Race

Bizarre article over at Slate today. Below is my response to the article, also posted in the Fray:

"It's not bigotry per se that hamstrings us in the struggle to achieve a just society. It's our inability to talk about and think our way through our preconceptions. We have to learn how to forgive each other, and more importantly ourselves, when we're stupid."

Ms. Dickerson makes a trenchant observation of bigotry's pervaisiveness in the human experience. In today's world, we've stigmatized the very concept of "discrimination" - a word which, in its most neutral sense, describes nothing more than a capacity for observing differences. She finds, as a black woman living in a white society, that racialized discriminations inflect our interactions with everyone - white or black, alike to us or not.

Our modern age of identity politics has noted the pervasiveness of racial discriminations and the correlation between race and lived injustice. In response to this, we have set out to scour men's souls, and remove forever the stain of racism from our hearts, in the hope that this would break the link between injustice and race.

Ms. Dickerson is right to point out the futility of this great crusade. Much as we might like to, none of us can ever completely sever the link between our lived experiences and our daily preconceptions. We find our prejudices are layered like an onion, with finer and more nuanced discriminations always residing beneath our broadest and most superficial presumptions.

For much of my childhood, I shared a room with an older brother who was five years my senior and always twice my weight. He had a rough adolescence, and as the nearest and smallest punching bag at hand, I bore much of the brunt of his frustrations and anger. Though our relationship has been long since repaired, to this day white men of my brother's height and build make me nervous. Is that right or fair? Should I be any less concerned about my prejudice towards men twice my size than I am about my trained responses to blacks or hispanics? Can I ever hope to peel away every layer of prejudice and preconception, and reach the blissed out nirvana of perfectly unconditional egalitarianism?

Of course not.

But is Ms. Dickerson's remedy - that I redirect my impulse towards inner purity away from the penitent's remorse and towards the confessor's absolution - really the proper solution?

I would argue not. The "solution" to the problems of social justice does not lie in the private purity of our hearts, but in the public conduct of our persons.

Ms. Dickerson is hobbled by a crippling preconception that she shares with the very persons she is striving to refute - that prejudice and injustice are inextricably linked. This relationship is far from necessary, and in fact isn't as obvious as our intuition would suggest.

Can a racist behave justly? Could a racist society be just? Should we demand that a racist behave justly, whether or not he relinquishes his racism? Should we demand a just society, whether or not its members are racists?

So long as prejudice and injustice are considered separate entities, the answer seems yes to all these questions.

In high schools throughout this country, America's children are facing the misery of social stigma. Some will be tormented for their acne, others for obesity. Some will be harassed on account of their bookishness, others for their stupidity. Shy kids are being called "losers" and hyperactive kids are earning reputations as "tweakers." There are boys being hounded for effeminacy, and women being scorned for their butchiness. And yes, there are many who are facing social consequences for nothing more marked than their race.

All of these kids are facing discrimination, and learning to discriminate. We're never going to eradicate discrimination so long as it is an essential characteristic of man's sociability.

But justice isn't measured by the pounding of our pulse in the company of a man we are intuitively afraid of. It is measured by the dignity of our conduct. It is observed in our extension of the most essential civil courtesies to one another without regard to our private thoughts. Justice is extended through our efforts to identify and rectify patterns of systemic injustice, or to simply help one another without concession to our judgmental impulses.

Racism is regrettable, and worthy of rebuttal or censure. But if the object of our reformist zeal is injustice, we won't find it in the private nooks and crannies of our innermost conscience. It's out there, in the streets, where we interact with one another. America didn't defeat the evils of slavery and segregation by purifying the hearts of men. It did so by asserting, with growing force and conviction, that there are certain forms of conduct which, whatever our own private flaws may be, rise to a level of manifest injustice that we could no longer sanction and would no longer tolerate.

So, with all due respect to Ms. Dickerson, I must disagree with her conclusion that "in the struggle to achieve a just society... [w]e have to learn how to forgive each other, and more importantly ourselves, when we're stupid."

Rather, we must learn how to see injustice when it parades before our eyes, and we must find the courage and wisdom to confront it with passion and efficaciousness.