Privileged bubbles and trying to pop them

Recent events in the news:

A Black man jogging through a White neighborhood in Georgia was murdered in a modern day lynching; this happened months ago and the killers would have gotten off scot-free, with help from local authorities, if not for a video being made public.

A Black woman EMT in Louisville was shot and killed in her own home by police officers executing a no-knock warrant at the wrong address.

A White woman called the police and threatened the life of a Black man by falsely claiming that he was threatening her after he asked her to obey the rules and leash her dog in Central Park.

A police officer in Minneapolis murdered a Black man by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes while the victim offered no resistance.

All this in the midst of a global pandemic that here in the United States is both taking advantage of and putting a spotlight on existing systemic inequities as it disproportionately kills people of color.

And now, police are violently cracking down on protesters against racist police violence, just weeks after police exhibited remarkably peaceful restraint when faced with heavily armed White protesters who stormed state government buildings because they were angry they couldn't get haircuts.

Noticing a theme?

My Facebook feed is full of people expressing well justified outrage at these events. I'm not criticizing people for posting hashtags. I'm glad that so many people want to do something to make a difference. But what can we (and by "we" I specifically mean White people) do to actually make a lasting difference? Plenty of awareness has been raised about these issues by now. I'd guess that most everyone who is going to care about the issues already cares about them. People who still don't care, even now, aren't going to start caring because they saw another hashtag.

I'm absolutely not faulting people for posting statuses on Facebook to raise awareness, but that's the easy part. We also have to do things that aren't easy.

In this day and age, with a virulent racist occupying our nation's highest office and with white supremacists emboldened by this fact, it is not enough to be "not racist." (It has never been enough to be just "not racist," but I think that's become far more obvious over the course of the last decade and especially last few years than it was for most of my own lifetime.) We have to be actively anti-racist if we want to do something about the underlying racism that affects everything in our society. What are some things we can do to be actively anti-racist?

I've thought about this a lot in recent years, ever since Ferguson, really. I won't claim to be an expert. But I'd like to share some of my thoughts relating to my own life experiences.

"Who would really have it any other way?"

It's so easy for White people to live in a bubble. I know this very well from my own life. And White people, generally speaking, have no idea what it's like to actually experience racism. But we know that racism is bad, because we've been told that all our lives. And we've been told that racists are bad people. And we don't think that we ourselves, or our close friends and loved ones, are bad people. Therefore we must not be racist and we must not be contributing to the racism that is everywhere in our society.

Being told that something we did or said was racist, or contributed to racism, does not feel good. I know this. It hurts our feelings. But that doesn't mean it's not true. (Nor does it necessarily mean you're a bad person.) We have to stop being so sensitive to our own hurt feelings. We have to stop being such snowflakes. If the worst racism-related thing you can imagine happening to you is being called a racist... imagine what it's like to actually be a victim of racism.

The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, for me, unavoidably recalls memories of events that demonstrated to me just how hard it is for White people to recognize and confront racist sentiments expressed by people close to them. Floyd was quoted as saying "I can't breathe" while that police officer choked the life out of him with a knee to the neck.

The phrase "I can't breathe" entered the national consciousness after a similar incident almost six years ago when Eric Garner, another unarmed Black man, uttered the same words while the life was choked out of him by an NYPD cop.

A relative of mine wrote an infamous newspaper column about Eric Garner's death. The column began [content warning: extremely inflammatory sentiments about victims of racist police violence]:

Eric Garner and Michael Brown [the victim of the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri] had much in common, not the least of which was this: On the last day of their lives, they made bad decisions. Epically bad decisions. 

Each broke the law — petty offenses, to be sure, but sufficient to attract the attention of the police. 

And then — tragically, stupidly, fatally, inexplicably — each fought the law. 

The law won, of course, as it almost always does.

