Recently I blogged that I was a racist. At least I had been guilty of racism and was not proud of it. Some friends tried to let me off the hook. They said it was not really racism. I was being too hard on myself. I think they were wrong. I wish they were right. No one wants to be a racist—even me.

However, if we are racist we have to face up to it. Unless and until we fess up we cannot change. The great theologian Martin Buber said, “We can only be redeemed to the extent to which we can see ourselves.” We have to acknowledge our own racism even when that is uncomfortable. As Dan Lett said in a recent opinion piece in the Winnipeg Free Press, “…to get to a better place we’re going to need to own our racism.”

A recent Abaca poll in Canada indicated that most Canadians are actually aware of their own racism. 23% of Canadians surprisingly admitted that they had “a lot” or “some” racist views. Even though it was confidential survey I found that surprising. More than 67% believed racial discrimination was real. 61% acknowledged that racism was built into our institutions. That last one really bothered me. If 61% of Canadians believe the system is racist why are more people not speaking up about it? Where are the complaints? Why do people acquiesce? Why are so many people silent about it? Is it because they are complicit in that system? They benefit from the racism so keep quiet about it? That seems pretty nasty doesn’t it?

Yet as Lett pointed out, “it is highly unlikely only one in four Canadians have racist views. Instead the poll might confirm just how reluctant we are to admit our own racism.” Actually I think it is almost impossible to actually admit that one is a racist. In our society that is to admit that we are really bad except for explicit supremacists who explicitly think their race is superior.

Earlier I blogged about prejudice and discrimination. Lett made the following interesting point:

Racism is defined in most sources as ‘prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.’ That is a broad definition that would catch most of us for something we said or thought.

However to avoid being labelled, many white people set the bar to qualify as a genuine racist much, much higher.

They would argue a true “racist” is a hateful person of almost comic book proportions who is actively seeking the oppression or eradication of an ethnic group. Think of the former apartheid government of South Africa: think the Ku Lux Klan and neo-Nazis. However, limiting the definition of racism to such extreme examples prevents us from seeing the more subtle ways we reinforce it in day-to-day life.

 

Such racists are easy targets. All of us are tempted to raise the bar high to get ourselves off the hook. None of us want to be thought of as racists. Yet, when one looks at Canadian or American society we have to admit there must be a lot of racists out there. And maybe I am one of them. That is a very uncomfortable thought.

Some racism is worse than others. At least, I think that is true. We shudder at the racism of a white cop holding a hand-cuffed black man on the ground by placing his knee on the man’s neck. Or as happened in Winnipeg a few years ago an indigenous man left in an emergency waiting room for more than 24 hours before he died without being attended to. The staff just thought he is was sleeping it off.  If the cop does that because the man is black that is racism. Or the hospital staff neglects the man in the waiting room because he is indigenous that is also racism. In both cases, it is bad. The wickedness is easy to see. Because it is easy to see it is easier to address. Subtle racism is harder to see and therefore its effects can be more pernicious. That is why I think it is much more dangerous.

When a group in a position of power holds prejudicial views of another race and those views are supported by the power of legal authority and institutional control that racism can easily be transformed into a system of racism that might be difficult to discern, exactly because it is so common and so pervasive. The reason it is so powerful is that such racism does not require an intentional act on the part of the racist. It just happens. In such a system racial prejudice functions implicitly without anyone consciously deciding to act on the basis of the prejudice. People function independently of their intentions or their own self-image. They don’t realize they are acting out racism. When that stage is reached it is incredibly dangerous.

That is why J. Kēhaulani Kauanui said, “Racism is a structure not an event.” Institutional power by people of influence can transform prejudice and discrimination into what Robin DiAngelo calls “structures of oppression.” Such structures are so important because they can inflict harm without anyone doing it intentionally. And then, as if that is not enough, such structures are often invisible for exactly the same reason–one does not see anyone intentionally doing a bad thing. This is what I called invisible racism. It all seems so normal, so natural. What could be wrong with that? The answer, of course, is that everything is wrong with that. As DiAngelo said, “Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals.” That is because institutions have so much capacity to inflict serious harm. Power converts minor havoc into irreparable harm.

