Throwback Thursday: Maybe America Is Racist
We should at least consider the possibility.
This article was originally published on April 12, 2021.
A few years ago, while covering a story on Republican New Hampshire legislator Werner Horn, I summoned the best and brightest scholars that America had to offer.
Horn, who represents his 95.9% white hometown in his state’s House of Representatives, confounded people who actually know things by stating that “owning slaves doesn’t make you racist.” During my interview with Horn, the Confederate colonel-looking legislator doubled down by whitesplaining why the Founding Fathers were not racist.
“Parsing out slavery in America, as opposed to slavery in general, is significant only because of how people behaved themselves after around 1800,” Horn said. “After around 1800, the Northern abolitionists tried to destabilize the institution of slavery in the South. So to justify and continue the practice, they [Southerners] came up with a bunch of racist garbage where the Blacks, specifically, were a subhuman race. It’s racist garbage.”
In an attempt to disprove the premise of Horn’s statement, I called on Dr. Henry Louis Gates, perhaps the most well-known historian in America. Gates began with an explanation of America’s history of racism by citing David Hume’s racist footnote to his essay, “Of National Characters,” in which he claimed that in all of Africa, there were no arts and no sciences. Gates noted that Immanuel Kant’s “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime” also expounded on the racial differences between white and Black people. He explained that Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia”—published the same year the Constitution was written—was classical racism defined.
But Gates was just a world-famous historian, and Werner Horn was a white man. So, to make sure that I had all the bases covered, I called professor, historian and widely recognized super-genius, Dr. Greg Carr, who heads the Howard University Afro-American Studies Department, teaches at Howard University School of Law and instructs the largest Africana Studies classroom in the world. Before launching into a history of racism, Carr swatted down Horn’s thesis with one request:
“Show me the white slaves.”
Carr (who may or may not be an actual human-like android from the future loaded with all the knowledge that ever existed) was using the concept known as Occam’s razor. In the fields of science, economics, or any reason-based pursuit of understanding, researchers adhere to this time-honored principle, which states: “Of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred.”
Engineers know it as KISS, or “keep it simple, stupid.” Among academicians, the concept is called ontological parsimony. Medical researcher Theodore Woodward said, “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.” Scientists from Stephen Hawking to Albert Einstein to Sir Isaac Newton accept the premise that whenever there are two different possibilities, the simpler one is usually the correct one.
Unless, of course, white people are talking about racism.
There are a lot of things we know.
Whenever I use the term “paleo-fictive rhetoricism” (the technical definition of white nonsense), people look at me like I’m speaking another language. Conversely, the fact that no one rushes to Google when they hear the word “racism” implies a collective acknowledgment that racism exists, either as a concept or theoretical idea.
To be fair, everyone has a different definition of racism. White people (and Clarence Thomas) believe someone must be caught burning a cross while screaming the n-word for them to qualify as a racist. Black people argue that some measure of power and authority is needed for a person or country to be racist. That’s why I always defer to the whitest, narrowest definition of the word:
(a) a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.
(b) behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief(a) the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another
(b) a political or social system founded on racism and designed to execute its principles
We also know police disproportionately kill Black people. Although some people attempt to explain that the discrepancy is a function of the disproportionate Black crime rate, research shows that this does not hold true. Again, research shows that is a lie. Once more for the people in the back (I’m talking to you, Matt Walsh) every peer-reviewed study that finds police shoot and kill Black people at disproportionate rates and “the only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police when unarmed was whether or not they were Black,” according to Justin Nix, a criminal justice researcher at the University of Louisville, who noted that police shootings do not correlate with crime rate, the neighborhood violence, age or mental illness.
Maybe it’s racism.
In any other area of sociology, criminology or statistical analysis, the existence of racism would be accepted as fact. But when it comes to racial data, the big brains in academia and scientific research will break their graphic calculators trying to explain away the outcomes of systemic inequality. They never can.
We know even the poorest majority-white school districts are better funded than the wealthiest non-white school districts. It is an indisputable fact that majority-Black schools offer fewer advanced-level courses. No serious person can argue against the fact that Black students are punished more harshly than white students. Yet, the idea that the education system is racist at its core is somehow seen as incendiary, even though it is the simplest explanation.
