Mislearning the Civil Rights era
Racially fraught incidents at colleges around the country highlight what PBS describes as "a failed lesson in colorblindness." Good intentions gone awry.
This week, a white female at the University of South Carolina was suspended over a photo showing her writing a racial slur on a whiteboard. The comment blamed blacks for the poor wifi reception on campus. The incident followed the expulsion of three students at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania over racial comments broadcast on college radio:
...one of the students used the N-word, a second said "black people should be dead" and the third said "lynch 'em."
A student at Duke University is under investigation after hanging a noose from a tree on campus. A former University of Mississippi student faces federal civil rights charges for placing a noose on the statue of James Meredith, the first student to integrate the Ole Miss campus in 1962. Then there was the infamous video of University of Oklahoma fraternity members' racist chant. And others.
The Christian Science Monitor quotes a PBS op-ed by Mychal Denzel Smith:
“As children of the multi-cultural 1980s and 90s, Millennials are fluent in colorblindness and diversity, while remaining illiterate in the language of anti-racism,” Mychal Denzel Smith, a journalist and social commentator, wrote in an op-ed for PBS.
Smith writes:
To be fair, that’s not entirely their fault. They were taught by their elders, Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, about how to think about race and racism. The lessons Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers gleaned from the Civil Rights era is that racism is matter of personal bigotry — racists hate people because of the color of their skin, or because they believe stereotypes about groups of people they’ve never met — not one of institutional discrimination and exploitation. The history Millennials have been taught is through that lens, with a specific focus on misunderstanding the message of Martin Luther King, Jr. Certainly, a world where we all loved one another would be ideal, where each person is seen as equal, where “the dream” of children of all different racial backgrounds holding hands with one another without prejudice is a reality. But Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers generally decided to ignore King’s diagnosis of the problem — white supremacy — and opted to make him a poster-child for a colorblind society, in which we simply ignore construct of race altogether and pray that it will disappear on its own.
Hence the insistence after the election of Barack Obama that we now live in a post-racial society, recent evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Three-quarters of a century after the Silents before them, Smith's analysis suggests, race is again a taboo subject decent people don't talk about in polite society. Only 20 percent of millennials say they’re comfortable having a conversation about it.
Smith elaborates on how the pursuit of colorblindness as an ideal misses the mark:
For Millennials, racism is a relic of the past, but what vestiges may still exist are only obstacles if the people affected decide they are. Everyone is equal, they’ve been taught, and therefore everyone has equal opportunity for success. This is the deficiency found in the language of diversity. We have spent the post-Civil Rights era concerned with whether or not there is adequate representation for racial minority groups within our existing institutions, not questioning whether these institutions are fundamentally racist and rely on white supremacy for their very existence. Armed with this impotent analysis, Millennials perpetuate false equivalencies, such as affirmative action as a form of discrimination on par with with Jim Crow segregation. And they can do so while not believing themselves racist or supportive of racism.
Writing for Aljazeera in January, Demos' Sean McElwee finds that "while young white Americans are clearly aware of interpersonal racism, they seem unwilling to address structural or implicit biases. It may be that racial progress will occur simply because there are fewer young whites relative to people of color." That is, demographic factors are also work.
Responding to the Duke noose incident, Ed Dorn, who teaches civil rights history at the University of Texas in Austin told the Monitor:
"A lot of people, even of the Millennial generation, grew up believing that this country would always look a certain way, and that the people who were in charge of major institutions would always be of a certain color ... But the color line is shifting, and in a few decades this will no longer be a white man's country. That makes them uncomfortable, angry, and anxious."[snip]
"We're seeing a major pushback against the progress that's been made since the 1960s, and one manifestation of that is a racist song by a bunch of drunken fraternity members and incidents like [the noose at] Duke," says Professor Dorn. "It's also important to note that free expression on campus has traditionally not been sanctioned strongly, which means that a few 20-somethings on a college campus, fueled by a few beers, feel that they can get away with a few things. There's a reason we use the word 'sophomoric.' "
Regarding our own college years, most of us might not want to look too closely in the mirror.