Part 1: How to Eradicate Racism from the United States

By Dennis Matanda
Editor-in-Chief, The Habari Network

It Started with a Car
Gaetano Fettucci is quite striking; complete with well-coiffed silver hair and a day-old beard. He’s reading The New York Times when I first find a table at our local Starbucks. When I return from getting my coffee, he sidles over and asks me how much I like my car. I smile. He noticed my car. I tell him the truth: my travel schedule means more trains and flights than the exhilaration of 455 horses encased in my 8-cylinder beast. He and I own similar brand vehicles, he says, but his’ nothing quite as ostentatious. I smile again, say thank you, assuming he’s about to excuse himself like many an American does at this juncture. But he does not go. Instead, he proceeds to talk about his father and brother; about his car. Soon, like old friends, we’re sitting at his table. I find out he’s a recently-retired 61-year old oncologist that works as an independent contractor on clinical trials for cancer drugs. Our conversation meanders and twists; we discuss Uganda, talk about the weather and about young people and technology: young people prefer their phones over proper conversations. Then on his own, my new friend brings up Donald Trump. He says the 45th president is just misunderstood and widely reviled because he threatens the status quo in Washington. I choose not to give my opinion.

Interestingly, throughout our 30-minute conversation, Dr. Fettucci is not quite as guarded as many white Americans sometimes are when speaking to a person of color. When we speak of Uganda, he does not make the typical anodyne comment about my accent or even ask how I escaped Africa unscathed. As far as he is concerned, the only difference between us is that he is almost 20 years my senior, but that does not matter since we are both independent contractors, albeit in different fields. We laugh. We exchange business cards. We say goodbye. And I am alone at last, in uffish thought. Then it hits me: this is exactly how one stems the tide of racism. This’ exactly how racism ends in these United States.

Defining Racism and Tribalism

No one wants the racist moniker slapped upon them. Recently, The Washington Post reported that in the era of Trump, it seems as though the Republican Party, which has made periodic overtures to blacks, Latinos and other minorities, is having to deal with the very race-related issues it has struggled with since the Civil Rights era. The main quandary, of course, is that Trump seems to be ‘winning’ by convincing white voters that they’ll keep their long-term status via keeping people of color, immigrants and black below them in societal rungs. But then we have to ask: Is it racist to employ such a strategy?

Also, technically, if one calls another ‘dumb,’ or a ‘dog,’ aren’t they more boorish than racist? While defining racism, one must be careful not to conflate the phenom with showmanship, winning strategies, or at worst, tribalism. Defined as preference for one’s own people over others, tribalism is oftentimes camouflaged as national security and realism theory – like in the cause of Peloponnesian Wars and in Africa’s endless internecine war; or in the economics of Jewish enslavement in Egypt. Racism is a whole new can of worms. As Beswick (1990) cautions, the intrinsic value and definition of racism lies in a multi-level antagonism between a group that considers another substandard because of the latter’s skin color.

In a recent New York Times column, Ibram X Kendi stridently suggests that one is racist because of what they do and say. But writing in the Financial Times, Goodhart (2017) counters that the challenge in assigning racist labels is that those who say or do ‘racist’ things may just feel uncomfortable that their group is no longer setting the tone in a neighborhood. Besides, how can one tell that another is definitively racist and yet (i) many won’t not share their true feelings about race for fear that others will label them racists; (ii) very few people think in explicitly ethnic or racist terms, and (iii) most people are not stupid or irredeemably mean.

Jodi Burkett suggests that to truly understand racism, one needs to look no further than South Africa’s apartheid system as the epitome of racism. While this system collapsed under its own weight by the time Nelson Mandela was elected president of that country, the U.S. has a more colorful past that stretches to the 14th century. Here, the award-winning 2016 book, Stamped from the Beginning, provides an inkling of how biases morph into institutionalized racism.

In the first place, a 14th century manuscript, Descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa) by Granada-born Wasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan renamed Giovanni Leone dell’Africa or Leo Africanus was influential in the racism process. In Descrittione, Africanus revealed that the sexually-indulgent Africans led beastly livelihoods devoid of reason, wit and art. Earlier, Ibn Khaldun’s 1377 work, Muqaddimab had, amongst comments on economics, government and religion, suggested that because Africans possessed few human attributes, they could be “saved by enslavement”.

For his part, George Best, a 16th century Elizabethan voyager published articles from his sojourns; affirming that blacks were, indeed, cursed with predispositions to devilish proclivities such as hypersexuality, greed and indiscipline. Best also inferred that because white skin, itself, was normative, black nudity, ‘bestiality,’ and savagery were akin to primitivity.