It’s easy for me to call the criminal justice system racist. Or, perhaps there’s another reason why Black male offenders receive sentences that are, on average, 19.1% longer than white male offenders who commit the same crimes and have the same criminal history, according to the United States Sentencing Commission. Explain why, when white people use illegal drugs, possess illegal narcotics and sell illegal substances at higher rates than Black people, Black people are six-and-a-half times more likely to be arrested and convicted for drugs. The Stanford Open Policing Project—the largest police-stop project that ever existed—found that Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be stopped and 4 times more likely to be searched than white drivers, even though white drivers were more likely to have contraband.
Police are twice as likely to use force on Black people versus white suspects, according to a 2015 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Black defendants get charged with harsher crimes, receive higher bail and are offered fewer plea deals according to Harvard researchers…and researchers in Wisconsin…and Philadelphia…and Maryland.
A study by the National Registry of Exonerations found that “African Americans are only 13% of the American population but…They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent defendants who were framed and convicted of crimes in 15 large-scale police scandals and later cleared in ‘group exonerations.’”
Racists love to point out the FBI crime data as an explanation, even though the stats only refer to arrests. Even knowing that most crimes go unsolved, we’re supposed to believe that the cops who use force on, shoot, kill, stop, frisk, search, sentence and wrongfully incarcerate Black people at disproportionate rates somehow have it right when it comes to arresting Black people.
Maybe it’s poverty.
We know that crime is related to poverty, socioeconomic conditions and access to education. But Black people are not three times as poor or less educated. In fact, a Black child born to wealthy Black parents is just as likely to end up poor or in jail as a poor white child. A home in a Black neighborhood is worth $48,000 less than the exact same home in a white neighborhood, even if the crime rate and neighborhood amenities are exactly the same. A white high school dropout is more likely to find a job than a Black college student. Of all the manufactured hypotheses that attempt to explain these racial disparities, none of them even comes close to the simplest explanation.
It’s racism.
Perhaps racism is the reason that these valiant scholarly attempts at whitesplaining away America’s racial toxicity exist in the first place. In any other scientific discipline, the general consensus would adhere to the tried and true methodologies found in every other field of research. Maybe white people genuinely cannot fathom that white supremacy is responsible for these racial incongruities because, by proxy, it would also mean that they benefit from “the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another.”
If only there were a word for that.
Of course, there is another possibility.
Perhaps Black people are inherently dumber than the white people who attend better-funded schools. Maybe we have less wealth than white people because Black people are lazier. It’s possible that Black people’s work ethic magically disappeared after 1865. Maybe we’re genetically more violent than the men who enslaved, raped, beat, lynched, tortured and withheld Black people’s constitutional rights for the first 189 years of this nation’s history.
These scientifically disproven, absurd assumptions are the only other logical explanation for why these racial disparities persist. To accept this hypothesis, a person has to ignore all the data, science, sociological research, math and history. They would also have to believe that—despite the history of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, voter suppression and employment discrimination—this country made an about-face from its past and spontaneously regenerated itself into a bastion of equality and impartiality.
This also explains why most white people “are satisfied with the way Blacks are treated in society.” Perhaps that’s why two out of every three white people believe Black people have “as good a chance as whites to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.” The majority of white people do not believe Black people face discrimination in voting, medical treatment, dealing with police or when applying for a loan or mortgage, even though numerous studies have documented these systemic issues.
It’s easy to understand why some people put racism in the same category as dragons, poltergeists and the pyramid-building Africans. We live in a country where white people’s imaginations hold more political, social and economic weight than evidence from climate scientists, economists, sociologists, criminologists, historians, dictionaries and the lived experience of Black people. Although it is impossible to verify if someone believes that “race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities, ” there is one thing we can absolutely know:
Their “behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief.”
The only possible way to conclude that America is not racist is to ignore all the academic, scientific and historical proof and accept, without evidence, the thing that white people believe.
By every quantifiable metric, America is a racist country.
But maybe I’m wrong.
Show me the zebras.
Maybe it is more precise to say America was built with racism in its foundations, and racism still shapes power, policing, housing, health, and wealth. But America is also people fighting to expand equality. The honest patriotism is naming the harm and changing the systems.
Maybe ? You think ?!