Race Relations Blog

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Juneteenth celebration (Richmond, California). Photo: David Paul Morris / Getty Images.

TheRoot.com's John McWhorter, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley, asks: Why celebrate Juneteeth? Excerpt:

Slaves, upon release, generally led lives of miserable sharecropping and other menial labor, and their descendants, as often as not, migrated north to end up penned into segregated slums ...

To me, the real day of celebration—one that I always think about as it passes—is not June 19 but July 2. That was the day the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed. The Civil Rights Act had as profound an impact on the fate of blacks in the United States as Emancipation. Say what you want about how far we have to go, but the official dismantling of Jim Crow was a watershed event in the history of human affairs.

In the years leading up to the American Civil War, Northern abolitionists disagreed about what the best approach to ending slavery would be. Most favored instant Emancipation, in which all slaves would be granted citizenship simultaneously. But some favored gradual Emancipation--a policy that would set a date in advance for the emancipation of all slaves, and give slaveowners time to adjust financially to the new reality. The war rendered the question moot, and instant Emancipation won out. In theory.

But the reality of the situation is that, as McWhorter points out, free Southern blacks for the most part weren't discernibly better off than Southern slaves. Jim Crow laws, such as the Mississippi Black Codes, made sure that Southern blacks of the era stayed poor and lacked political influence. After pretending to protect Southern blacks for less than a decade, the federal government left Southern blacks to the Dixiecrat wolves in 1877 and failed to do its job for another 87 years. To this day, racial profiling, employment discrimination, housing discrimination, hate crimes, cyclical poverty, and other vestiges of the old racial caste system remain.

Sure, some blacks benefitted from instant Emancipation. But some blacks were free prior to Emancipation, too, and that didn't eliminate the reality of slavery. If we separate ourselves from the labels we use to describe policies and look at the realities of human experience, there isn't much difference between a slave and an indentured sharecropper. And if we separate ourselves from the labels we use to describe policies and look at the realities of human experience, there is an undeniable family resemblance difference between someone being born to a life in a slave's chains and someone being inculturated into a life in the chains of prison and poverty. We may have a black president next January, but it is a safe bet that this will not change the hard realities of life--that black Americans are three times as likely as whites to live in poverty, that black Americans are far more likely to go to prison or become victims of crime, that we still live in a culture that has judged the next generation of black Americans guilty before they have even been born.

Opportunities have increased over the past 143 years, and Emancipation and the Civil Rights Act certainly represent milestones in that process, but the Emancipation the abolitionists had in mind--a true and universal Emancipation, an Emancipation that, in the words of William Lloyd Garrison, "includes all the people, with all their rights in their hands, and with an equal power to maintain their rights"--still hasn't happened for many black Americans living today.

So while I wouldn't go as far as to dismiss Juneteenth, I always have to resist the urge to put an asterisk on the word "Emancipation." There is a ghost of Juneteenth past, a ghost of Juneteenth present, and a ghost of Juneteenth future. There is a greater Emancipation, a universal Emancipation, that awaits us still.

See also:

• The Conscience of the King
• Black Civil Rights in America: An Illustrated History

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Although New York magazine cites Adam Sandler's You Don't Mess with the Zohan as an example of the "brownface" phenomenon, both Sandler and the title character are ethnically Jewish. Photo: Rob Loud / Getty Images

The other night I caught a few minutes of The Dragon Painter (1919), an American film starring the husband-wife team of Sessue Hayakawa and Tsuru Aoki. One of the remarkable things about Hayakawa and Aoki was that until the past few decades, it was virtually unheard of for an Asian character to actually be played by an actor of Asian ancestry in an American film. More often the character would be played by a caucasian actor wearing crude makeup--as in the case of the Swedish-American actor Warner Oland, who played Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu in the famous 1920s serials.

