On
Racism and White Privilege
Rev.
Dr. Tom Sorenson
August,
2017
I’m not happy that I have to say this, but some conversations I’ve
had recently at First Congregational Church of Maltby as well as
things I’ve heard in the public media convince me that a great many
white Americans simply do not understand the breadth and depth of
racism among us, nor do they understand the wide-ranging effects of
the white privilege they all have even if they are unaware of it. So
I am going to attempt here to state some basic truths about racism
and white privilege in the United States of America. Only when we
white Americans become more aware of and sensitive to the racism and
white privilege that pervades every aspect of American life will we
have any possibility of overcoming them and creating the society of
which Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed, a society in which all people
truly are judged by the content of their character and not by the
color of their skin.
It almost sounds like a cliché to me today, but racism is America’s
original sin. Those words sound like a cliché to me today, but for
most of my life I probably wouldn’t even have understood what they
meant. I grew up and was educated in a mostly white, mostly middle
class culture in Eugene, Oregon. There were very few Black people in
the Eugene-Springfield metropolitan area as I was growing up there in
the 1950s and early 1960s. My father was a history professor at the
University of Oregon, and there were always some people of color
around the university, mostly if not quite exclusively from foreign
countries. There were a few Black students at South Eugene High
School when I was there (class of 1964), but few if any of us whites
knew them or had anything to do with them. My education began in the
public schools of Eugene. Yes, we were taught American history—sort
of; but the racism prevalent throughout American history was hardly
mentioned. We were taught that the Civil War was about slavery, and
the South was on the wrong side of that issue. Yet when South Eugene
High School played its annual football game against North Eugene High
School we played the South. Someone dressed in a Confederate uniform
and carrying a Confederate battle flag would ride a horse around the
field, and we would all cheer. That we were cheering for symbols of
racism, slavery, and white supremacy never occurred to us, but of
course we were. I once began a sermon on American racism with the
line “I was lied to.” I was lied to mostly by silence. No one
told us that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners and that
Jefferson fathered children by one of his slaves, a women who had no
say in the matter whatsoever. We enjoyed Black entertainers. We
listened to Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., and no one told us
that they were not allowed to stay in the Las Vegas hotels where they
performed. I received a typical white education, one that paid next
to no attention to the horrors of white discrimination against Black
Americans and never once hinted at the truth that white Americans
committed genocide against Native Americans. That racism is America’s
original sin didn’t sound like a cliché to me then. It wasn’t
even a truth that I ever heard.
Consider for a moment the issues of race and slavery in the founding
of our nation. In 1776 slavery was legal in all thirteen American
colonies. It was far more prevalent in the southern colonies than in
the northern ones, but it existed everywhere. Although not all Black
people were slaves, all people who were enslaved were Black. They
were Africans or the descendants of Africans forcibly brought here
against their will under horrific circumstances under which many of
the abducted people died before ever reaching America. Washington and
Jefferson were slave owners, but so were many others of the so-called
founding fathers. When our forbears drafted the US Constitution a few
years after they achieved independence from Britain the issue of
slavery came up, but not whether or not to abolish it. The issue was
only whether or not Black Americans should be counted for purposes of
determining representation in the House of Representatives, where a
the number of a state’s representatives was and is based on
population numbers. The southern slave owners of course wanted them
counted, for if they were the South would be much more heavily
represented in Congress than if they weren’t. Some Northerners
objected, perhaps because they objected to slavery but also because
they said that since slaves weren’t really citizens and couldn’t
own property or vote they shouldn’t be counted at all. The solution
the framers reached was a compromise. Each slave would be counted as
three-fifths of a person for purposes of determining Congressional
representation. This provision was repealed by the Fourteenth
Amendment after the Civil War, perhaps only because after the Civil
War there would be no slaves, so the provision was moot. Still,
Blacks as less than fully human was written into our Constitution at
the very beginning.
