^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Jack Kerwick, guest columnist for the new About.com: U.S. Conservative Politics site, is about half right. He's not crazy about the word "racism," and thinks that anyone interested in having a multiracial discussion about race issues should declare a moratorium on the word first. His article reflects the ambiguity that many whites feel about the word "racism," an ambiguity that some people of color share, and an ambiguity that rests partly in the fact that race itself is a nonsense idea and it's very hard to create a really useful vocabulary around a nonsense idea. Race is a vehicle for oppression, a pseudoscientific way of color-coding caste bias to benefit the glorified con artists who invented it, and the terminology we use to talk about race now will probably sound ridiculous in 500 years. Race itself is racist. The fact that race exists at all, in any significant way, is a pretty good indicator that we live in a racist culture--because any non-racist culture would have little use for such a vague, clumsy, and culturally loaded taxonomy of family and cultural heritage.

In lesbian and gay rights activism, there are two wonderful words to refer, separately, to anti-gay motivation, also known as homophobia, and anti-gay systems or behavior, also known as heterosexism. You can do heterosexist things without homophobic motives, like eHarmony does--matching only opposite-sex couples because those are the only kinds of relationships that their matchmaking formula has been written to address. You can also do anti-heterosexist things with homophobic motives, such as supporting a local lesbian and gay matchmaking service because you have an irrational fear that your neighbor is coming on to you and you want to throw him off your scent.

But racism and sexism, as terms, don't really work that way. You can do racist or sexist things with no intention of doing so, or you can have private racist or sexist motivations. This double-sided aspect of racism is one that many whites, including but certainly not limited to white conservatives, can't get their heads around. Racist behavior, in the eyes of some whites, is behavior that is motivated by intentional racism--say, a philosophical belief in white supremacy. It makes sense that whites would see racism this way, since if you're a white person trying not to do racist things, not having a racist ideology is a good first step.

People of color tend to experience, and therefore define, racism a little bit differently. Whites who specifically and deliberately and openly buy into a philosophy of white supremacy are a pain but they aren't usually the biggest problem, because they don't tend to have much power these days. But institutional racism has a lot of power, often putting white kids in better schools and more economically stable families and one day into better career tracks with a higher annual salary, leading towards a retirement and a higher life expectancy to match. That reality is much more oppressively racist than some lunatic on the street corner ranting about "children of Ham."

The great activist/philosopher Stokely Carmichael, later known as Kwame Ture, coined the term "institutional racism" to refer to the racism that forms the backbone of Western culture. From a vantage point focused on institutional racism, it might not matter as much if a celebrity makes a racially inflammatory remark--though it's important that we condemn it, so that such remarks and the sentiments they reflect don't become socially acceptable again--but it matters an awful lot when people are denied opportunities and denied a decent standard of living and denied a long and healthy life because they were born in a certain place with a certain skin color. That kind of racism kills, literally kills, on a scale today that dwarfs the most prolific years of Klan lynchings. We aren't looking back on an era of apartheid and race killings. We're living in an era of apartheid and race killings, and we can fight it through volunteer services or we can fight it through social policy but unless we all fight it in some way, future generations will ask the same sorts of questions about today's whites that we ask about the generations that supported slavery and segregation: "Why did they sit there and just let it happen?"

And when people of any description behave in a way that promotes this machinery of oppression and death, that's racist behavior. And since it's impossible not to occasionally do things that promote this machinery of oppression and death, the argument could legitimately be made that everybody's sometimes a racist, that nobody's clean, that we're all bozos on this bus.

That's why you're not likely to see me posting here about how a person of color in America did something racist when he or she said something unkind about white people as a group. That's not usually a very deadly form of racism. Saying that Malcolm X behaved in a racist manner when he used the phrase "blue-eyed devils" is like saying that somebody is fighting off multiple infections because they've got two pimples and a little gingivitis. It's technically true, but it isn't as serious as it sounds. But when folks make remarks that justify this system, by saying that white people have more value than other people, then that's something that has to be confronted directly because that's how we got into this mess to begin with, and the little progress that has been made over the past 50 years could disappear in 10 if people get too quiet.

Sometimes that means using the dreaded word "racism." Yes, it is "the deadliest of sins," as Jack writes--literally deadly. Racism kills, and a lot of people died trying to build a less racist culture. But a less deadly word would sound too sanitary, too gentle, too pedestrian. The word "racism" shocks the system. It's supposed to.

Instead of a moratorium on the word "racism," let's declare a moratorium on white people setting preconditions for discussions about race. Let's just roll up our sleeves and have these conversations and look seriously at the issue of race and not necessarily try to look witty and pretty and bright. If occasionally I get called a racist or occasionally you get called a racist (and in my experience, this doesn't happen all that often), so be it. You don't have to agree with the assessment, and the more false it is, the more your own behavior will disprove it in time.

In the Margins

Looking at the rest of Jack's article point by point, I have to take issue with a two things he wrote that were not part of his central argument.

First:

Considering the obscene levels of black on white crime,

Whites make up 73.9% of the population, so a race-neutral assumption would be that they would make up 73.9% of crime victims. This is not the case; more than 50% of crime victims in the United States are not white. Blacks, who make up only 12.2% of the U.S. population, make up nearly half of all crime victims in most categories--49% of homicide victims, for example.

So speaking of "obscene levels of black on white crime" really doesn't reflect the big demographic picture, which is that whites are by far the category of Americans least likely, per capita, to be victimized, and blacks among the most likely (surpassed only by American Indians).

as well as the fact that "polite society" permits blacks and other racial minorities to say things for which it is all too willing to expel whites even remotely suspected of harboring similar thoughts,

Which polite society is this? Surely not the polite society that just gave Don Imus a $20 million radio show contract after years and years of racially inflammatory on-air remarks, but can't seem to find enough adjectives with which to condemn the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

See also:

• Don't Be Don Imus
• All Apologies
• Black Civil Rights in America: An Illustrated History