Have we come a long way? Not necessarily, as New York magazine reports (see "The Summer of Brownface"). Excerpt:

... [I]n You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, opening tomorrow ... Adam Sandler plays an Israeli and Rob Schneider an Arab; both have seemingly taken a dip in the same substance used to honey up Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart. Mike Myers’s The Love Guru is quite possibly the first Hollywood comedy entirely devoted to tittering over turbans since Peter Sellers played Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party, from 1968. Ben Kingsley, naturally, shows up to meta-travesty his own half-Indian heritage, and by extension his Gandhi role, with a cameo as Guru Tugginmypudha. (Should the homophonic hilarity of that name prove too subtle, there’s also Guru Satchabigknoba.)

Kingsley is also onboard for the just-announced Prince of Persia, the cast of which — unveiled in the past week — includes such notable Persians as Jake Gyllenhaal and Alfred Molina. Nor is the trend limited to Hollywood blockbusters. In the indie thriller Stuck, out now, ethnic Estonian Mena Suvari rocks the cornrows to play a character based on a real-life black woman. On the small screen, meanwhile, it’s a fairly safe bet that the two-month overlap between the general-election and the TV-production cycles will bring us a lot more Fred Armisen as Barack Obama come September.

And none of the above, of course, is even close in sheer audacity (and, let’s admit it, comic potential) to Robert Downey Jr.’s full-blown blackface in Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder.

I'm not the arbiter of what is and isn't offensive, but it seems to me that brownface, or blackface, is problematic when it does one of two things:

• When it reduces the already scandalously limited number of roles available to people of color, and/or
• When it reinforces harmful stereotypes.

If we look at each of these examples based on those standards, we find that not all "brownface" is created equal. Read more...

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Photo: Lawrence Lucier / Getty Images

Last Friday, Geraldine Ferraro answered exit poll data suggesting that racial resentment was a factor in several key Clinton victories (see "Did Racism Win West Virginia, Kentucky for Clinton?") by suggesting that racial resentment is not necessarily racist, and that it may be justified.

Yes, she really did write that. Excerpt (emphasis mine):

Since March, when I was accused of being racist for a statement I made about the influence of blacks on Obama's historic campaign, people have been stopping me to express a common sentiment: If you're white you can't open your mouth without being accused of being racist. They see Obama's playing the race card throughout the campaign and no one calling him for it as frightening. They're not upset with Obama because he's black; they're upset because they don't expect to be treated fairly because they're white. It's not racism that is driving them, it's racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don't believe he understands them and their problems. That when he said in South Carolina after his victory "Our Time Has Come" they believe he is telling them that their time has passed.

I don't mean to focus on Ferraro. Her remarks in March, in which she essentially described Barack Obama as a quota hire, were offensive but should not have surprised us, considering her history of making similar remarks in the past. I'm also not interested in discussing the Clinton campaign's own history on race issues, since I've already discussed this at length (see "Hillary Clinton vs. The Black Candidate"). I'm more interested in the logic of Ferraro's views on racial resentment, which are shared (I suspect) by many whites.

First, the term "racial resentment" does have a history that precedes Ferraro and the Racial Resentment Index used by Newsweek to assess the role of race in the Kentucky and West Virginia primaries. And most political scientists could have predicted that it would be a factor in the campaign of the first African-American presidential candidate. As a team of seven authors wrote in Whitewashing Race (University of California Press, 2003, p. 210):

Racially polarized voting is due in part to white voters' fear and mistrust of black candidates. In an imaginative study, Keith Reeves showed that despite white voters' reluctance to reveal their racial prejudices to pollsters, their views of blacks are directly linked to their feelings about black candidates. In an experimental survey Reeves devised, he presented white voters with descriptions of two candidates who differed only in their positions regarding two issues, environmental policy and affirmative action. For one group of white voters, both candidates were white; for the other group, one candidate was black. When faced with the black candidate, whom Reeves called Hammond, many whites changed their vote to the undecided category rather than saying they would vote against the black candidate. Reeves showed that these voters were quite hostile to blacks and expressed common negative racial stereotypes ...

Racially polarized elections persist for two reasons. The most obvious one is that white candidates often play the race card. Reeves's study, as well as other data, shows that simply identifying an opponent as black easily sways white voters, as will racially coded campaign appeals to stir up racial resentment among white voters.