Importantly, although the Dred Scott Decision of 1857 was an indirect catalyst of the American Civil War, Chief Justice Roger Taney affirmed that drafters of the Constitution had viewed all negros as ‘beings of an inferior order and had no right the white man was bound to respect.’ Dred Scott was superseded by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment of 1868 that gave African Americans full citizenship. While the Reconstruction period of 1865 – 1877 was key to determining the future of race relations in America, Nicholas Lemann says racism against blacks may be a by-product of the Renaissance; the Reformation; the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment, and today’s racists assume that those groups of people that didn’t garner riches, power, and influence from the economic progress of Europe are, for the most part, inferior.

Perhaps there’s some truth to this: Between 1857 and the present, the United States stumbled into Jim Crow laws that, in the 1870s and 1880s, mandated racial segregation in public facilities of the former Confederate States that had large black populations. Further mainstreaming racism, the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1896, upheld the ‘separate but equal’ legal doctrine for African Americans.

Today, while Jim Crow has mostly been overruled and erased by countless legal victories, by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, there is overwhelming evidence that Barack Obama’s election as America’s 44th president in 2008 did not deal racism as decisive blow. As Garcia & Zulfacar (2015) and Williams (2012) demonstrate, Jim Crow-like racism continues to manifest itself in American spheres such as education, professional careers, socio-economic status, overall public health, and the criminal justice system.

In juxtaposition, French MPs in June 2018 replaced ‘race’ in their constitution – a word they had long disparaged as a made-up social construct – with the word ‘sex’. Conversely, a United Nations expert warned that following Brexit, racism and religious intolerance had become more acceptable in Britain. So where do off-hand references to majority black countries as shitholes leave us? Blogger, Roxanne Gay, suggests that a sizable percentage of the white American populace thinks poorly of blacks and the developing world. This special sort of amorphous racism, while grotesque, is something that continues to have an obstinate hold on the American zeitgeist.

Today’s Racism

Despite a shabby present, and an even shabbier past, there is no doubt that things have improved significantly from the time Emmett Till, a black teenage boy was, in August 1955, brutally killed for the rumor that he merely whistled at a white woman. Starting in the 1950s, a consensus was that racial discrimination against blacks in the United States was not a good thing, culminating in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s August 28, 1963 ‘I Have a Dream’ speech before over 250,000 black and white protesters in Washington, DC. Sometime in 2017, the Economist reported that in 1958, only 4 percent of America supported inter-racial marriage. By 1997, this number had risen to 50 percent and hovers around 87 percent today. Interracial marriage had also climbed from 7 percent in 1980 to 15 percent of all marriages in 2010. At the same time, racially and ethnically motivated hate crimes reported to the FBI fell 48 percent between 1994 and 2015. Unfortunately, these crimes reached a 5-year high of 6,121 cases, representing a 5 percent increase over 2015, and the year before.

Ten days after the election of Donald Trump, white people had engaged in small-scale harassment of blacks, Jews, Muslims and persons of alternative sexuality. But then author Ta-Nahisi Coates suggests that presupposing only a lower class of white people are racist misses out striking examples of far-reaching racism where, for example, the University of Chicago quietly and privately pursuing ‘urban renewal’ while publicly claiming otherwise. Also, when you combine elements of tribalism, one should not be surprised when the Republic Racist in 2016 says:

 ‘The White racial group is bound by the common factor of racial characteristics of the Caucasian race, and their European ancestry. The group can only exist as long as these common factors are shared. These common factors of race and heritage are destroyed by effectively introducing diversity and multiculturalism. They can only be strengthened by a racism that celebrates that which strengthens the group and rejects that which weakens it …’

Based on how racism is defined in this discourse, Republic Racist cannot do anything about diversity and multiculturalism. In the grand scheme of racism, it doesn’t really matter that a Louisiana justice of the peace believed, in 2009, that interracial relationships were wrong and refused to marry an interracial couple. What matters much more is what U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia: ‘…restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause (of the United States Constitution).’ By the way, that justice of the peace was forced to resign, and he took his anti-interracial sentiments with him.

Penultimately, my new friend Gaetano demonstrated that if we are to dent tribalism and racism, people of color must deliberately form firm friendships within white communities. Because most white Americans already live in racial segregation – with white teachers, white role models, white heroes and white heroines – the key to ending racism might be in challenging this insulation. While my brother Dickson and I agree that challenging insulation is quite an arduous task, I feel that the process is facilitated further along by the new addition to an already invaluable collection of friends.

Importantly, as you will see in Part II, the task of ending racism in these United States is receiving a much-needed boost from the media. Unfortunately, in the meantime, black people like me continue to suffer daily humiliations: a traffic policeman will have the audacity to stop you for a misdemeanor, and then proceed to ask you if the car you are driving is registered to you – even if your name is prominently displayed on your registration. Should I scream racism? As German Lopez reports, accusing white people of racism can cause defensiveness to the point of white supremacy.