An example might help explain this. A good friend of mine constantly and rightly that reminds me that women are guilty of discrimination too. Not just men. This is obviously true. But it is also a fact, that very few women have the ability to inflict as much harm as the institutional system that is controlled by men. Women cannot match that power. That usually makes discrimination by the system more effective and hence more heinous than the discrimination by women. Men have been able to deny women their human rights for a long time because men controlled the institutions.

That is why systemic racism is so powerful and leads to so much harm. That is why invisible racism is often so much worse than obvious racism. That is why what happened in Minneapolis, bad as it was, is actually not as bad as systemic racism.

Discrimination is not the same as prejudice. For example, Racial prejudice is not prohibited by our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Discrimination in some cases is prohibited. There is a good reason for that. Robin DiAngelo makes the distinction clear in her thought-provoking book White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for White People to talk about Racism. “ Discrimination is action based on prejudice,” she says.

That’s why discrimination is not tolerated and prejudice is. It is an acknowledgement that we all unavoidably have prejudices, but we ought not to base our actions on prejudices. We have a duty to avoid such actions, even if we can’t stop such attitudes.

Examples of actions based on prejudices that amount to discrimination include the following: excluding, threatening, ignoring, ridiculing, slandering, maligning, and causing violence.

Sometimes the acts are clear-cut and obvious. When a police officer restrains a black man without any evidence that the man has committed a crime, based on a feeling that he might be guilty and wrestles him to the ground and places a knee on his neck just because he is black that is clearly bad. The officer will have discriminated against the black person if he would not have treated a white person in the same situation the same way. We will all have no trouble agreeing to that. Such a form of discrimination is easy to recognize. We are not entitled to feel great satisfaction in noticing that this is wrong.

The much more interesting discrimination is the subtle kinds. Many of us feel slight discomfort in the presence of people from certain groups. This is particularly true if we are in the minority. I suggest such a feeling is fairly natural even if it is not deserved and is based on prejudice. That is not discrimination. But if one acts on the basis of this irrational feeling, that is discrimination.

We ought to be aware that prejudice often manifests itself in action. The way each of us sees the world and people in it drives how we react to those people in the world. Here we must be careful. As DiAngelo says, “Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates.” I suspect that is true. But we have to be careful to avoid this. Discrimination is always bad because it is always irrational. It is always based on a decision made before the evidence is given, or even contrary to the evidence. And if it is racial discrimination, it might be illegal as well as it might be contrary to the provincial Human Rights Code or Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But more importantly it is wrong. We ought not to racially discriminate.

Racism is the big subject in the wake of the recent incident in Minneapolis where a police officer kneeled on the neck of a black man lying on t he ground with his hands handcuffed behind his back for nearly 9 minutes during which time he died. Understandably, people around the world have been enraged.

I think it is helpful to start our discussion of issues surrounding racism by considering what some of the basic concepts mean. To begin with, what is prejudice? To answer that we should first consider prejudice and racism. They are related concepts but they are not identical. They are siblings.

A prejudice is a pre-judgment about another person based on factors other than evidence or facts. It is a judgment that we make when we have a thought, or feeling, or belief about another person based on the group to which that person belongs, rather than the behaviour of that person. For example, the belief that black people or indigenous people are dangerous. Prejudice includes thoughts or feelings such as accepting stereotypes or profiles of groups that are based on generalizations about the group rather than basing such feelings on evidence presented. That is why a prejudice is always irrational. By definition it is not based on evidence and reasoning.

As Nathan Rutstein said, “Prejudice is an emotional committment to ignorance.”

As soon as one thinks about it one realizes that such prejudgments are not rational. They can’t be. Rational judgments are those that are based on evidence and are not made before seeing the evidence! It is very common for prejudices to be shared within a group. As Robin DiAngelo said in her book White Fragility, “Our prejudices tend to be shared because we swim in the same cultural water and absorb the same messages.”

Yet it is impossible not to have prejudices. As DiAngelo said,

“All humans have prejudices; we cannot avoid it. If I am aware a social group exists, I will have gained information about that group from society around me. This information helps me to make sense of the group from my cultural framework. People who claim not to have prejudices are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. Ironically, they are also demonstrating the power of socialization–we have all been taught in schools, through movies, and from family members, teachers, and clergy that it is important not to be prejudiced. Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality.”

