Race for Change

It is fun to have college-age kids.  It gives me the opportunity to delve into topics I missed the first time I went to college.  Having majored in the arts, my son’s choice of social sciences has been enlightening to me.  Eventually I got a graduate degree in health policy—which took me through a wide range of courses in economics and public policy—so I am not without background in social justice and the political process.  But my son’s choice to major in sociology, and his particular area of concentration, has given me the opportunity to survey the landmark works on race and ethnicity and to learn the lexicon of social change.

My son has never been one for science, having a decided preference for people over parts.  In retrospect, he has always been sensitive to the human condition, whether it was noticing the homeless and downtrodden on the subway, or worrying about starving children while he filled his own plate.  It is no surprise to me that he has chosen a path working with those less fortunate than himself, although I worry constantly that he will not be able to maintain a professional arm’s length distance from his “clients.”  He is fascinated by the differences among us and by trying to understand the root causes that make it so.  I believe he lives with a “there but for the grace of G-d go I” lens on life.  That he wants to do something about it rather than looking away makes me proud.

I began following along with my son’s required readings in sociology, as much out of interest as to share his educational journey.  I confess these books and essays have been incredibly eye-opening to me.  Having been born in the late 50s, I have already lived through so many social revolutions I thought I had seen it all and learned it all.  But I was amazed at how rigid my own thinking remained even after years in the liberal lane.  I did not think myself to be a racist, but I am now convinced that I must work actively not to be one.  Most people do not understand the extent to which latent “cultural racism” prevails in the US, ingrained as it is in our society’s DNA.  It is a uniquely American societal virus that infects behaviors and outlooks on both sides of racial lines.  Racism appears even more blatant in the US after traveling through Europe; we clearly lag behind the world in our perception of what equality means.

One of the things that always confounded me was our need to express things in well delineated racial terms.  For example, we describe George Clooney as an ‘actor,’ yet many describe Denzel Washington as a ‘black actor.’  This is clear racism, but a form that many otherwise socially sensitive people do not recognize as racism.  Our society is full of barriers and hurdles for people who are not clearly descended from white Europeans.  It is based on a tradition of promoting some at the expense of others—an entitlement of the majority—compounded over generations.  When our Founding Fathers chose to ignore the slavery problem, it set in motion a societal divide from which we are still recovering.   Today, sociologists point out that race is “socially constructed,” meaning that the distinctions we place on people based on their skin color or ancestry is a social choice we make.  It has no genetic basis.  We are all the same, even despite our range of superficial differences.

But it does not stop there.  Because we have a racially-charged society, we continue to propagate a “we vs. them” ethos.  We take ethnic labels, such as Latin, or religious groups, such as Islamic, and use them to push each other into defined racial boxes.  Even my use of "we" in this clumsy illustration demonstrates the difficulty in describing the problem without inadvertantly aligning with one side.  And while the range of non-white options becomes more and more diverse with every US Census, it should not be confused with showing tolerance or acceptance of diversity.  The precision with which our society aims to quantify its racial mix remains consistent over generations in its intent to marginalize certain groups.   It is a lot of effort spent defining something that is a purely artificial distinction.