On a family email list, an email thread about this column - or more specifically, online reactions to this column - came up. Family members were offended at the insults online commenters were slinging at my relative who wrote those words. Some family members did, yes, express disagreement with the column's sentiments. But no one said anything remotely to the effect of, "hey, that's pretty... racist?"

Another passage in the infamous column was this:

Second, and this speaks to the ubiquitous allegation that cops are treated “differently” than ordinary citizens in deadly-force cases: Indeed they are — and it is the law itself that confers the privilege. 

The law gives cops the benefit of every reasonable doubt in the good-faith performance of their duties — and who would really have it any other way?

I'd say that the overall sentiments in this column are pretty racist, and it would require a pretty narrow definition of what qualifies as "racism" to deny that - but this is something of a semantics issue. It's literally impossible to have lived in society and not have racial biases that affect our thinking, because we're constantly bombarded with messages that implant these biases in our brains. Whether these biases rise to the level of being "racist"? Does it matter that much?

Whether or not it's "racist," that statement - the law itself... confers the privilege... The law gives cops the benefit of every reasonable doubt... and who would really have it any other way? - in light of the things that keep happening to Black people at the hands of law enforcement - over, and over, and over - is probably one of the most blatant examples of being blinded by one's one privilege that I've ever seen. Like, maybe you can't imagine why anyone would really have it any other way... but maybe the people who have to constantly live in fear of what cops might do to them or to their loved ones, maybe they would have it another way?

(Because people's feelings get hurt so much by any hint that they're guilty of racism, other terms have been invented to try to illustrate the same concepts in different ways. Such as "white privilege." "White privilege" is basically just another way of saying that society is racist against non-White people. And it doesn't mean that White people's lives are easy, just that when White people's lives aren't easy, the color of their skin isn't one of the reasons for that. But again, as with "racism," people get their feelings hurt by the term "white privilege." Stop being such fragile snowflakes.)

Although this newspaper column is nearly six years old now, it came up not too long ago on the same family email list, in an unrelated topic, but before all the current craziness (that is, COVID and mass protests) in this country started. And in that recent thread, family members from different parts of the political spectrum all seemed to scoff at the idea that the relative who wrote that column was racist or was even "racially biased."

Because of course. Racists are bad people. My relative, a person I care about, is not a bad person. Ergo, my relative is not racist.

It doesn't really work that way.

I reiterate, it is impossible to live in society and not be racially biased. It is a question of whether we actively work to recognize and confront those biases.

Not unrelated to this line of discussion, the relative in question, in other emails, has also favorably cited the writings of Charles Murray, author of noted work of pseudo-scientific racism The Bell Curve. Specifically, an article was shared that in essence claimed that if different racial groups had equal opportunities in society, that wouldn't necessarily result in the different racial groups having the same outcomes - "the same mean income, the same mean educational attainment, the same proportions who become janitors and who become CEOs."

This is pretty much by definition a racist claim by Murray.

Think about how many times in the average Black person's life they must encounter an Amy Cooper (the Central Park dog leash lady) or a Derek Chauvin (the Minneapolis cop who murdered George Floyd), and that Amy Cooper or that Derek Chauvin has some ability to influence the course of events in that Black person's life - grades they get, job hirings, promotions, criminal charges, etc.

In the real world we inhabit, it is impossible to test Murray's hypothesis that, given equal opportunities, different races would not attain equivalent outcomes, because we are so incredibly far away from equal opportunities.

This all happened a long time ago. But for whatever reason, these incidents just have a way of sticking in my mind forever. Incidents where someone put forth racist ideas and no one in the family stood up and called it what it was. I myself would sometimes try to push back, but I wouldn't go so far as to say, "hey, that's racist."

And perhaps that wouldn't have accomplished anything anyway, because, again, of the whole White people being fragile snowflakes about accusations of racism thing.

But how often do conversations like this happen in White families all over the country, and no one tries to advance the anti-racist narrative, and impressionable people - impressionable children, especially - are watching and listening and having their world views shaped by such statements going unchallenged?

