One thing emerging from the heated start of the Trump presidency is that accusations of racism are emotional triggers: they trigger liberal pride and unity, and conversely intense conservative rage. A friend of mine, for instance, has been interviewing Trump supporters, and he consistently gets responses like this:
Q: “What do people think about your politics that just isn't true?”
A: “Where to start? That I am some sort of evil, terrible, racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobe. I am not any of those things.”
Arlie Hochschild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land – which should be required reading for all liberals – highlights the same theme: at one point she comes to the realization that Rush Limbaugh serves as “a firewall against liberal insults”. She quotes a Limbaugh fan:
“Liberals believe that Bible-believing Southerners are ignorant, backward, rednecks, losers. They think we're racist, sexist, homophobic, and maybe fat.” (p. 22)
If the world were really polarized into racists and non-racists, it might be a good thing to unite the latter against the former. But it’s not: racism, like other -isms, is a complex phenomenon, not an inborn personality disorder. People learn to overcome racism, a journey that is long and arduous. Most conservatives have moved a long way in in that journey in the last half-century. Moreover, most liberals still have a long way to go.
We shouldn’t be polarizing this; we should be working together on it.
Most conservatives in Hochschild’s account of the Louisiana heartland, and many others, have entirely accepted the idea that Blacks should be treated equally, that they are not inferior, that they can be good neighbors. They often interact freely across racial lines at work, and probably as much as Northerners in churches and neighborhoods. They would not resist a Black family moving into the area, or Black or Hispanic children attending class with their children. And we should recognize that these are enormous and hard-won advances. One Louisianian recalls how he used the “N-word” freely in his childhood, like everyone else – and then abruptly recognized the hurt it caused and stopped using it. It was well within my memory that Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama proclaiming “segregation forever”. We don’t see anything remotely like that now; those attitudes have changed profoundly. It’s an amazing human achievement.
And how about ourselves, liberals of the coasts? Our neighborhoods, in my hometown of Princeton and my old hometowns of Boston and New York, are profoundly segregated. Our elementary schools in practice often reflect that separation. High schools have formally integrated, but then largely tracked races and ethnicities into different classrooms. Blacks continue to lag in income, health, and almost every other measure of well-being. Profound mistrust continues between police forces and minority communities.
In other words, we haven’t solved the problem of inclusion. We should be a little more humble about it. We have a lot of work to do, in the North as in the South and everywhere. Inclusivity is a process, and a hard one, demanding deep change in identities and ways of life, often triggering fear and anger. As a matter of fact, my sense is that in parts of the South Whites interact with Blacks more comfortably and frequently, and with more genuine equality, than in the liberal bastion of Boston. But of course no section of the country has reached the desired end point.
But now accusations of racism have become the flashpoint for really dangerous polarization, which is rapidly hardening into a divide that will be hard to overcome. And it’s unnecessary. Very few people are deliberately racist; pretty much everyone is racist in some respects; but liberals have claimed the moral sword and are using it against conservatives. And by setting up this battle, we make things worse: we lose the opportunity to find allies on many issues, to undercut the Trump coalition, by using the R-word as a battle standard.
It’s time for a reframing. We all have work to do. And, by the way, racism is only part of that work. The broader issue of diversity – the changing roles and status of immigrants, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays – is very much a continuing and unresolved challenge. The economic inequality that has torn apart the lives of factory workers in Michigan and oil workers in Louisiana – that’s something we are all part of as well, and all need to work on. These are not problems where one side of the political spectrum has all the moral right and the other has all the wrong; these will be hard to solve, and that we all need to play a part in the building the solution. As long as we keep hurling insults – and I’m looking at my own liberal tribe here – we will make it impossible to actually make progress on any of them.
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