Discriminations

John Jackson Jr., an associate professor of communications and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, has a confused and confusing article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright.”

“In the 1950s and 1960s,” he begins,

“consensus historians” such as Richard Hofstadter argued that large swaths of the American public displayed a “paranoid style” of political analysis that made them incapable of fully participating in rational debate. That “sick” style was concerned with “the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content.” Half a century later, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s claim that the AIDS epidemic is a scourge inflicted on the African-American community by the U.S. government exemplifies the extent to which paranoia — racial paranoia, in particular — continues to play a powerful role in our politics.

As a former historian I would like to spend some time explaining why this thumbnail on “consensus history” in general and Richard Hofstadter is so poor as to be almost a parody — it was never about “large swaths of the American public,” who were never called “sick” — but you didn’t sign up for a history seminar and so I’ll let that pass. (But what did you sign up for?)

So, let’s move on to (where else?) racism — overt? covert? (pervert?).

The civil-rights movement succeeded in outlawing legal discrimination and driving explicit racism to the margins of society. But in many respects, racism has simply gone underground. Today it is usually subtle, making it more difficult to identify. Of course, recent studies demonstrate that black people still have a harder time than white people (even with identical credentials) when it comes to buying new homes or cars or landing lucrative jobs. According to some social scientists, those differences aren’t just about white prejudice. They are also related to institutional and structural realities like housing patterns and the reliance on market forces in hiring that perpetuate racial differences as a byproduct of seemingly colorblind social policies.

Here we are introduced to the familiar contrast between “explicit racism” and “underground,” “subtle” racism, but what exactly is this racism that once was seen but now has become so “difficult to identify”? One might be tempted to say that what Jackson (and others who make this common distinction) mean by racism is simple prejudice against blacks, but it’s obvious that’s not what he means, since he emphasizes that what he’s referring to isn’t “just about white prejudice.”

O.K., what is it? Apparently such things as “housing patterns” and even “market forces.” No wonder “racism” is so hard to identify! On this view, it’s everything and everywhere.

And, since Jackson implies racism is both everything and everywhere, one can understand why so many people see it wherever they look, even where, by some unexplained magic, it isn’t.

When racism was explicit and legal, there was less need for African-Americans to be paranoid about it. For the most part, what they saw was what they got. Racists could be unabashed about their feelings, and politicians could blatantly vow, like George Wallace, to fight for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

With the social advances of the 1960s, African-Americans have become increasingly secure in their legal citizenship, but they are less confident about determining when they are being victimized by silent and undeclared racism. Racial paranoia characterizes the post-civil-rights generation of “affirmative-action babies.” They are young black people for whom legal segregation is a glimpse at black-and-white images in a PBS documentary. But they also have a sneaking suspicion that somehow the smallest slights and the most trivial of gestures may be a telltale sign of what has been called “two-faced racism” — hidden racial animus dressed up to look politically correct. Such uncertainty gives rise to paranoia, especially if we stubbornly fail to discuss racism’s newfangled subtleties.

But wait a minute. I’m sure you can already see the problem here. If racism, despite its “newfangled subtleties,” or maybe even because of them, hasn’t disappeared but has simply gone “underground,” and morphed into something so subtle it’s hard to identify but is still pervasive in our society, what exactly is “paranoid” about seeing it, well, everywhere?

The professor’s attempted explanation falls a good deal short of satisfactory.

What do I mean by racial paranoia? It describes the suspicions black people have whenever, say, an idle white salesperson at their local drugstore sees them beckoning with a question but ignores them anyway. Or when that salesperson takes a few seconds longer than needed to sigh himself into an unenthusiastic response. Insignificant, I know — petty, even. More hollow bourgeois angst. But when talking about race and racism, we shouldn’t underestimate the potential significance of seemingly inconsequential acts.

In some ways, racism was easier to recognize when it was the obvious motivation behind public water hosings and police-dog attacks, when it was symbolized in socially meaningful lines separating the fronts from the backs of buses. Fortunately that version of racial reality is dead. But many Americans still view race relations today through the warped lens of the pre-civil-rights era.

Understanding race means disregarding almost everything we accepted about it prior to the 1960s. We have achieved a modicum of racial equality in the law, but we are far less skilled at figuring out what this recent change in racism — from blatant to subtle, from explicit to inferential, from biological to cultural — means for how we relate to one another after the courts have adjourned and the unabashed bigots have been publicly lambasted.

The point isn’t that race is less important now than before. It is just more paradoxical. Race is real, but it isn’t. It has value, but it doesn’t. It explains social difference, but it couldn’t possibly. That sort of racial double-think drives Americans crazy, makes us suspicious of those staring back at us from across America’s racial tracks, and fans the flames of racial paranoia.

Again, if racism has simply changed its form, if it has disappeared not in the sense of not being here any more but simply being so devilishly subtle that it’s hard to pin down, what exactly is “warped about the lens of pre-civil rights era”? What Jackson seems to be saying is not that that lens is warped, but merely that it needs more magnification to detect the racism that is just as prevalent as it always was, only different.

The heightened racial sensitivity that we see now is paranoid only if it sees a threat that’s not there. Prof. Jackson doesn’t seem to have made up his mind on this point, or if he has his explanation is so subtle and so far beyond the reach of his prose that I don’t know what it is.