No one wants to be considered bad. So we can’t be bad. That does not mean we should succumb to prejudice. On the contrary, we must fight it relentlessly because prejudice is so irrational and so pervasive, and so powerful. We must recognize that to the extent we make any decision or harbour any belief that is based on prejudice we are acting irrationally and could be poisoning someone else to follow our prejudice or harming someone who is the object of the prejudice. That is why we should constantly be on the lookout for prejudices and constantly try to minimize them and to deny their ability to affect us. As philosophers say, we should always try, to be an ideal observer—that is one who is thinking rationally and impartially about what is observed even when that is hard. We will never achieve the ideal of course, but we should always be trying to move in that direction of the ideal observer. If we do that we will improve our chances of finding the truth, but it is no guarantee that we will find it.

No one likes to be accused of being prejudiced. If we are we must admit we are to that extent irrational. This is particularly important when it comes to racial prejudice because this is considered such a serious character defect in modern society. If we admit we are racially prejudiced we are admitting that we are bad and ought to be ashamed of ourselves. That is never a comfortable thing to admit.

And that is why people will go to great lengths to convince us that they are not prejudiced. This is an important idea which I got from DiAngelo. I do not think she has all the answers, as I will get to, but this, I think is a fundamental concept that makes a lot of sense. Prejudice is a prejudgment that is ultimately irrational. And that is why we should try to avoid prejudices. But we are not hopeless just because we have a prejudice it just makes us human.

The world was shocked by the recent death in Minneapolis of George Floyd as a result of a police officer holding him down in a prone position even though he was handcuffed, on the ground with a knee on his neck. He was begging to be allowed to stand up and repeatedly eeked out the words, “I can’t breath.” 3 other officers stood by and did nothing to help Mr. Floyd. Disturbingly, the police officer seemed nonchalant with one of his hands was in his pocket. As if this was not big deal. This was in broad daylight with people standing around. People in the vicinity were taping the incident on their smart phones. Around the United States and around the world people erupted in protest after seeing the videos. This is in turn led to rioting in many cities, even Fargo North Dakota and Steinbach Manitoba.

All of this is a product of the unfortunate entrenchment of racial superiority in North America. Racism is a problem not just in the United States but Canada as well. Once entrenched racism is very difficult to eradicate. Frankly, it takes a dramatic killing or a race riot for people to even take notice. The incident in Minneapolis has attracted a lot of attention.

Yet, I would submit that there is more important racism than that created by dramatic events. The reason is that most racism is invisible. People don’t notice it. The reason racism is so hard to notice is that it is so common. Racism lives everywhere. But people don’t see it. And that is a big problem.

It is easy to look at the police officer that killed Floyd as a bad person. Racists are bad. But glaring racists, like that police officer are not the big problem. The bigger problem is invisible racism, or systemic racism, or implicit racism. It is much more difficult to fight an invisible enemy than an ugly one.

There is plenty of evidence that we live in a society that subjugates non-white races in favor of the white race and those who enjoy the benefits of that oppression don’t see the subjugation because that would be contrary to their own interests. People in power never see their own power as anything other than a blessing. Anything that would erode that power is seen by the powerful as irrational or even insane. That is why whites have to work hard just to see the privileges they enjoy. They don’t look like privileges; they look like earned benefits. But we must learn to see that privilege and not just blindly accept it.

We can see an unconcerned white cop with his hands in his pocket and his knee on the neck of a hand-cuffed and prone black man and we can see that this is wrong. That is plain to see. That is a bad cop! But we are blind to the system that is all around us that privileges us while it subjugates people of other races. We are blind to the system that privileges us and our children and our friends while it disadvantages black people and indigenous people and others.

Invisible racism is invisible because we, the privileged, are blinded by our own privilege. We don’t see it because it’s natural. It’s the water in which we swim. That is what makes it worse than kneeling on the neck of a helpless black man. That evil is clearly visible. And it is clearly nasty. We don’t see our own privilege because that would undermine a system that benefits us. We don’t want to see or think about it. We are good people. We would never put a knee on the neck of a helpless black man.

