For 10 years I've taught a class on cross-cultural customer service, and I can say with impunity that this country has yet to have a real conversation about race, and the reasons are that every attempt usually begins with a witch-hunt and the re-ignition of intense emotion. Imagine trying to learn in a classroom where the teachers and other students pounce on you, screaming "Ignorant pig!" every time you falter or ask a real question.
Prejudice in any form is a human capacity: I've met racist lesbians and homophobic Latinos. A young man in a wheelchair with cerebral palsy remarked to me he didn't like blacks because they'd once stolen his bus money. A white graduate student (a rape survivor) told me she couldn't possibly live in a dorm that housed physically disabled students; their needs troubled her. Human beings do not conform to simple equations: just because one group or minority's been a target of cruelty doesn't render it free and clear of the same inner turbulence.
So...we can all relax, because the truth is that we're all racists.
We're all racists not because we're evil, but because we're human. Human experience takes pain and learns from it, often with fallacious, even irrational conclusions. From our earliest days as knuckle-dragging cave dwellers, we learned that a little xenophobic prejudgment would keep us alive — eg, another cave dweller with an auburn unibrow had hurt us before, therefore all others with auburn unibrows would likely do the same. At its most primitive level, racism is the "rough and ready rubric" every human carries around in his DNA, to assess the world at large. It's been said racism comes from ignorance: I say sustained racism also comes from pain. "The other" we fear and despise has hurt, robbed, or killed some part of us, so the expectation is that it will happen again.
That said, of course racism should not be tolerated because at this point in our history it's going to eat us all alive with endless conflict. Conflict halts economic growth, subverts real learning, inflates grudges lasting several generations.
As with any pain, you have to decide if you're going to tolerate it, change it, or heal it.
The racism I've observed boils down to 3 broad types, like points on a spectrum:
1. Clear, overt, easy to spot. These are the middle-of-the-litter modern-day knuckle-draggers who parade around in sheets and swastikas, burning crosses, and dreaming up self-aggrandizing titles like "Grand Wizard" or "Aryan Commandos for God" when they should be investing in job training or just job-hunting. Having "systematized" the commission of hate crimes, most of the actions from this population result in crimes against property and humanity.
2. Covert, baffled, everyday racism. Honest questions about difficult mysteries: "Am I wrong to lock my doors because I saw a young black man sprinting towards my car tonight?"... "If I complain about that Pakistani chemistry teacher whose English is unintelligible to my kid, will I come off as a racist pig?" ... "There are seven Middle Eastern men on this flight...are they really business men? Have they been checked out?" ... "How can any intelligent, educated woman of that nation submit to an arranged marriage? How can a loving father indulge in an honor killing?"
3. "Well-meaning" racism. This one is especially tricky, because it swathes itself in false positives. Picture Marge, the office den mother, who says things along the lines of, "That lovely Cambodian fellow Tuan told me he was going to put in for that promotion, and I hope he gets it! It's sorta hard to understand him, though, because he talks fast and his English isn't so good, but I think he'll be great at that job because Asians are so smart at math and engineering." The dubious "gift" of "well-meaning" racism is that it's the condescending pat on the head that infantilizes or dismisses "the other" and doesn't believe it's actually doing any real harm. In its metallic good-heartedness, it can also be impenetrable to new evidence. Positive stereotypes are just as damning and constricting as negative ones.
#1 is easy to spot. The ones that haunt us are #2 and #3. So here's another way to look at it:
Each of us has a frame of reference for understanding the world. Maybe your frame contains a few stereotypes, but for the most part it's porous and open to new evidence. You take each person as an individual, and you're willing to live with a certain amount of ambiguity. And if there are aspects of other cultures that baffle or even repel you, your reaction doesn't make you an ignorant racist—it could mean you don't have all the information yet.
Then there's another frame of reference, the one that upholds stereotyping, rejects new information, and selects evidence to keep those faulty stereotypes going. It's the clenched-fist view that "the way my people does things is the right way or the only way," and, as such, does not tolerate ambiguities. The spectrum of this can run from well-meaning Marge to that cross-burning knuckle-dragger. There are people in the world who, for reasons of their own, are willfully misunderstanding of others.
It's not just about understanding difference, but variations on differences. That's why this is so hard, and why we should have That Conversation sooner than later.
We may choose to work and reside within homogeneous enclaves, but the fact is all of us now live among variations. It's going to be more demanding, but one of the benefits of being open to variations is that over time conversations about differences become routine, unthreatening, and informative. It becomes not about having That Monolithic Conversation, but of just sitting down with a new acquaintance and getting the backstory on who each of you really are. You don't have to like or approve of "the other" to attempt understanding.
