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This country is constantly in denial about racism or the effects of racism. Black people have to prove, with a smoking gun, that our treatment is the product of racism. We are consistently forced to give up the historical context we know to be true because it's possible that any one instance may not be the result of racism. But that's applied everywhere to everything, from the job Loquanda missed out on because of her name to the mortgage rate that's too high because the apartment is located in a black neighborhood (all other things being equal) to whether or not an officer shot a 12 year old kid because he has an internalized fear of black people.
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Agreed, but I have a problem with those examples. And I guess it comes down to a question of whether risk minimization is true racism. The decision to lend is a risk analysis. If black neighborhoods tend to be poor neighborhoods, and poor ones have higher default rates, is a lender racist for charging a higher rate? Perhaps the outcome is racist, but the racist intent is absent. If an HR manager uses data suggesting people with certain black sounding names tend to be less advantageous hires, is that really racist, or is that engaging in cold, amoral risk analysis? I'm not suggesting an answer one way or another, but big data is making this already complicated question a whole more so.
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Look, I'm not stupid. I understand that white people are never going to give up anything tangible.
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This is where I become a little confused. I don't see what whites are giving up in becoming less racist. White people had an advantage being born white. Nobody's asked us to concede anything. We've been asked not to hold other people down. Or get behind police who murder them. But economically, it's not a zero sum game. The more black people advance, the more the economy grows, the more everyone benefits over the long term. Am I missing something here?
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I realize that change will only come over generations and generations of painfully slow improvement. And obviously there has been progress. I think part of that article's point is that the good intentions we've seen from so many white people over Brown and Ferguson, etc. don't mean much when the outcome is exactly the same for black people as it has always been. And the author was expressing her frustration because of that.
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Nothing has more empty calories than white guilt and its gaudy public expressions of sympathies. But keep in mind - this is America, where no one has an attention span much beyond that of your average lab rat. In regard to almost everything problematic, we're all about awareness, and outcry. But when it comes down to the tough work of actually fixing the problem, we've already moved on to the next tragedy over which we can publicly display our dismay.