It is only in recent years that I have begun to learn something of
the horrors of American slavery. People who were slaves simply
weren’t people. They were property. They had no human rights that
their owners had to respect. They could be beaten at will. They could
not marry. They could not own property. It was often illegal to teach
them to read and write. Slave owners did not have to respect slave
families, and families were regularly torn apart when some member was
sold to and taken away by another owner. It wasn’t just in the
South that Blacks had no rights. In 1850 the US Congress enacted the
Fugitive Slave Act, which said not only that any escaped slave who
was apprehended was to be returned to her or his owner but also that
people everywhere in the country were legally obligated to cooperate
in the enforcement of that law. In 1857, in the case of Dred Scott
v. Sanford, the US Supreme Court
held that any “Negro,” whether free or enslaved, whose ancestors
had been imported into the US and sold as slaves could not be
citizens
of the United States and had no standing to bring suit in federal
court. Yes, in those years
and earlier there was a significant abolitionist movement in the
north. Most abolitionists were Christians, but then most slave owners
claimed to be Christians too. Yet the abolitionist movement never
succeeded in abolishing slavery in the south. That happened only
after the Civil War, four years of brutal slaughter in which more
Americans died than in any other American war, a ghastly statistic
that is still true today.
After the Civil War slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment
to the US Constitution. During the period known as Reconstruction
Blacks in the south had a freedom they had never had before. Some of
them were elected to positions in state government and even became US
Representatives and Senators. Yet even during Reconstruction the
conditions of life for the former slaves were hardly easy. They had
been freed, but they had not been given the “40 acres and a mule”
that so many of them had hoped they would receive. The racism in
southern whites was if anything made worse by their resentment over
having lost their “property,” their former slaves. In 1876 the
Democrats agreed to the disputed election of Republican Rutherford B.
Hayes as President in exchange for a promise by the Republicans to
withdraw federal troops from the former Confederate states and to end
the policies of Reconstruction. Thus began the era of the “solid
South,” when southern whites supported Democratic candidates
because the Democrats had become the party of segregation. Blacks
were excluded from public life. “Jim Crow” laws were passed in
all the southern states that sought to enforce through legal means a
strict separation of the races. Blacks were denied access to public
services and to white businesses. Lynching of Black people, mostly
but not exclusively men, became common. A Black man could be lynched
simply for looking at a white woman, and many were. Schools were
segregated, and Black students suffered in schools that were wholly,
and intentionally, inadequate. In 1896 in the case of Plessy v.
Ferguson, the US Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow laws under the
specious reasoning that separate could be and presumably was equal.
That hateful doctrine was overturned only in 1954 by the case of
Brown v. Board of Education.
There were no Jim Crow laws in the
north, but the north was hardly free from racial prejudice. Northern
cities became strictly segregated. There were white parts of town and
Black parts of town. Banks practiced “red lining,” the practice
of refusing to give home purchase mortgage loans to Blacks seeking to
move into white areas. Residential neighborhoods were segregated, and
public school attendance was based on neighborhoods. Thus in the
north there came to be white schools and Black schools nearly as
exclusively as in the south even though there were no Jim Crow laws.
Racial discrimination in housing, public services, and education may
not have been legally mandated in the north; but it was perfectly
legal, and it was nearly universally practiced. In
American law people are free to make any decision they want on any
basis they want, including a discriminatory one, unless some law
provides otherwise. In the United States before 1964, there were no
national laws prohibiting racial discrimination in housing,
employment, or the provision of public services (although
some states had such laws by then),
and such discrimination was the nearly universal rule not the
exception.
Throughout
American history, then, whiteness has been considered the human norm.