So one not easy thing we have to do is, when someone we know says something racially problematic, we have to be able to point that out, ideally in a way that will encourage others to listen and not just shut down (that part of it is even less easy). Another not easy thing we have to do is, when someone does point out that we have done or said something racially problematic or that we bear some responsibility for the racism that permeates society, we have to get over our hurt feelings and make a good faith effort to listen and learn. White people's feelings are not the important thing right now.

Let me be very clear, this is not just a problem among conservative White people. This is a problem among numerous liberal White people as well. For another example from the dreaded family email list, a fairly liberal family member shared a statement by a fringe group of conservative African-American pastors decrying the Supreme Court's 2013 decision that the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional. The statement was, "We are devastated that the Supreme Court succumbed to political pressure by voting to weaken the sacred institution. They neglected our most precious children who need a mother and a father united in marriage for healthy development."

This liberal family member strongly disagreed with the Black pastors and expressed that they did not even know how to respond without being labeled racist. Basically, they felt that it was hypocritical for a Black person to say this because of the high rate of Black children being raised by single parents.

Obviously I do not agree with the Black pastors' stance on gay marriage. But saying that they're hypocrites because they're Black? Yes, yes that would, in fact, be racist.

And again no one else in the family seemed to have a problem with this.

Again, a long time ago. Again, something that stuck in my mind. That's just the way my brain works.

The point is not to demonize specific people in my extended family, it's to illustrate how pervasive these attitudes are, and how casually accepted they are, even among people who harbor no conscious animosity toward other races and who would absolutely never think of themselves as racist.

I don't want to just call out other people here. I'm not going to pretend I'm immune to this stuff.

Bubbles

I grew up in a total white privilege bubble. In school I learned about the Civil Rights movement and the message that came across was that, although there might still be racist individuals out there, and those individuals were bad for being racist, racism as a structural, societal issue had largely been solved in the 1960s.

I was in such a bubble that I actually believed this to be true until at least several years into my adult life.

(The most ironic part was probably learning about school integration in a classroom that was at least 95% White and no one ever pointing out that disconnect.)

I remember when I was in college, thinking that if affirmative action was used for school admissions, it should be focused only on economic status, not on race, because I thought disadvantages Black students faced in modern society were due to Blacks tending to be poorer as a result of racism in the past, but not because of racism that still existed in the present. And that low income White students were just as disadvantaged as low income Black students.

This seems completely crazy to me now. But when I was in college, I actually believed this.

(And just in case it's not clear - I am not saying that low income Whites face no disadvantages. Just that Blacks, of any income level, face many other obstacles that Whites don't face.)

I also remember making enormous use of "ironic racism" for the purpose of Internet humor when I was in my mid 20s. I thought I was just being absurd because I thought that people generally didn't believe those things anymore, for real, in modern society.

Talk about being in a bubble!

Truth is, I can only think of two Black people who I knew in person over the entire first eighteen years of my life. Both were people I went to school with and got along with but neither was a close friend. I had literally not the slightest comprehension of what it was like to be a Black person in America, because no one ever tried to tell me.

This is a map showing the block-by-block racial demographics of where I lived when I was growing up (from justicemap.org which uses Census data):

Purple indicates Whites are the most common race. The darkest shade of purple indicates greater than 90% White. I lived in one of the purplest of purple regions on this map.

Where I live now looks very different.

On this map, purple again indicates Whites are most common, red indicates Blacks are most common, and the deeper purple or red indicates a larger percentage of that particular race. I live right at a transition point between plurality White and plurality Black. I didn't choose where I live based on the racial demographics, I just happened to find a place I liked in this location.

So here's the thing. When I was younger, if I had been passing through this neighborhood and seen the people who lived here, there would have been a little voice in my head saying, in essence, "A lot of Black people live here so it's probably not a very good neighborhood."