Racial resentment has historically been understood as a bad thing--reflecting white disaffection with civil rights programs and the slowly diminishing opportunity gap between whites and people of color. The sense many whites have is that resources are finite, if not scarce, and that any gains made by people of color will negatively affect the livelihoods of whites. For voters who feel that Hillary Clinton is more qualified, the victories of the younger Barack Obama might feel like affirmative action at work. White Democrats who might never have voted for Hillary Clinton before the campaign, but harbor a high level of racial resentment, might see themselves in her. They might wonder why the younger, allegedly less qualified black candidate is getting a position that had been previously all but reserved for an older, allegedly more qualified white candidate.

It's no surprise, from this vantage point, that some of these white Democrats--many of whom generally vote Republican in national elections--might turn to John McCain. Like Hillary Clinton, he's older and he's white.

But is this really racism? That depends on how you define racism. If you define racism as a philosophical belief in the biological superiority of whites, then no, it probably wouldn't qualify as racism. But that has seldom been anything more than a fig leaf for the practical concerns of racial resentment--the attempt by insular whites to make sure that they were able to claim resources and opportunities for their families and their communities at the expense of other families and other communities. Racist policy may be motivated by pseudoscientific race theory, but simple greed is enough--especially in impoverished regions such as the South and Appalachia, where resources are scarce. And any time there is de facto racial segregation in regions where resources are scarce, there is likely to be some degree of racial resentment.

Ferraro takes the view that one of Obama's primary goals over the next six months should be to somehow appeal to these racial resentment voters:

Hope, change, and inspiration don't do it. A speech on racism might persuade editorial boards, but to these voters it's "just words." Obama has less than six months to make the case.

The implicit message of Ferraro's editorial is that Hillary Clinton wouldn't have to make such a case in the general election, but historical evidence strongly suggests that she would. As political historians Raymond Tatalovich and Byron W. Daynes write (Moral Controversies in American Politics: Cases in Social Regulatory Policy, p. 64):

Affirmative action has been used by Republicans for three decades to try to splinter the Democratic base of women, minorities, and working-class white males. The Nixon administration sought to pit white workers against black recipients of affirmative action, and peel off the angry white males from the Democratic Party and encourage them to vote Republican. The strategy was successful in the 1972 presidential election, and much more so in appealing to the "Reagan Democrats." By the 1980s Republicans could run against the programs they had created in order to appeal to the white working class.

This is not to say that McCain would use white racial resentment as a campaign strategy--he may, in fact, take this opportunity to choose a non-white running mate and guarantee that the next White House will be racially diverse--but Ferraro's suggestion that the Democratic nominee find some way to overcome certain voters' racial resentment seems ill advised. White Democratic nominees have been trying to do that, unsuccessfully, for decades; expecting Barack Obama, or even Hillary Clinton, to somehow pull it off seems unrealistic.

See also:

• Racism and Electability

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Photo: Scott Olson / Getty Images

The Summer Olympics are still months away, but sports fans can still sit back and watch the Oppression Olympics unfold on their TV screens. White male pundits still debate whether misogyny is worse than racism or racism is worse than misogyny, but nobody seems to ask this question of women of color who actually ran for political office, among whom the verdict seems to be mixed. When Shirley Chisholm ran for president in 1972, she remarked that "I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being black." But when Barbara Blackmon lost her bid to become Mississippi's lieutenant governor in 2003, she attributed the loss to race, not gender. Most women of color who have spoken to me about this are more annoyed at the question itself than they are at the potential that someone might get the wrong answer.

So I'd like to say, right off the bat, that I'm not interested in making the argument that race trumps gender. Nothing "trumps" gender or race. We'll be living in a much better world when something does, but right now both race and gender remain fundamentally untrumped, to the detriment of us all. (Let's not forget another Shirley Chisholm quote: "In the end, antiblack, antifemale, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing: antihumanism.") And while Democrats tear each other apart over the race vs. gender question, Republicans have already selected a white male nominee who has 50/50 odds of becoming the 44th president and rendering this entire discussion moot.

