Part II: How to Eradicate Racism in the United States

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

A quandary currently engulfs us: how do you deal with a situation where there are just not enough advocates for post-racial American society? So when we say ‘advocates,’ we are not talking about rainbow nation proponents. Advocates are, actually, a must simpler caste. They are the white, black, brown, yellow and red people that have made the conscious effort to befriend someone from another race. They want to understand what goes on when microaggressions go awry. Interestingly, almost all the people interviewed for this set of articles on ending racism in the United States had a certain look in their eyes. Even when they thought a brighter future was possible, their body language said it is monumentally arduous to try to resolve the ills that beleaguer these United States. To others, it is impossible for mere mortals to comprehend why people do what they do.
Mostly, we cannot do it.

However, perhaps we are giving up a little too soon. In the United States, where television is as much a staple as rice is in China, there is a chance that one could find a plethora of television-based avenues to removing the negative consequences of the microassaults as mentioned earlier. For instance, could a television show work towards preventing one’s offspring from dating outside their race? After all, if all blacks are not like the characters in HBO’s hit show, “The Wire“, then we may see a significant reduction in those verbal or nonverbal microinsults that convey disdain for another’s race. Moreover, we could also see a fall in the sort of microinvalidations that reflect the true meaning behind asking another where they were born (Sue, 2010).

Collectively, even when one cannot pinpoint their source, microaggressions often run the gamut from compelling women to clutch their purses a little tighter when they see a person of color approach them on the street, to causing unnecessary police shootings. One could attest to the microaggression when someone calls law enforcement on suspicious-looking-but-nonetheless-innocent blacks. Microinvalidations may be at the heart of those that look like Latin Americans being subjected to seemingly endless traffic stops.

Microaggressions are akin to racism

Microaggressions tend to prompt both handwringing, and of course, another feature such this one that shall not be the ultimate denouement on racism. Besides, what is another well-intentioned article going to do to this enigma? The painful truth is that we could, instead, succeed in making white people unnecessarily defensive about the position they currently hold in society. Harmless or not, we have no choice but to try to postulate and do what news outlets such as ours were meant to do. Thus, the central thesis to this article is that eradicating racism in these United States may rest in the media; a fraternity we, as The Habari Network belong to.

That’s because various media forms influence the way people perceive issues (Scheufele, 1999). At the same time, frame and cultivation theories may adequately explain how to rearrange the social reality upon which American racism rests. Illustratively, while it may not have been initially designed with didactic motives, the film ‘2012’ had a significant impact on the climate change debate. In the same vein, the hands that, in Birth of a Nation, crudely caricatured concupiscence as unique to the black male continue to echo whenever there’s an incident between a black man and a white woman.

Emmett Till is just as a victim of this echo as that tall young black man who went directly to jail – without the benefit of the doubt – when a white female classmate accused him of rape.

A new kind of racism

While the 44th president shall go down in the history books as an example of the United States confronting its dark legacy of racism, Punyanunt-Carter (2008) may have been right in suggesting that the Herculean effort only produced ‘temporary peaks of progress.’ In this instance, some propose the outlines of what looks like a new sort of racism to understand the manner of opposition during the Obama Presidency.

However, any scintilla of racism experienced in that period may not have been too new after all. Earlier in the 20th century, about the time when theological or philosophical doctrines upon which to further subjugate others were running dangerously thin, some whites measured their absolute freedom in inverse relation to the absolute slavishness of the blacks.

This ‘measurement’ often had devastating consequences for the latter. Thus, as it was a century ago, the farcical cult of individual supremacy experienced in the Obama Era could neither hide its spots nor shake off its white supremacist roots. Summarily, while racism may be here to stay, and while Critical Race Theory (CRT) recognizes how deeply ingrained racism is in American society, we all may just be a little guilty of aversive racism where we genuinely believe and act in favor of racial equality, but still unconsciously harbor some negative feelings about other races. Going beyond legal, cultural and psychological arenas and into epistemological attributes of liberalism, Marxism, post-structuralism, cultural nationalism and pragmatism, the chances of having a comprehensive post-racial America may be close to nil. That racism affects both American liberal and conservative alike could explain why so many people are just a little too uncomfortable to have a full-length discussion on a topic this convoluted. However, there are places in the United States that have entirely dispensed with such discomfiture.

The power of television

There is a certain otherworldliness to American television; a surreal life-form that, in spite of its origins, is not meant to lead anyone down a meretricious path. The phenom we speak of is neither akin to prime-time shows like How to Get Away with Murder, FBI, and NCIS, nor of chemicals brewed by cable television apothecaries. Instead, the world here is one so ephemeral that you could miss it in a hypothetical blink of an eye. Somehow, even if more must be done to balance gender roles in advertising, America’s most consequential advertisers and thought-leaders have successfully gotten ahead of the American public.