No one in my life ever tried to instill racist values in me. Not remotely. But when you grow up around all White people, and don't really know any Black people, and most of the Black people you see in the media are either pro athletes (who are obviously very rare to encounter in everyday life) or people accused of crimes, that's just what happens to your brain.

(It's also worth pointing out the inherent privilege in these "good neighborhood" assessments. Most White people would see a neighborhood like the one in which Ahmaud Arbery was murdered for jogging while Black as a good neighborhood.)

So as I said before, it's not a question of whether or not someone is racially biased, because it's impossible to live in society and not be racially biased. It's a question of whether you recognize that those biases exist in your brain and then make an effort to actively confront those biases.

I'm not looking for a pat on the back, like "oh what a great guy you are for overcoming your biases." I mean honestly the biases are still there and it's a constant process of confronting them, and it's not easy to do, but it's also not nearly as hard as it must be to be a person who is constantly on the receiving end of those biases. So I think the least I can do as a decent human being is try to recognize and confront those biases and I hope other people can do the same.

School integration (or lack thereof)

If we zoom out from those maps I showed to the metro area level, we see two areas that are both quite segregated, Cleveland (second map below) even more than Columbus.

This is pretty typical of American cities. Why? There's a long, racist, history there that I won't get into (but look into redlining if you aren't familiar with the term).

Oh, one of the upshots of this clustering of Black Americans into inner city areas is that they are exposed to higher levels of pollution (thanks, urban freeways!), which has all sorts of negative health effects on both the brain and body. One of these is higher rates of asthma. Eric Garner's daughter Erica, who became an outspoken activist after her father was killed by the NYPD, tragically died at the age of 27 after an asthma-induced heart attack. Erica Garner was a victim of our racist society just as much as her father. It's also very likely the case that her health conditions were exacerbated by the stress of living in a world full of people making derogatory and deliberately inflammatory statements about her and her deceased father.

That said, I mainly bring up this segregation because it goes to one of the other important but not easy things that my life experiences have convinced me White people need to do.

Everyone wants what's best for their children. A big part of that, society tells all of us, is making sure our children go to a really good school. I have no doubt that most people, when thinking about where they are going to raise their children (a very big decision, to be sure), look up the ratings of the schools that their children would potentially attend.

Ohio school district report cards show that the Grandview Heights school district, where I grew up, gets an A grade. The Cleveland Heights-University Heights school district, where I currently live, gets a D grade.

"I would be a bad parent if I sent my kids to a D-rated school!" a lot of people undoubtedly think.

What those people may or may not know is that these school ratings are largely proxies for the socioeconomic statuses of the students who attend the schools, and do not really tell us anything independent of that about the quality of the schools.

The school funding system in the state of Ohio, where school districts are funded by local property taxes so that wealthier districts have better funded schools, has been declared unconstitutional multiple times going back to 1997, and yet still nothing has been done to fix this problem.

Furthermore, because Black people face numerous structural obstacles at every step of life as a result of living in a deeply racist society, Black students, on average, are more likely to struggle in school. Therefore a majority Black district will tend to get lower ratings regardless of how good the teachers in those schools are.

At Grandview Heights High School, by the most recent report, the student population is 91% White (non-Hispanic). At Cleveland Heights High School, it's 76% Black, 15% White.

This is interesting when compared to the overall demographics of the cities. Grandview Heights is 93% non-Hispanic White. Cleveland Heights is 46% White, 42% Black. The former's school demographics match the city demographics. The latter's are drastically different.

This is because in Cleveland Heights a much larger percentage of students, especially White students, attend private schools.

So the pattern is: White parents who live in a racially diverse area tend to either (a) move to a not diverse suburb (like the one where I grew up) or (b) send their kids to private school (like the schools a lot of White kids in my current city of residence attend), either way so they can ensure their kids go to a high-rated school.