But putting aside the question of race versus gender for a moment, I think opposition to the Clinton and Obama campaigns provides us with a rare example to study how race and gender can factor into a political campaign. About.com: Women's Issues guide Linda Lowen has done a fine job during this campaign of looking at how misogyny has impacted Hillary Clinton's bid (see "It's About Gender, Stupid"); I think it's also important to look at how racism has impacted Obama's.

There is no better petri dish to analyze that question than the West Virginia and Kentucky exit polls. These two states, which Hillary Clinton won by overwhelming margins, are states in which white racism played a significant and potentially pivotal role in the outcome. That's not speculation on my part; the voters said it played a significant and potentially pivotal role in the outcome.

Let's look at the West Virginia exit poll, in which 16% of white voters (more than 95% of primary voters were white) reported that race was a factor in their decision to vote for Hillary Clinton. Clinton won with 67% of the vote. If we take the 16% at their word, all but 1% of Clinton's margin of victory can be attributed to white voters who admit that they were less likely to vote for Obama on account of his race.

In Kentucky, as Pam Spaulding reports, the situation was even more bleak. Some 18% of white voters (99% of Kentucky voters were white) reported that race was a factor in their decision to vote for Hillary Clinton. Clinton won Kentucky with 65%. Without the 18% of voters who admit that race was a factor in their decision to vote for her, she would have received only 47% of the vote.

Clinton supporters who boast of her impressive numbers in Kentucky and West Virginia, in contrast with her steady losses in other recent states, need to acknowledge the clear and documented role that racism played in those two victories. This is not to say, of course, that misogyny has not likewise played a role in Barack Obama's victories. But when Hillary Clinton touts her support from "hardworking whites," or her husband compares Obama to Jesse Jackson, or her finance chair suggests that he's a presidential quota hire, or her polling expert suggests that he won't carry the Latino vote, and so on and so forth, that lends credence to the idea that racism is actually a strategy in her campaign and not merely a side effect of the fact that she's running against a black candidate. Both Clinton and Obama could probably do more to repudiate bigots who would be inclined to support them, but Clinton, due to the rhetoric that her own campaign has used, has a much more difficult task ahead of her if she intends to leave this contest with her legacy intact.

See also:

• Hillary Clinton vs. The Black Candidate

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Jack Kerwick, guest columnist for the new About.com: U.S. Conservative Politics site, is about half right. He's not crazy about the word "racism," and thinks that anyone interested in having a multiracial discussion about race issues should declare a moratorium on the word first. His article reflects the ambiguity that many whites feel about the word "racism," an ambiguity that some people of color share, and an ambiguity that rests partly in the fact that race itself is a nonsense idea and it's very hard to create a really useful vocabulary around a nonsense idea. Race is a vehicle for oppression, a pseudoscientific way of color-coding caste bias to benefit the glorified con artists who invented it, and the terminology we use to talk about race now will probably sound ridiculous in 500 years. Race itself is racist. The fact that race exists at all, in any significant way, is a pretty good indicator that we live in a racist culture--because any non-racist culture would have little use for such a vague, clumsy, and culturally loaded taxonomy of family and cultural heritage.

In lesbian and gay rights activism, there are two wonderful words to refer, separately, to anti-gay motivation, also known as homophobia, and anti-gay systems or behavior, also known as heterosexism. You can do heterosexist things without homophobic motives, like eHarmony does--matching only opposite-sex couples because those are the only kinds of relationships that their matchmaking formula has been written to address. You can also do anti-heterosexist things with homophobic motives, such as supporting a local lesbian and gay matchmaking service because you have an irrational fear that your neighbor is coming on to you and you want to throw him off your scent.

But racism and sexism, as terms, don't really work that way. You can do racist or sexist things with no intention of doing so, or you can have private racist or sexist motivations. This double-sided aspect of racism is one that many whites, including but certainly not limited to white conservatives, can't get their heads around. Racist behavior, in the eyes of some whites, is behavior that is motivated by intentional racism--say, a philosophical belief in white supremacy. It makes sense that whites would see racism this way, since if you're a white person trying not to do racist things, not having a racist ideology is a good first step.

