Dear America: A Few Things This Black Woman Would Like You to Know About Race

bu Guest Contributor Tami, originally published at What Tami Said

It is normal to be prejudiced.

…and in a country like America that was born and raised on the notion of white supremacy (See manifest destiny, slavery, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese citizens…), it is normal to be prejudiced against black people. So ingrained is the idea that white culture is right, or at least the benchmark for all other cultures, that even most black Americans devalue blackness (See “the doll test” as one example. See black hack comedians and their “black people are always late, broke, triflin’…” schtick as another.) So white America, modern prejudice is not all your fault.

Now that I have said that, now that I have absolved you of personal guilt, can we have the conversation about race that everyone keeps referring to? I mean a REAL conversation, not the one that has played out over the last month on talk radio and cable news and political blogs and Web sites, where black people attempt to shed some light on the ways race affects our daily lives and white people get defensive and angry and insist that race is no longer an issue.

Witness the reaction to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent statements about race.

“Black Americans were a founding population,” Rice said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”

As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times,

“descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that.”

“That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today,” she said. SOURCE

What to me seemed like a reasoned statement that acknowledges the reality of our country’s past and present, made Lou Dobbs clutch his pearls in horror.

“There is no country on the face of the Earth as progressive, as racially and ethnically diverse as our own,” Dobbs wailed. “It’s something we should be proud of.” SOURCE

Why is the very mention of our country’s racist past and its lingering prejudices anathema to some? Why does discussing racism so often result in defensive bravado? It’s as if pointing out racial challenges negates the progress the country has made and condemns every member of the mainstream as an irredeemable racist. That is not the case.

If you are willing to listen, here are some other things that this black woman would like the mainstream to know about racism and the relationship between black and white Americans:

Racism and prejudice aren’t about white sheets and Jim Crow anymore. Black Americans know that. Only an idiot would claim that our nation has not made tremendous gains in racial equality.It is just that we know that racism and prejudice still exist, because we live with it every day. Unlike the naked racism faced by our grandparents and ancestors, the bias most of us face today is covert or institutionalized.

For those who listened to the Women’s History Month panel discussion, you may remember Shecodes, a black woman, sharing a story about a job interview with a Wall Street firm. The company was eager to recruit Shecodes after reviewing her resume and talking to her on the phone, but when she arrived for her interview, things changed. Shecodes waited nearly an hour before asking if the interview was going to happen. What followed was a discussion with a brusque interviewer who would not make eye contact and quickly dismissed her. Nearly every black professional I know can tell at least one story like this–a job interview where a potential employer is excited by stellar credentials and a race-neutral name and voice, but immediately turned off at the sight of a black candidate.

Now Shecodes eventually got a job on Wall Street and indeed ended up having the very office once occupied by her rude interviewer. Did she triumph? Yes! Is this occurrence as bad as being held in bondage or legally denied the vote? Maybe not. But it is still racism.

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