Losing the race to erase racism.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: Life in America

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"AMERICANS ARE engaged in a war over a word: racism." Thus began Charles M. Blow in a July 2010 op-ed piece in The New York Times. The article, "Obama's 'Race' War," did not slow the debate, which continued through the 2010 elections and into the new Congress with the election of Tea Party candidates who dragged discrimination, immigration, and even "birther" issues into another year.

Blow reported four months later that there also exists on the American political scene a "sentiment that the current racial discontent is being fueled by a black liberal grievance industry that refuses to acknowledge racial progress, accept personal responsibility, or acknowledge its own racial transgressions." He cites Harvard University, University of Washington, and University of Virginia data to note that racial prejudice is a two-way street. In tests taken between 2000 and 2006, three-quarters of whites were found to have implicit pro-white/anti-black feelings while 40% of blacks possess a pro-black/anti-white bias. Self-reporting in an ABC News poll in 2009, 34% of whites admitted to "some feelings of racial prejudice" while 38% of blacks admitted the same. This seems to be the way we are.

However, neither racial discrimination nor even racial prejudice is the same as racism. Discrimination involves treatment as well as differentiation, and even may be perceived as a corrective discrimination, as is the case of affirmative action policies around the globe. Prejudice mostly is directed at separation, not perpetuating advantage.

Racism is the most perverse of the attributes of social behavior related to race. Racism is the practice of differentiating on an assumption of superior and inferior biological traits that can be recognized in physical characteristics, especially skin color. In the common usage, racism is a defensive reaction from those who have, not from those who do not. In the vast majority of global circumstances, it is an expression of lighter-skinned peoples toward the darker skinned. While there are circumstances of "reverse discrimination," there are few cases of "reverse racism" that would involve remaining in an inferior economic or social power situation and fewer still of reversing completely a power hierarchy. (Zimbabwe perhaps being one of them, although whites still have extensive economic power there.)

Racism issues have taken on near epidemic proportions in the U.S. since the presidential campaign of Barack Obama and more since his subsequent election, with racism, discrimination, and prejudice all being thrown into the mix. Demonstrators have shown up at health care town halls and rallies with signs picturing Pres. Obama as a witch doctor or with placards stating that "The Zoo Has an African [Lion] and the White House Has a Lyin' African."

Two years after the election, "birther" contingents keep popping up claiming that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, contrary to significant evidence that says otherwise, or that his mother was not legally an American, or an adult, or that he had dual citizenship. The birther list goes on. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Tea Party protesters, and other right wing commentators bring race to the fore at every opportunity. One survey in early 2010 showed that nearly one-quarter of Americans thought Barack Obama was a Muslim, despite all evidence to the contrary during the 2008 presidential campaign. Affirmative action policies continue to be challenged and even civil rights and immigration legislation are being pushed toward a chopping block. Would all this be occurring if Obama had Russian, Jewish, or Asian heritage?

Discrimination and profiling are as embedded in society today as they were in the days of civil rights activism and before. This is not just because of Pres. Obama's skin color, although the darkness of his skin has generated much of the frenzy. Ironically, he actually is half white and was raised in a white culture.

Race and color also have been at the forefront of the immigration issue, especially as it has surfaced in Arizona SB 1070, a state bill that would make an effort to close the border with Mexico as well as generate some form of profiling in order for local police to identify possible "illegal immigrants," which, in Arizona, automatically implies that the individuals are Mexican or Central American, with readily identifiable color, features, and stature. A Federal judge has held that the profiling portions of the bill possibly are unconstitutional and they have been stayed temporarily, but the debate over the bill continues to be heated and the arguments will go on.

The July 2010 incident where conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart created a heavily edited video implying racism on the part of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod again has raised the specter of ongoing racial division in this country. Attempting to counter arguments about racism among Tea Party participants, Breitbart involved the NAACP (where Sherrod spoke in March about her own evolution in racial attitudes) and the Obama Administration (which pressured her to resign) in kicking this hornets' nest in American society with a falsehood about Sherrod. Breitbart and Fox News commentators instituted a debate about reverse racism, completely turning around the historic definition of the...