People of color tend to experience, and therefore define, racism a little bit differently. Whites who specifically and deliberately and openly buy into a philosophy of white supremacy are a pain but they aren't usually the biggest problem, because they don't tend to have much power these days. But institutional racism has a lot of power, often putting white kids in better schools and more economically stable families and one day into better career tracks with a higher annual salary, leading towards a retirement and a higher life expectancy to match. That reality is much more oppressively racist than some lunatic on the street corner ranting about "children of Ham." Read more...

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Nicole Paultre-Bell and her mother await the verdict. Photo: Pool / Getty Images.

Three men left a bachelor party. A group of armed assailants ran towards them. The driver, whose wedding was scheduled for the next morning, attempted to flee the apparent carjackers. The assailants fired 50 bullets, killing the driver and injuring his two passengers.

The driver was unarmed. His passengers were unarmed. These facts are not in dispute.

The assailants, it was later revealed, were plainclothes officers of the New York Police Department. They were attempting to investigate rumors of prostitution at the club. They thought they heard someone say "gun." They claim that they verbally identified themselves as they ran up to the car, drew their own guns, and fired them. It wouldn't have necessarily mattered if they did. Carjackers shout things--crazy things--all the time to get the attention of the driver.

Maybe the driver should have taken a calculated gamble and just let them have the car, but most carjackers don't spray cars with bullets. They steal cars. Murder charges, clearly identifiable bullet damage in their stolen automobiles--it's not good business for carjackers. NYPD officers don't have to worry so much about murder charges because NYPD officers are never charged with murder for killing black or Latino suspects on the streets. It's rare that they're charged with anything at all. The occasional shooting death of an unarmed brown or black man, like the human sacrifice performed by ancient fertility cults, is viewed as a blood tax.

The three killers, charged with manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and assault, asked for a bench trial--a trial by judge instead of by jury, the right of every criminal defendant. Surely they knew that a jury might deadlock and result in a mistrial, then perhaps a retrial. They wanted an acquittal on a first pass. They got one.

I'd barely followed this case after the indictment was announced because I took it for granted that the officers would be convicted of something. Generally speaking, shooting three unarmed people and killing one of them results in a conviction if it goes to trial. But this, I should have reminded myself, is the NYPD.

I don't pretend to know what the shooters were thinking. I've never been in their shoes. I assume it's a difficult, dangerous job. I assume they were genuinely frightened, that they genuinely felt that their lives might be at risk. But then the same can probably be said of most killers on America's urban streets, who more often than not are involved in dangerous drug-related disputes, disputes that fall outside of the magisterium of the police and the law-abiding world that police represent. Those shootings bulk up the homicide statistics of every major city in the United States.

No, I'm not a police officer. I have the luxury of sitting here in my chair knowing that I can call 911 at any time and count on the protection of police officers. Police officers have a very difficult job. They should receive a six-figure salary instead of the minimal salary that they presently receive. But they should receive that salary in money, not in acquittals.

I wonder what would happen if we showed civilians the same deference that the State of New York has shown to these police officers--where "I was scared" is an excuse for drawing firearms and firing indiscriminately into an occupied vehicle. My suspicion is that more people, people from every walk of life, would die. Those are sacrifices that we are not willing, as a culture, to make.

But apparently killing a Sean Bell, every now and then, is okay. Through the officers, white Americans who endorse the shoot-first policy, but know that it will never affect them personally, put these young men on altars and drive daggers through their hearts. And for another year, we have good crops.

The Department of Justice has the opportunity to pursue federal civil rights charges against the officers. It should. The New York Police Department is still conducting an internal investigation to determine what, if any, disciplinary action the officers might receive. It must. Sean Bell's widow, who was at least allowed to take his name, has filed a wrongful death suit against the officers. It was, by any reasonable standard, a wrongful death. And it was also, if we are to reject the logic of human sacrifice, a federal civil rights violation--and at least an example of reckless endangerment, if not manslaughter. Police are taught better ways to stop an occupied vehicle than perforating it with dozens of bullets.

