no reasons for pride

This Jamelle Bouie piece on the sickening wealth gap between black and white Americans demonstrates plainly: our race problems are structural and material and are not problems of mind. Yet our discourse on race suggests the opposite. An offensive Tweet got vastly more attention that a sitting federal prosecutor asserting in court that the mere presence of racial minorities and money is indicative of illegality. That's exactly the problem.

People say to me, hey, you can do both. You can complain about unfunny jokes at the Oscars and complain about the host of hideous racial inequalities in our country. And, yeah. You can complain about both. My point is not that one thing is not important or that only one can be addressed. My point is that the way in which we address demonstrations of racist or sexist ideas makes addressing racism and sexism harder, not easier. When the biggest racial controversy of a given year is, for example, Michael Richards shouting a racial slur in a crowded theater, rather than the racial income or unemployment gaps, structural change becomes less likely. And because the way we prosecute the case against racism in situations like that of Michael Richards is to ascribe failures in thoughts or emotions, too many people come to imagine that racism can be solved through possessing pure thoughts and emotions. As Bouie's piece ably demonstrates, the structural economic conditions of our country have created a white-black wealth gap. Every American could be in possession of pure hearts and pure thoughts and that wouldn't change. This is why I have so little use for the ritualistic purity displays like those we witness for the past few days. They aren't just unable to contribute to positive change; they suck all of the energy and the attention into those issues which are least material and thus least useful. I care that Bloomberg Business Week published a racist cover. But I care far more about the predatory practices that systematically exposed minority families to massive risk, which that racist cover references.

Besides.... can you address both? I dunno. More and more often I believe that there is a phenomenon of outrage fatigue in the American people. As Bouie suggests, as much as we continue to have a problem with outright (if quiet) bigotry, generally our problem is the people who don't possess outright racial animus but who drag their feet, or want to change the subject, or think that we've already adequately addressed race. What I hear when I try to engage with those resistant to anti-racist efforts is not that they don't think racism is bad but that they are "tired of race." Is that a fair position? It's not. Should they feel differently? They should. But should is irrelevant. Those are the people who must be moved. They are the people who must be reached, in order to make practical change possible. And as long as those self-same rituals of racial purity are expressed in an idiom that is emotional and mental in nature, the resistant can say to themselves, "I personally lack racist thoughts, so therefore I am contributing to fighting racism." Functionally, the consequences of controversies like that of this weekend are regressive, not progressive.

If the way we've been doing things worked, it would have worked a long time ago. If generating personal outrage at bad feelings and bad thoughts worked, things would be far better than they are now. This way is not working. Which is why the evident pride with which people participated in the controversy this weekend bothered me. The Civil Rights Act turns 50 next year. The conditions are what they are. What does anyone have to feel proud about?