On Racism and White Privilege

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.