogies to the fall and winter of 2017, when sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein triggered a deluge of disturbing accounts from women and provoked frank conversations in which friends, colleagues and neighbors confessed to one another: I’ve suffered in that manner as well. Or: I now realize I have wronged someone, and I’d like to do better.
Although racism is hardly a secret, “a huge awakening is just the awareness of people who don’t face the headwinds,” said Drew Dixon, a music producer, activist and subject of the documentary “On the Record,” about her decision to come forward with rape allegations against music producer Russell Simmons,
which he has denied. “Many people had no idea what women deal with every single day, and I think many nonblack people had no idea what black people deal with every day.”
While the outpouring may seem sudden, there have been signs that perceptions on race were already in flux.
Opinion polls over the last decade have shown a self-reported turn by Democrats toward a more sympathetic view of black Americans, with more attributing disparities in areas like income and education to discrimination rather than personal failure. By 2018, white liberals said they felt more positively about blacks, Latinos and Asians than they did about whites.
The reason for the shift is unclear — and those attitudes have so far not translated into desegregated schools or neighborhoods — but may help explain the cascade of responses to Floyd’s killing.
The outpouring is also related to the horrific nature of Floyd’s death — a white police officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes — captured in a stark video at a moment of rising national frustration with the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdown.
The protests still surging through the streets of U.S. cities, said civil rights movement scholar Aldon Morris, are “unprecedented in terms of the high levels of white participation in a movement targeting black oppression and grievances.”
Younger Americans are also much more racially diverse than earlier generations. They tend to have different views on race. And their imprint on society is only growing.
‘Boiling point’
In the wake of the Floyd protests, everyone from Wall Street CEOs and the sportswear giant Adidas to the fruit snack Gushers and a company that sells stun guns put out statements of support of diversity, flooding Instagram with vague messages.
These prompted cries of hypocrisy from those who said the companies don’t practice the values they’re espousing.
The tumult has been especially fraught at Estée Lauder, the beauty giant, stemming from the political donations of Ronald Lauder, a 76-year-old board member and a son of the company’s founders. He has also been a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump.
On Monday, Estée Lauder said it would donate $5 million in coming weeks to “support racial and social justice and to continue to support greater access to education,” and donate an additional $5 million over the following two years.
Other companies have also pledged money. On Thursday alone, PayPal, Apple and YouTube collectively pledged $730 million to racial justice and equity efforts. Late one recent Saturday night, two women who study black health and communication were talking to each other, for what seemed the thousandth time, about the racism they have encountered in their careers.
The killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and too many others had brought them to a “boiling point,” recalled one of the women, Joy Melody Woods, a graduate student at Moody College of Communication. But the national conversation was still focused primarily on police brutality.
“That’s not the only system that perpetuates white supremacy,” Woods said. “There are other systems, and academia is one of those.”
Woods called on black scholars to begin sharing their experiences using the hashtag #BlackInTheIvory, which her friend Shardé M. Davis, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, had just coined.
The hashtag was trending by last Sunday night and as of Thursday evening had collected nearly 90,000 tweets.
The stories of exclusion, humiliation and hostility were all too familiar. But the difference was that they had mostly been shared behind closed doors. In the past, nonblack colleagues could be sympathetic but were more often dismissive or worse, sometimes labeling a black colleague as “difficult.”
“What feels different this time is that white folks are listening,” Davis said.
“We’ve received nothing but empty platitudes and empty promises, and the wound just scabs right back up,” she said. “We’re walking around in institutions with a whole bunch of BandAids and scabbed-over wounds. Enough, enough.”