Last Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added
himself to the long list of Republicans who have denied the existence of
systemic racism in this country. Graham said on “Fox News Sunday” that “our
systems are not racist. America’s not a racist country.”
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Graham argued that the country can’t be racist because both
Barack Obama and
Kamala Harris had been elected and somehow, their overcoming
racial hurdles proves the absence of racial hurdles. His view seems to be that
the exceptions somehow negated the rule.
In the rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint
session of Congress, the other senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott, the lone
Black Republican in the Senate, parroted Graham and became an apologist for
these denials of racism, saying too that the country wasn’t racist. He argued
that people are “making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made
any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to
heal.”
Scott’s argument seems to leave open the possibility that
America may have been a racist country but that it has matured out of it, that
it has graduated into egalitarianism.
I personally don’t make much of Scott’s ability to reason.
This is the same man who said in March that “woke supremacy,” whatever that is,
“is as bad as white supremacy.” There is no world in which recent efforts at
enlightenment can be equated to enslavement, lynching, and mass incarceration.
None.
It seems to me that the disingenuousness on the question of
racism is largely a question of language. The question turns on another
question: “What, to you, is America?” Is America the people who now inhabit the
land, divorced from its systems and its history? Or, is the meaning of America
inclusive of those systems and history?
When people say that
America is a racist country, they don’t
necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist.
However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted
for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his
racism, becoming apologists for it, or applauding it. What do you call a
country thus composed?
Historically, however, there is no question that the country
was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early
wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of
the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s
Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.
Eight of the first 10 presidents personally enslaved
Africans. In 1856, the chief justice of the
US Supreme Court wrote on the Dred
Scott case, in an infamous ruling that would be issued in 1857, that Black
people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an
inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either
in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights
which the white man was bound to respect.”
The country went on to fight a Civil War over whether some
states could maintain slavery as they wished. Even some of the people arguing
for, and fighting for, an end to slavery had expressed their white supremacist
beliefs.
Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against
Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that among white people and Black ones “there must
be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am
in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”
Some will concede the historical point and insist on the
progress point, arguing that was then and this is now, that racism simply
doesn’t exist now as it did then. I would agree. American racism has evolved
and became less blunt, but it has not become less effective. The knife has
simply been sharpened. Now systems do the work that once required the overt
actions of masses of individual racists.
So, what does it mean for a system to be racist? Does the
appellation depend on the system in question being openly, explicitly racist
from top to bottom, or simply that there is some degree of measurable bias
embedded in those systems? I assert the latter.
America is not the same country it was, but neither is it
the country it purports to be. On some level this is a tension between American
idealism and American realism, between an aspiration and a current condition.
And the precise way we phrase the statement makes all the
difference: America’s systems — like its criminal justice, education, and
medical systems — have a pro-white/anti-black bias, and an extraordinary
portion of America denies or defends those biases.
As Mark Twain once put it: “The difference between the
almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the
difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
Being imprecise or undecided with our language on this
subject contributes to the murkiness — and to the myth that the question of
whether America is racist is difficult to answer and therefore the subject of
genuine debate among honest intellectuals.
Saying that America is racist is not a radical statement. If
that requires a longer explanation or definition, so be it. The fact, in the
end, is not altered.
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