As the resident instructor for Race and Ethnic Relations, I was asked to speak to the Black Student Union last week. Below is a transcript of what I said (more or less). It went over very well-the oldest AA professor at our university told me I was “smokin” when I finished! Best compliment I’ve gotten in a while. As you’ll see the remarks are relatively brief (only about 12 minutes), but I think it gets the point across.
First, I would like to say thanks to—- for that nice introduction and to BSU for extending the invitation to speak here tonight and for this wonderful meal.
I was asked to talk about Perceptions of Race, and so I’d like to share a little bit about how we as sociologists think about race. I think this is important because we think about race differently than most people, and this leads us to much different conclusions about what needs to be done to address racial inequality in this country.
Sociologists, like myself, think about race as a social construction.
-No genetic evidence for racial classifications
-We created it. Or at least, we created this version of race, based on skin color, for a whole host of political and economic reasons that had little to do, at first, with any perceived inferiority of one group of people as opposed to another
-Race, and by extension racism, thus, has always been a justification rather than an objective fact.
So if that’s the situation, if race is not a real, objective thing, then why do we still care about race? If there is no objective whiteness or essential blackness, why do we spend so much time and energy dealing with it? Or worse, trying not to deal with it? Why do we have things like the Black Student Union and Black History Month? Why do we bother teaching entire courses about Race and Ethnic Relations, which I hear is an excellent class, by the way?
Because, quite simply, race still matters. In this country your skin color affects your life chances in everything from education to health care. Most importantly, it affects your chances of living a happy and fulfilling life.
John Mirowsky and Catherine Ross, two socialpsychologists who study the affects of inequality on individual satisfaction correctly point out that “One of the core interests of sociology is the study of social stratification-the inequalities in income, power, and prestige. Few persons would care about such inequalities if the poor, powerless and despised were as happy and fulfilled as the wealthy, powerful, and admired. Thus, racial differences in status and income are a problem in the human sense as well as in the academic. The inequality in misery makes the social and economic inequality meaningful.”
Repeat that last line.
And I think it almost goes without saying that there is still tremendous social and economic inequality among races.
As a nation we have made tremendous strides with regard to race relations in the past 50 years, but in many respects, the most difficult work is still left to be done. The challenge that we face now is not as clear or straightforward as a sit-in or a bus boycott. As courageous and innovative as those efforts were, our contemporary problems with race will not be solved with such grand and dramatic gestures. Additionally our opponents cannot be identified by storefront signs proclaiming “Whites Only” or by men in white hoods.
Instead, the challenges that confront us are systemic and the opponents reside within all of us. The racism that we face is built into our social structures and into our culture. Perhaps most notably, there is a prevailing sentiment in our society that if we simply ignore race, it will go away and cease to be a meaningful determinant of a person’s life chances and happiness. Correspondingly, there is a belief that to acknowledge race in any way is enough to be a racist or at the very least, to open oneself up to charges of “playing the race card.” Let me assure that nothing could be further from the truth. It is quite clear who benefits from this “let’s start over from this point forward” approach, right? Those who already have a head start. And these people, white people, me, don’t benefit due to some ill-will toward minorities, or overtly racist policies and practices. We benefit in a myriad of subtle ways from inheritance to the development of cultural capital that only serve to reproduce privilege.
The colorblind approach is as flawed as it is idealistic.
No, we can’t ignore race. We can’t ignore race because race exists as a fact. As a social fact. Even if it’s something we created, it has very real ramifications. Even if we all woke up tomorrow and agreed to pretend as though skin color didn’t matter, the residue of racism would still pervade. Non-whites would still be overrepresented among the poor, and while white males face a 1 in 16 chance of ending up in prison at some point in their lives, that number would still be 1 in 3 for black males. The current recession has affected us all, but it has not affected us all equally. The current unemployment rate is around 9% for whites and 17% for blacks, and upwards of 20% for black males. These are social facts which will not be altered by ignoring or intentionally avoiding issues of race. Not only will no good come from denying the existence or importance of race, but there is much harm to be done pretending that race doesn’t matter. We deny reality at our own peril.
So we need, at the very least, to talk about race, to acknowledge it, and to try and understand people’s experiences with it. This does not mean that we need to be combative or confrontational-necessarily-though there may be a time for that. But we need not shy away from pointing out how and when race matters. [Tell about how I have to work with students to say “I’m white” or “I’m black”]
As I said in the beginning, the notion of race is a social construction. We made it. And while we can’t unmake it, we can change it. We can alter the ability of racial classifications to have a negative impact on our society even on a big, systemic basis. But in order to do this, we must first recognize that deep inequalities still exist among people of different races here in the U.S., and that these will not disappear by simply packing them away neatly in a box which is only to be opened every February under the careful guidance and with the full support of a predominately white society.