But if the majority of Americans are comfortable letting Sean Bell's killers take his life with no legal consequences, because they're willing to pay that price to live in a "safer" country, then each American should at least hang a plaque on the living room wall. And every time another young unarmed man dies in New York or Los Angeles because police have been given a general license to kill, they should be required to engrave that name on their plaques. It should be a really big plaque, because this happens quite often. (Sean Bell's story made national headlines not because he was an unarmed black man who was shot to death by police, but because he was an unarmed black man who was shot to death by police the night before his wedding.) And at the top, every plaque should read: "IN LOVING MEMORY OF THE INNOCENT PEOPLE WE KILLED IN THE NAME OF OUR OWN SAFETY."

It's the least we can do.

See also:

• Summary of the Sean Bell Shooting and NYPD Trial

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

I just ran across the required reading section at The Angry Black Woman, and stumbled across her post on white liberal guilt--the debilitating fear that many whites have of saying or doing something that might come across as racist.

I'm not immune. I'm a white guy and I live in a 73% black city. Being thought of as a racist would be profoundly damaging to my social life, my career, and my activism work. But the truth is that if you write and talk about race--and I write and talk about race a lot--then you're always at risk of stepping in it, because race isn't just a "touchy" subject. It's an incredibly complicated subject that no one person can ever completely comprehend.

I don't remember ever being called a racist in person, but I've occasionally said things that came across the wrong way and had to backtrack. I'm not just talking about the everyday experience of having whites on the Internet accuse me of "reverse racism," but also about times in my life when I tried to say something interesting or helpful and stepped in it.

And I've learned from my mistakes, so here are five thoughts I'd offer to any white person who is legitimately paralyzed with fear that something s/he one day says or does might be seen as racist:

- First, don't be paralyzed. Seriously. Whites tend to resolve the difficult problem of talking about race by pretending that race doesn't exist at all. Pay attention to what people of color tell you about racism. Learn from it. Let yourself care about it. Talk about it. As whites we materially benefit from racism, so we have a moral obligation to confront it.

- Remember that racism is much, much bigger than you. Racism is an institutional problem, not something that has been invented by people who are alive today. It pervades American culture. So if you accidentally say something racist in a culture that's already racist, the problem isn't that you're creating racist sentiments. It's that you're failing to filter out the racist sentiments you've been fed.

- If what you say sounds racist, apologize for it. There seems to be this weird idea floating around that if you didn't mean to say something racist, it wasn't actually a racist remark. Sorry, no. You can, in fact, accidentally make a racist remark. Practice these words (or something to this effect that sounds more like you): "Yeah, that wasn't what I meant to say; I worded it wrong. I'm sorry." Unless you're dealing with somebody who already hates your guts, a simple verbal gaffe is probably not going to be perceived as a Freudian slip as long as you apologize for it. But if you defend it, the perception may be that your statement wasn't really a slip-up because you consider it worth defending.

- Don't buy into the "race hysteria" myth. Race is a touchy subject, sure, but people of color who are your friends probably aren't going to suddenly forget who you are just because you accidentally said something offensive. If any do, it's a safe bet that there's more going on there than an isolated verbal slip-up.

- Relax. Again, we live in a racist culture. Whatever you might one day say by accident, it's a safe bet that people of color in your life have heard people say far worse things on purpose.

In closing, I'd like to go back to a blog entry I posted in October regarding various highly-publicized instances in which white celebrities had made offensive remarks (see "All Apologies"):

None of this is to say that this will earn the offenders forgiveness, but that shouldn't be their primary objective anyway. The proper response for any ethical human being, upon discovering that they have caused harm, is to try to make up for it.

This is something that I have only slowly learned about racism controversies. Most of the time the controversy isn't about who is and who isn't a racist, as if this were some kind of sociopolitical remake of Where's Waldo. It's about recognizing the damage we do, and refusing to profit from it, and correcting it, and moving forward.

As long as you're more concerned about the harm your words can do to others than you are with the harm your words can do to your reputation, odds are excellent that you will always be able to address your verbal gaffes in an intelligent way. In personal communication, as in most areas of life, genuine empathy and concern for others tends to shine through--but when you're only thinking about yourself, people can usually pick up on that, too.

