A while ago I posted about the failure of academics in the face of the immigration debate, allowing the most important issues to be ignored. A similar thing is happening on racism - a concept that has been utterly degraded in public discourse, at least in the US. In a recent Washington Post editorial on "school reform" the Post responded to pretty carefully written criticism of DC schools chancellor Rhee. The criticism had been that much of her work had functioned to strengthen existing privileges for white kids in NW DC while damaging some of the few good schools that African American kids from poorer neighborhoods had access to. The Post responded by saying that the claim that Rhee doesn't care about black kids was libelous.
And that's the thing. "racism" in the popular mind has come to mean nothing but explicit, conscious, negative mental states vis a vis racial minorities. Structural racism and habitual unconscious racism have disappeared almost entirely from public view. Part of the cause of this is right-wing insistence that race no longer matters because hardly anyone expresses explicit racist attitudes anymore, and explicit legal discrimination is a thing of the past. Part of the cause is also a range of black leaders and black organizations that focus more on the incautious remark than on the massive structural racism of prisons, health care, poverty, etc. But the effect is to make it nearly impossible to raise serious issues of race in the US. To point it out at all is instantly taken as a charge of conscious explicit hatred - a charge easily dismissed as either unprovable or hyperbolic.
And academics, in my view, are to blame. How many of us study these issues, without ever bothering to write op-eds explaining the basics to the public. In a country in which being a black man is a vastly better statistical indicator of spending time in prison than is committing an imprisonable offense, in which urban black folks typically have worse health conditions than people in the third world, in which poverty is seriously racialized, etc, I don't think it is too much to ask that we engage in a bit of public pedagogy designed to make these facts recognizable.
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