White Americans have seen Blackness as somehow deviant, a departure
from the human norm, and therefore inferior. Most of us white
Americans don’t like to admit that that’s how it has been with
our country, but our reluctance to admit it does nothing to impair
the validity of the statement. We are even less comfortable admitting
that that is how we see things ourselves, yet here’s an
uncomfortable truth all of us white Americans must face. We grew up
and were educated in a racist culture, and we have not escaped the
effects of that racist culture. Virtually all of us are racists. That
doesn’t mean we hate Black people. It doesn’t mean we think
discrimination against Black people is a good thing. Statistics are
hard to come by and are probably unreliable, but most of us don’t
think those things any more. Yet our opposition to acts of racism
doesn’t mean we aren’t racists. To see if you’re a racist,
don’t look at the political positions you adopt. Be honest about
your first, gut reactions when you see a person of a different race,
for us whites especially a Black man or woman. Do you immediately
think less of that person because of her or his skin color? We have
to honest in answering that question. We have to answer it yes even
if we immediately become aware that our negative reaction to a
person’s skin color is wrong and we are quite prepared to overcome
it in our dealings with that person. The truth of the matter is that
very few of us do not have that reaction. That’s because we grew up
in a culture that has always said and still says in so many ways that
Blacks are inferior. We whites have been conditioned by our culture
to be racists, to think that
it is better to be white than to be anything else.
We simply must admit that truth. We will never truly overcome racism
until we do.
Moreover, in a racist culture that
considers white to be the human norm and Black to be a negative
deviation from the norm, white privilege exists. Each and every one
of us white people has it. That most of us are unaware that we have
it doesn’t mean we don’t have it. We do, and we will never
overcome it until we get a whole lot more honest than we have been
about having it. White privilege is the ability to go through life
without having to worry about how the dominant culture sees you
because of your skin color. White privilege is not having to be
substantially better than every other applicant to get a job for
which both Black
and white people have applied. White privilege is not needing
affirmative action to get you into a good university. White privilege
is not having landlords from whom you wish to rent an apartment give
you obviously specious reasons for not renting to you when you know
the real reason is your race. White
privilege is having a legal system that systematically if not always
consciously treats you better than it treats a Black person in the
same circumstances. White
privilege is not having had to grow up in a culture that makes you
less just because you aren’t white. White
privilege is not having to to
be afraid every time a police
car drives by. White privilege is not having to train your children
to be afraid of the police and how to act to avoid unwarranted police
attention or harassment. The manifestations of white privilege are
numerous, and we white people enjoy them all the time without even
thinking about them. For a long list of instances where white
privilege is in play see
http://www.antiracistalliance.com/Unpacking.html.
I know very few white people who are
truly aware of the privilege they carry with them every minute of
their lives in our racist society. Because we don’t see our
privilege we don’t see how deep-seated racism is in our culture.
Because we don’t see our privilege we don’t have a clue about
what it means to live without that privilege. We blithely tell
ourselves that we don’t hate people of color, so we convince
ourselves that we aren’t racists.
We probably aren’t being totally
honest with ourselves when we tell ourselves that we aren’t
racists, but even if we are honest when we say it we do not deal with
the institutional racism that pervades American life. Institutional
racism is racism that is seen not in individual acts of
discrimination but in the racially
disproportionate results
American institutions produce. The easiest instance of institutional
racism to see is the case
of the criminal justice system. Blacks consistently receive harsher
punishments than whites for the same crimes. As a result, Blacks
disproportionately populate our prisons. The juries who convict
Blacks of crimes surely don’t think of themselves as racist. Most
of the judges who determine sentences probably
don’t either, yet the racially disparate results of the court
system are undeniable. That’s institutional racism. It exists in
our courts to be sure, but it exists in most of the systems of our
society. It exists in employment. It exists in education. It exists
in health care. It exists in housing. Until
we white Americans become much more aware of the evils of institutional
racism among us we will never overcome those evils.
So we live in a society that was
formed in racism and that has lived with racism ever since. Yes, we
passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yes, we passed the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, although the Supreme Court not too long ago took most of
the teeth out of that one on the false premise that racial
discrimination in voter registration and
districting no longer exists
among us. American society is
racist to the core, and we white Americans benefit from that racism
every day. Our first task is to become aware that we do. Only then
can we begin to dismantle white privilege and move toward a truly
equal society.