See also:

• All Apologies

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Newsweek health writer Dean Ornish thinks so--and the data is on his side:

In the past decade more than 100 studies have been published documenting the harmful effects of racial discrimination on a variety of health measures in African-American men and women.

For example, a recent study that followed nearly 60,000 African-American women for six years found that women who reported on-the-job racial discrimination had a 32 percent higher risk of breast cancer than others who did not. Women who said they faced racial discrimination on the job, in housing and from the police were 48 percent more likely to develop breast cancer than those who reported no incidents of major discrimination.

Another study of African-American women found that those who reported chronic emotional stress due to their experience of racism had more severely blocked carotid arteries (which supply blood to the brain) than those who did not. In yet another study perceived racism was associated with a significantly increased risk of uterine fibroids in black women, and this was unrelated to differences in health care utilization.

And then there are the effects of racially-correlated inequalities in health care access--the topic of Unnatural Causes, a seven-part, 14-hour documentary currently airing on PBS. Low-income black men have a median life expectancy of 67--a decade below the national average.

So what can be done about this? Ornish emphasizes the need to dismantle active racism, and to generally treat each other in a kinder way in our day-to-day lives. This is good advice, I believe, and should be taken to heart--but it doesn't address the core problem of racism, because white folks who make intentionally life harder for people of color are generally not the same white folks who ask themselves what they can do to make life easier for people of color. The EEOC has made some progress in fighting overt employment discrimination, but there's a limit to what can be accomplished by civil rights laws--particularly when the most significant problems impacting the health of people of color have more to do with institutional racism than personal racism.

So a systematic, institutional solution is needed. And as Brian Smedley points out, we're not talking about a revolution here--even mainstream, bipartisan policy proposals can have a dramatic impact on racism-related health disparities:

If we believe – as most Americans do – that the United States should be a place where everyone has a fair chance to achieve their full potential, then we can focus on achievable policy solutions. These include things like providing access to high-quality early child education programs for all children, reforming school financing to equalize the quality of education in K through 12th grade, and reducing financial barriers to college. We should also support living wage policies, so that no one who works full-time is forced to live in poverty, and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit program. We should provide job training so that more people can participate in high-growth jobs, such as in the technology industry. We should invest in affordable housing and fix the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. We should support housing mobility programs, so that people in low-opportunity communities can move to better neighborhoods, and invest in jobs and schools in low-opportunity communities so that they become attractive places to live and work.

And if we're willing to go a step further, universal health care must be a priority. Studies have consistently shown that about half of all uninsured Americans are black or Latino, when black and Latino Americans barely make up one quarter of the U.S. population.

There are ways to address the overall impact of racism on health and life expectancy, but most of them are inconvenient for Americans who already enjoy high standards of health care. These Americans need to be made more aware of the severity of the problem. A low-income black or Latino man who dies in 2008 due to racially-correlated health care disparities may not be as obvious a victim as a black or Latino man lynched in an earlier era, but he's just as dead.

See also:

• Institutional Racism

^{by Tom Head, About.com Guide to Civil Liberties}

Photo: William Thomas Cain / Getty Images.

The most significant problem the punditocracy faces in analyzing Obama's speech is that it analyzes itself. Like his writing, it's blunt, introspective, and at times painfully honest. Like so much of what Barack Obama has said, it sounds too direct, too decent, to have come out of the mouth of a politician.

Pam Spaulding of Pam's House Blend put it best for me:

When I read it I wept. The tears were of sheer relief ...

People who know me well are quite aware that I'm not one prone to great waves of emotion; I'm Ms. Even Keel to most. The emotion was because there I sat, reading elements of wisdom about our desperate need for engagement on the topic of race that I have written about on this blog for years. At times I have almost pleaded with readers to feel safe to open up to discuss the difficult issues of difference -- putting up posts with a dearth of comments because few were willing to put themselves out there ...

Because of that, in Obama's speech I was reading the words of a man that gets it, regardless of the fact that he is a candidate for President of the United States of America that resonate with me on this issue. That he is thisclose to becoming president of this country -- and to risk it all by cracking open this door on a painful area of this country -- is something I thought I would never see. He is giving voice to a healthier view on race relations that needs to be embraced from a stage where it's hard to argue that it is not an issue worth tackling.

