Modern racism is sometimes more subtle than it used to be. Although we don't sit in different parts of the movie theater anymore, we constantly breathe in a smog of racism in our environment. The foolish will get confused about the difference and think that racism doesn't exist anymore.
To be clear, flagrant racist hate crimes still happen all the time. But today, they allow the rest of us to be comfortable with our own levels of prejudice. "I'm not a racist! I'm not like those crazy guys!" "I am not a racist--my best friend is black" "I am not a racist--I don't even see a person's color!"
But we are never actually blind to people's color. We are instead a product of a racialized society steeped in biases that have given members of the majority power and privilege for hundreds of years. This system still exists and so do its consequences.
But we are never actually blind to people's color. We are instead a product of a racialized society steeped in biases that have given members of the majority power and privilege for hundreds of years. This system still exists and so do its consequences.
One of the characteristics of the post-jim crow era is that our 21st-century racism is subtle, insidious, and therefore terribly difficult to combat. It is no longer about public shows of discrimination or of individual violent anomalies that have now (for the most part) become socially unacceptable. More pervasive now is the constant bombardment of exhausting microaggressions :
Racial microaggressions are brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group.
(see Table 1 of that link for some examples)
It can be difficult for white folks to appreciate the magnitude, impact, and burden of the accumulated daily prejudices over a person's lifetime. How much extra energy do have in your life to deal with the sales clerk that follows you around the store as you shop for clothes, the taxi that passes you by for someone with lighter skin, the professor that assumes you came from a bad high school? Or the folks that use a description of you as an insult to others, or the people that can't be bothered to remember how to pronounce your name, or the colleagues that deny that your own experiences were the products of racism? Furthermore, it is from the accumulation of microaggressions that larger cultural and systemic racism arises (wage disparity, housing discrimination, judicial prejudice. See post: I Am George Zimmerman).
If you get a chance, check out http://microaggressions.tumblr.com/, a blog that compiles users' submissions of real-life microaggressions of all kinds. They say of themselves:
This project is a response to “it’s not a big deal” - “it” is a big deal. ”it” is in the everyday. ”it” is shoved in your face when you are least expecting it. "it” happens when you expect it the most. ”it” is a reminder of your difference. ”it” enforces difference. ”it” can be painful. ”it” can be laughed off. ”it” can slide unnoticed by either the speaker, listener or both. ”it” can silence people. ”it” reminds us of the ways in which we and people like us continue to be excluded and oppressed. ”it” matters because these relate to a bigger “it”: a society where social difference has systematic consequences for the “others.” But “it” can create or force moments of dialogue.
They continue...
...[microaggressions'] slow accumulation during a childhood and over a lifetime is in part what defines a marginalized experience, making explanation and communication with someone who does not share this identity particularly difficult. Social others are microaggressed hourly, daily, weekly, monthly.
White folks have the privilege of not having to deal with daily racial microaggressions. Let's use that extra energy, then, to ease the burdens of those that do have to encounter such things.