(Cleveland Heights, by the way, is one of the most liberal cities in the entire country. Out-and-out, virulent racists are extremely rare here. So this is definitely an example of what I mean when I say these problems that contribute to a structurally racist society are present among White people of all political stripes.)

"Separate but equal" was ruled unconstitutional in 1954. The Supreme Court correctly ruled that there could not be equality under segregation. Yet today, school segregation in much of this country is almost as bad as ever.

This is definitely one of those things that's not easy, because society bombards parents with messages that they have to make sure their kids have the best possible path to success and they have to make sure their kids go to the best schools and they would be irresponsible parents if they didn't. And one part of solving this is that we have to demand equitable school funding. But I also contend that any time a well-to-do White family living in a racially diverse metropolitan area makes a decision to send their children to largely segregated schools - public or private - that decision contributes, in its own tiny way, to the vast racial divide that is tearing our country apart.

Now this does not mean that White parents who make these decisions are racists or bad people. Okay, some are, but most aren't. They're just doing what society tells them they have to do to be good parents. But as this ongoing pandemic is also illustrating, we have to think beyond our own selfish interests and think more about society at large. Everyone doing what they think is in their own best interests creates a disaster for society.

I expect this is uncomfortable for some people to think about because I know that lots and lots of the people I know come from families who made the decision, or are people who made the decision themselves, to enroll children in largely segregated schools because that's what society told them was what they had to do for their children. But we have to confront this issue. This is part of what I mean by doing things that aren't easy.

And I don't mean that all well-to-do White parents have an absolute moral obligation to send their kids somewhere like Cleveland Heights for school. There are a lot of factors that go into a decision like that. I'm just saying promoting diversity and equity in society should be one of those factors. I'm saying that what we do have an obligation to do, at the very least, is to reject the notion that being a good parent means making sure your kid goes to a "highly rated" school, when we know that those school ratings reflect the socioeconomic statuses of the student bodies and little else.

If I had gone to a school like Cleveland Heights instead of Grandview Heights, would I have any less success in life? I really doubt it. I think my ability to be successful comes a lot more from the resources and nourishing home environment my parents provided me than it comes from what school I attended. (Underprivileged children, of any racial background, would undoubtedly have much more to gain from attending exceptionally well funded schools that someone like me.) I also know that friends of mine who attended Cleveland Heights, both White and Black, seem to have gotten good educations and turned out just fine.

And if I had attended such a school, it would have helped me to not be in such a ridiculous white privilege bubble for the first two-plus decades of my life.

I think everyone benefits from getting to know people from diverse backgrounds, as well as from having adequately funded schools. Right now, poor kids who would have the most to gain from really well funded schools are mostly trapped in underfunded schools with other poor kids, and therefore have neither adequate school funding nor diversity. Rich kids who have far more resources at home and could get by more easily with slightly less well funded schools but would really benefit from more exposure to diversity are often in really well funded but also not diverse schools. Some places like Cleveland Heights do genuinely have a lot of socioeconomic diversity, but I suspect the increasing reliance on school ratings by parents who have the most ability to choose where to send their kids to school is making it harder to maintain that socioeconomic diversity in their student bodies.

I want to again emphasize the point that it's not enough, it's never enough, to be not racist, we have to be anti-racist. Let's imagine that, somehow, tomorrow, suddenly everyone in the whole world stopped having any racist motivations whatsoever, but everything else was the same. Black students would still tend to be in less well funded schools, as a result of our country's racist past. Financially comfortable White parents, taking a totally "race neutral" approach but still following the paradigm that they have to send their kids to the top rated schools, would continue to move to mostly White suburbs and/or send their children to private schools. Black parents, having on average less financial resources because, again, of the effects of past racism, would generally find it much harder to make those same decisions about where to enroll their own children. Despite no one being racist anymore, racial segregation and inequity would continue for generations if not into perpetuity!

That's one of the reasons why we can't, can't ever, settle for just being not racist. We have to do more.

