San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Calls for racial justice swift, widespread
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 some amazement as powerful white leaders and corporations acknowledge concepts such as “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.
But their power is also cultural. A run on books about racism has reordered bestseller lists, driving titles such as “How to Be an Antiracist” and “White Fragility” to the top. And language about U.S. 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, league Commissioner Roger Goodell 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 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, accounts that some said they were too scared to disclose before. They are using hashtags such as #BlackInTheIvory or #WeSeeYouWAT, referring to bias in academia and “White American Theater.”
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 such as 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 nature of Floyd’s death — a white police officer kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes — captured in a video at a moment of rising national frustration with the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemi.
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.
Brands trying to appeal to younger consumers have in recent years increasingly proclaimed their belief in equality and justice. Two years ago, Nike featured in a major ad campaign former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem to protest racism. The tagline for MAC, the cosmetics company, is “All Ages, All Races, All Genders.”
In the wake of the Floyd protests, everyone from Wall Street CEOs and sportswear giant Adidas to 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 beauty giant Estée Lauder, stemming from the political donations of Ronald Lauder, a 76year-old board member and a son of the company’s founders. He has also been a prominent supporter of President Donald Trump.
On May 29, employees at Estée Lauder, like those in much of the rest of corporate America, began receiving emails from the company’s leadership addressing racial discrimination.
There was “considerable pain” in black communities, one missive noted. According to copies of the internal communications obtained by the New York Times, the company, whose portfolio includes Clinique, MAC, Bobbi Brown and La Mer, encouraged employees to pause working June 2 in honor of “Blackout Tuesday.”
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.” It said it also would give another $5 million over the next two years.
Other companies have also pledged money. On Thursday, PayPal, Apple and YouTube collectively pledged $730 million to racial justice and equity efforts.
Late last Saturday night, two women who study black health and communication were talking to each other, for what seemed like 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. “Academia is one of those.”
Woods called on black scholars to begin sharing their experiences using the hashtag #BlackInTheIvory, which her friend Shardé Davis, an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, had just coined.
The women went to sleep that night, not knowing they had opened the floodgates. The hashtag was trending by 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.
Particularly important, she and others said, is that white scholars seem to be having conversations about racism in their institutions without a black colleague around to prompt or guide them.
Inequity in universities manifests at multiple levels. Black academics are disproportionately hired to positions with weaker long-term prospects. They receive fewer grants, and their papers are cited less often.
Changing these systems will take “an incredible amount of energy at the right pressure points in the system,” said Kafui Dzirasa, a psychiatrist at Duke University.
For any system — say, applying for grants from the National Institutes of Health — making things more equitable would come at a cost, either to the system or to nonblack applicants. “And that’s the cost that it’s unclear if the system is ready to take on,” Dzirasa said. Davis was more blunt.
“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.”