West (2017) says that advertisers – for all manner of reasons – are using few white models and heterosexuals in their brand materials. While West refers to this as ‘overcompensatory’ and just ‘trying to avoid accusations of bigotry,’ racism is, definitely NOT just an obsession THESE days.

If racism was one of these ‘things,’ one would not turn around and argue that it has ‘almost seeped into the collective unconscious.’ These THINGS have been going on for a long time, and while minorities have suffered all manner of abuse, and white people have taken on defensive positions on racism akin to what West calls the ‘secular equivalent of Original Sin,’ Lacy (2017) says that brands are simply embracing a ‘broader scope’ of race, sexual orientation and gender identity in their 15, 30, 45 and 60-second television adverts. In the panoply of television adverts, men are happily married to men; it is quite commonplace to see a blue-eyed white man ambling along in bliss with his nappy-haired brown-eyed daughter; the man and woman in the Mercedes advert are definitely Caucasian and Negroid, respectively, and the American public is engorging itself on these tomorrow people.

In 2000, University of Illinois, Chicago professors, Rojecki & Entman, found that in a sample of 1,620 adverts on America’s major networks, African Americans appeared in about 32 percent of them, playing mostly secondary characters. Less than 3 years later, Henderson, Baldasty, & Gerald (2003) confirmed the earlier findings, establishing that in incidences where whites appeared in upscale product placements and commercials for beauty and home products, people of color were in low-cost, low-nutrition products, and in athletic and sports equipment ads.

Juxtaposed with negative portrayals of African Americans as criminals, these trends raised questions about one-dimensional racial stereotypes, that resulted in evaluating African Americans in a certain subservient way in real life. Overall, with social tolerance holding a positive correlation to income, wages, growth and happiness, Ralsmark (2017)‘s presupposition that media visibility of a group signaled relative social worth is quite revealing. After all, social tolerance has a positive correlation to income, wages, growth, and happiness.

In 2016, BabyCenter, a parenting website, and YouGov, a research firm, found that 80 percent of their audience loved seeing diverse families in advertising. Even though ratings have been shown to be higher for programs featuring people of color and women, these two groups are still, for the most part, underrepresented in American media – notably in broadcast and cable programming. Pondering in Time Magazine about the significance of Marvel Studio’s blockbuster, Black Panther, Smith (2018) seems to make the popularity contest case by averring that the movie was less about being black, and more about being the first megabudget movie to have an African American director and a predominantly black cast. That movie made over US$1.3 billion in theatrical performance, and over US$86 million in home market performance. Here, Smith says that while white people may not understand the hysteria, these media forms – like the short television adverts – reflect infinite versions of society with boundless possibilities.

The impact of diversity television

Alternatively, by expertly reading the tea leaves of Nielsen’s 2014/2015 viewership data, Ellithorpe & Bleakley (2016) concluded that black adolescents watched more shows than non-black adolescents during that television season. At the same time, they seemed to celebrate the fact that mainstream American television may have availed adequate programming for minorities. After all, because these adolescents intentionally sought out messages from characters that looked like them to find ‘appropriate’ tools for identity development and social identity gratifications, the frequency with which they watched television was quite revealing. Whether this is a good or bad thing, Lichter (2013) noted that under the so-called Third Demographic Transition, America’s older, largely white population would, increasingly, be replaced by today’s disproportionately poor minority children over the next generation or two.

Primarily, because racial boundaries may be shaped by the changing meaning of race, ethnicity, segregation, friendship networks, interracial marriage, and childbearing, growing ethnic diversity will lead to a situation where whites and minorities increasingly share physical and social spaces or interact as coequals. Thus, even when America’s racial transformation could place upward demographic pressure on future poverty and inequality, future harmony is, squarely, in the hands of America’s older population of elected officials and taxpayers. Their responses today to America’s increasingly diverse population will determine how today’s children transition (or not) into productive adult roles.

However, would ominous warnings and bright ideas on the media be sufficient in stemming a tide of racism? In a 2016 Time magazine column, Christine Ngaruiya, a New Haven-based physician and researcher, proposed a 3-rule strategy to supplement avenues to end racism in the United States. Speaking to all races, Ngaruiya specifically pointed out empathy; taking a stand against stereotypes, and being in the know. Having compassion is the first step – only misanthropes are incapable of walking in the footsteps of another. However, forming a movement against stereotypes is a more significant challenge. For instance, while some may argue that laughter is the best medicine, the point to ponder is that stereotypes, even those meant to be humorous, could be misappropriated to the detriment of others. Ngaruiya’s last spot in the trifecta is, perhaps, the easiest: be conscientious of what you watch and listen to is so important, she warns. People are not the characters played on television.