The topic of this site, race relations, is so often used as a vehicle and a vessel for condemnation, and we should condemn remarks such as those made in recent months by Don Imus, Duane "Dog" Chapman, and so forth. But the remarks are not proof of anything except that we live in a culture that is tragically afflicted by this ridiculous pseudoscientific concept that we call race, and the relentlessly evil racial hierarchy that comes packaged with it. Don Imus did not invent racism or misogyny. Duane Chapman did not invent the N-word. Behavior like theirs explodes like bubbles in a pot of boiling water--but all of the water is boiling, not just the bubbles. In a non-racist society, there would be no reason to care whether or not people made racist remarks because those remarks would have no power to cause damage or inflict pain.

If you have not already read or heard the speech on race that Obama delivered Tuesday, please do so now. Whether you like Barack Obama or not, he has said some things that badly needed to be said. He's lancing the boil--and, as Pam Spaulding likes to say, touching the third rail--of race politics in America.

Here are a few remarks that especially stood out for me:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe ...

We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now ...

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect.

Note that he refuses to condemn Jeremiah Wright. Note that he refuses to condemn Geraldine Ferraro. Note that he places the focus not on the bubbles that occasionally rise to the surface of the boiling water, but on the fact that the water is boiling in the first place. We live in a racist culture. Our culture has a racist history. With apologies to Billy Joel, we--Geraldine Ferraro, Jeremiah Wright, Duane Chapman, Don Imus, all of us--didn't start the fire. It was already burning. He didn't pretend the remarks weren't offensive, but he also didn't pretend that they came out of nowhere.

Politicians who comment on race almost never get this. They seem scared to. They're afraid of touching the third rail. They're afraid of saying the wrong thing and being thought of as racists. So they step back. Obama, in the middle of a heated presidential campaign, isn't stepping back. Make no mistake: He is taking a huge risk by making a speech about race at this point in the campaign, when nearly all of the remaining Democratic primary voters are white. For whatever reason--maybe personal integrity, maybe to prepare for the long march to November--he has chosen to take on this issue directly and settle it now.

I suspect that every white American has at some point or another wondered: Why haven't black folks achieved demographic parity with whites? You won't run into very many whites who answer this question by saying that whites are genetically superior to blacks, but my experience is that most whites don't have a direct answer to this question at all, which is almost worse.

Some will say "culture," but culture always comes from somewhere. It doesn't just arise out of a vacuum. Some will say "poverty," but poverty always comes from somewhere, too. In the end, explaining racial disparities means either asserting that some people deserve to have more social power than others on account of their race, or asserting that they don't and that their disproportionate level of social power is unjust. Because who we are ultimately boils down to biology and environment, addressing racial disparities means either asserting philosophical racism or confronting institutional racism. The disparities have to come from somewhere. Either they're within us, or they're imposed on us. Either they're just, or they're unjust.

Obama explains the root causes of these disparities as concisely as anyone ever has:

... [W]e do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

And my experience has also been that many black folks look at these disparities and ask themselves: Why don't white folks get it? Why are they complicit in this system? Do they think this is how things are supposed to be? Obama has an answer for this, too:

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze ... And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.

And immediately after he says this, Obama puts his own candidacy in context:

Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

In his race speech, Obama didn't sell his candidacy as a snake oil solution to American racism. He didn't excoriate Geraldine Ferraro or throw his former pastor under the bus. He didn't sugarcoat the reality of institutional racism. And he categorically refused to use his racial identity as a weapon against either of his opponents:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

Obama's speech powerfully defied expectations. He isn't interested in being a racial candidate, but he obviously isn't interested in being a post-racial candidate--in "transcending race"--either. He's simply being Barack Obama, and whether he becomes the 44th President of the United States or not, this speech will be remembered long after we have forgotten about the gaffes of Ferraro and Wright.

See also:

• Transcript: Barack Obama's Speech on Race and Faith (Deborah White / About.com: U.S. Liberal Politics)