Going forward

With the chaos engulfing our country now as cops nationwide choose to violently crack down on protesters rather than accept the possibility of being held accountable for their actions, and the president encourages that police violence, and an increasingly authoritarian and white nationalist Republican Party seems hellbent on dismantling our democracy, I fear everything I discuss in this post is insignificant next to the urgency of this moment. Things seem to have gotten so much worse even in the time since I began composing these words.

The most important thing for the remainder of this year is ensuring Trump and the complicit Republicans in Congress are removed from power. If that doesn't happen, there's a very real possibility all will be lost.

After that, I hope and pray we will all have the opportunity to come together and rebuild our country into a truly more perfect union. The suggestions I'm making are not quick fixes for anything. They're things we'll have to make a consistent effort on for probably the rest of our lives.

I'm not an expert on these issues. I'm just someone who has thought about them a lot and who is hopefully less naive than he was as a young man who had lived his whole life in a bubble, and who likes sharing his thoughts with the world. I've only touched on aspects of the race issue that I can directly relate to my own life experiences. There are other, exceedingly important, elements, that I haven't explored. Police reform seems like the most pressing issue at this moment and I haven't really touched on it, but this is already a long post. And although the problems with police forces are the most blatant right now, if we want lasting change we need to address so much more than that.

The message that I want all White people to hear and process is this - "racism," "racial bias," call it whatever you want, but it's something we all have in our brains, something that affects how we all view the world, whether or not we want to admit it. We've all been told that racism is bad, so it can be uncomfortable to admit these things about ourselves. But we can't prioritize our own comfort over other people's lives. We have to directly confront these biases both in ourselves and in the people around us.

When someone we consider a friend or loved one says something that illustrates racial bias, we can't just let it slide for the sake of avoiding conflict. I get it. I'm generally a conflict-averse person. One thing I've had to work on in therapy is recognizing that avoiding talking about uncomfortable issues to avoid conflict tends to lead to bigger problems in the long run. This is true for societal issues just as much as for personal issues. Maybe the Trumpists' ongoing looting of our country and everything we took for granted is the price we White people are paying for our failure to directly address these issues for so long.

Of course, vulnerable communities and people of color are paying much worse prices for our failures.

When I was a kid, not only did I not really know any Black people, but the people around me didn't really talk about race in any meaningful sense. It seems like people thought, "Well, MLK said we shouldn't judge people by the color of their skin, so if we just tell everyone to not judge people by the color of their skin, it will all work out. No need for any more in depth or uncomfortable conversations about the many ways MLK's dream isn't being realized in society."

It's obvious now that approach didn't work.

I will strongly credit my parents for raising me with good values, even if those values weren't race-conscious. I learned to recognize the fact that my family was very fortunate, that there were a lot of people in the world who didn't have nearly the same good fortune, and that people who are very fortunate have a responsibility to help people who are less fortunate. I didn't learn that rampant racism in society is one of the reasons some people are much less fortunate, but once I became educated as an adult on these issues, my passion about them naturally grew from the values I'd been instilled with as a child.

We have to recognize now that part of instilling our children with a complete set of good values is teaching them about racial justice. And how to be anti-racist instead of just not racist.

We have to reject widely held beliefs that help perpetuate structural racism even in the absence of active racist intent, such as the commonly held beliefs about schooling that have resulted in segregation getting worse, not better, in certain parts of this country over the last few decades.

And we have to do so many other things. This is nowhere close to being a comprehensive list. My heart hurts at what is happening in this country. Writing this is my little attempt at making a difference. I hope it can make a small difference. I vow to do more in the months and years ahead to try to continue to make those small differences. If we all do something every day to make just a little tiny difference, that can add up to enormous change.

But only if we don't settle for doing the easy things.

Any of us who has been settling for doing just the easy things, we have to recognize that time is over.

We have to do the hard things too if we're going to save our country.