Notes & References

Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Barrouquere, B. (2017, November 13). FBI: Hate crimes reach 5-year high in 2016, jumped as Trump rolled toward presidency. Retrieved from Southern Law Poverty Center: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/11/13/fbi-hate-crimes-reach-5-year-high-2016-jumped-trump-rolled-toward-presidency-0

Beswick, R. (1990). Racism in America’s Schools. Eric Digest Series, EA(49).

Black, C. (2002). Leo Africanus’ ‘Descrittione dell’Africa’ and its Sixteenth-Century Translations. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 65, 262-272.

Blinder, A. (2018, July 12). U.S. Reopens Emmet Till Investigation Almost 63 Years After His Murder. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/us/emmett-till-death-investigation.html

Burkett, J. (2013). Constructing Post-Imperial Britain: Britishness, ‘Race’ and the Radical Left in the 1960s. London: Palgrave – Macmillan.

Chait, J. (2011, March 3). No, the Tea Party Isn’t Racist. Yes, It is Racial. Retrieved from The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/84642/no-the-tea-party-isnt-racist-yes-it-racial

Chow, D. (2013, August 29). A Dream Deferred: America’s Changing View of Civil Rights. Retrieved from Live Science: https://www.livescience.com/39292-america-civil-rights.html

CNN. (2009, November 3). Louisiana justice who refused interracial marriage resigns. Retrieved from CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/11/03/louisiana.interracial.marriage/index.html

Coates, T.-N. (2013, March 8). Good People, Racist People. Retrieved from The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/good-people-racist-people/273843/

Dearden, L. (2018, May 11). Racism has become more acceptable since Brexit vote, United Nations warns. Retrieved from Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-racism-religious-intolerance-united-nations-special-rapporteur-a8348021.html

DiTomaso, N. (2014, January 2). White People Do Good Things for One Another, and That’s Bad for Hiring. Retrieved from Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2014/01/white-people-do-good-things-for-one-another-and-thats-bad-for-hiring

Economist. (2017, September 1). Racist behaviour is declining in America. Economist.

Garcia, J. J.-L., & Zulfacar, S. M. (2015, August). Black Lives Matter: A Commentary on Racism and Public Health. American Journal of Public Health, 105(8), 27-30.

Gay, R. (2018, January 12). No One is Coming to Save Us from Trump’s Racism. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/opinion/trump-shithole-countries-haiti-el-salvador-african-countries-immigration-racism.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article&region=Footer

Goodhart, D. (2017, March 2). White Self-Interest is the Same Thing as Racism. Retrieved from Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/content/220090e0-efc1-11e6-ba01-119a44939bb6

Kalpakian, J. (2008). Ibn Khaldun’s Influence on Current International Relations Theory. The Journal of North African Studies, 13(3), 363-376.

Kendi, I. X. (2016). Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books.

Kendi, I. X. (2017, February 22). A History of Race and Racism in America, in 24 Chapters. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/books/review/a-history-of-race-and-racism-in-america-in-24-chapters.html

Kendi, I. X. (2018, January 13). The Heartbeat of Racism is Denial. Retrieved from The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/13/opinion/sunday/heartbeat-of-racism-denial.html

Lemann, N. (1996, February/March). The End of Racism? American Heritage, 47(1).

Lopez, G. (2018, July 30). Research says there are ways to reduce racial bias. Calling people racist isn’t one of them. Retrieved from Vox: https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/15/13595508/racism-research-study-trump

Miller, C., Werner-Winslow, A., Cohen, R., Via, W., & Amend, A. (2016, November 2016). Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election. Retrieved from Southern Law Poverty Center: https://www.splcenter.org/20161129/ten-days-after-harassment-and-intimidation-aftermath-election#antiblack

Mohdin, A. (2018, June 28). France replaced the word ‘race; with ‘sex’ in its constitution. Retrieved from Quartz: https://qz.com/1316951/french-mps-removed-the-word-race-from-the-countrys-constitution/

Parker, A., Kim, S. K., & Costa, R. (2018, August 18). ‘I’m not going there’: As Trump hurls racial invective, most Republicans stay silent. Retrieved from The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/im-not-going-there-as-trump-hurls-racial-invective-most-republicans-stay-silent/2018/08/18/aab7fd8a-a189-11e8-83d2-70203b8d7b44_story.html?utm_term=.b70442bdda52

Van Troos, B. (2013). Race in the seventeenth century: a comparison between the portrayal of the African in Shakespeare’s Othello, and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Retrieved from Universiteit Gent: https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/RUG01/002/060/416/RUG01-002060416_2013_0001_AC.pdf