If we don’t object to the system that invisibly benefits us, we are complicit in that system. We are then part of the problem rather than the solution. That is why to some extent even the dramatic incident in Minneapolis actually helps to blind us to the real problem. If we quietly allow a racist system to continue without openly dissenting there is no chance that system will ever be interrupted by us. Does that make us racist?

Steinbach has a reputation for being extremely conservative when it comes to social issues. As a result I was very interested in how a Black Lives Matter rally and march would proceed. I went last night (June 8, 2020) The first people I saw were a group of very conservative Mennonites. They are probably from the most conservative group in the area. I wondered what their point of view would be. To my pleasant surprise they were obviously supportive of the cause and consented graciously to me photographing them. I thought they might object to photographs, but they did not. In fact later I noticed they had their own photographer. I guess they are not as conservative as I presumed. Presumptions are bad as I have been preaching. Me bad (again).

I also noticed a black family who were comfortably seated with their signs. They also eagerly agreed to let me photograph them. There were quite a few black people at the rally. I did not know we had that many black families in town. Once more, I was sadly ignorant. But at least I was here to learn. I wanted to learn and support.

A number of the speakers were young people. In fact almost all the speakers were young people. Some of them gave very emotional speeches that made it clear, as if it was not clear before, that racism lives in Steinbach.

I did not notice any of our political leaders. Our Mayor, our Member of Parliament, and our member of the Legislative Assembly were all not in attendance (as far as I could tell). If I  am wrong and one of them was in attendance I hope someone corrects me. All 3 were eagerly in attendance at a grand opening of a fast food chicken restaurant a week or so ago where they participated without benefit of social distancing. Somehow the opening of a fast food restaurant was more important than a rally in support of racial justice.

I did not participate in the march because the crowd which had been fairly well spread out during the speech was bunching up for the march. It did not look safe to me so I went home. After all, I am an old man who lives with an old woman. So I have to be careful I don’t bring home any diseases. It might be our last.

All in all I was pleased with the event and the fairly large crowd that attended. Perhaps Steinbach is not as conservatives as I thought. As Bob Dylan, sang, ‘The times they are a-changing.’ Even in Steinbach, black lives matter.

Recently I was in the hospital in my hometown, thinking I might have Covid-19. While I was waiting for test results in the emergency room I wanted to use the washroom, but I was told by the nurse I would have to use a commode. I really did not know what a commode was. I kept thinking of a bedpan. That did not seem too attractive to me. I whined. The nurse was firm. I decided to try to wait it out, hoping at the time I would be able to go home soon. So I told the nurse I would wait it out.

Jimmie overheard me. He was the guy who would have to clean the washroom each time it was used. No one’s favourite job. Jimmie did not know me; he just heard me schlemming and he graciously offered to let me use the washroom and clean it after I was done. He had no reason to do that. He was just being kind, to an overly fastidious old man. But he was really taking a serious risk. Washrooms used by Covid-19 patients are dangerous places. Oh by the way, did I mention that Jimmie was black?

Jimmie all I can say is, my bad. Later, as soon as I thought about what he had done for me, I felt guilty. As I should have felt guilty. I earned the guilt. The second day in the hospital I bucked up and used a commode and found it was not so bad at all. I had been a big baby. And yet Jimmie took a chance he need not have taken. Why did he do it?

We live in a system of systemic racism. Whites, like me, don’t think we are racists. We are good people aren’t we? After all there are not many insults worse than being called racists. We can’t admit that about ourselves. But we live in a system that routinely and automatically advantages whites while denying those same advantages to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, indigenous people, and other groups. Most of us whites never think about that. We don’t see the water in which we swim. We don’t want to see those advantages, but that does not make them any less real. There is ample evidence that whites enjoy those advantages while other racial groups are denied those advantages.

Frankly, when I think about Jimmie and how I unthinkingly exposed him to an entirely unnecessary risk I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. I revealed myself as a person who would take advantage of a system of systemic racism for a minor advantage to me, and an unnecessary risk to Jimmie. That’s racism. And frankly it happens all the time and that does not make it right. I hope that I learned from the experience.

I was a racist; and most of us whites are too.