The Price of Paradise: The Costs of Inequality and a Vision for a More Equitable America

5. We Renamed the Problem and It Disappeared: Assuming That Racism No Longer Limits Minority Chances

123 5 WE RENAMED THE PROBLEM AND IT DISAPPEARED ASSUMING THAT RACISM NO LONGER LIMITS MINORITY CHANCES I live in a very old house, which is a good thing (until something breaks). On the first cold days of October, when you turn on the thermostat , you must wait for the heat to slowly rise up from the basement. It seems to climb from Reconstruction through wood and coal to the Industrial Era, up past the Progressive Era to World War I, then World War II, until finally it reaches oil, gas, plastics, and perhaps one day solar. The journey of heat through my home reminds me of what happens when the word “racism” is used, how its mere mention, like the touching of a thermostat, sets off a thermodynamic impatience from the gut to the brain. Thus begins the fifth assumption, that racism no longer limits minority opportunities. Impatience rules the dialogue between those who hold this assumption (believing that the emphasis on existing racism ignores our nation’s progress for the sake of securing undeserved preferences) and those who don’t (believing that the continued existence of racism retards our progress and is too obvious to be ignored by people of goodwill). We have developed the polite habit of splitting the difference in these disagreements, finding WE RENAMED THE PROBLEM AND IT DISAPPEARED 124 equal merit on both sides in a resolution that resolves nothing. That’s disingenuous and unproductive. The truth about racism, I believe, is not merely somewhere in between opposing viewpoints. It is a matter of finding common terminology. In my experience, the idea that racism no longer acts as a serious impediment to minority chances must be based on an understanding of racism that is individual in its terms. In this view, racism, if it exists, resides in individuals and is expressed by individuals . Racism as an obstacle is refuted by examples like the popularity of a mega-rich Oprah Winfrey or the reelection of a brilliant President Obama. The absence of individuals with white hoods (notwithstanding occasional outbursts and invective from knuckleheaded outliers) is evidence that most individuals are color-blind. I agree that we have a great deal to be proud of in our effort to undo the primordial hatreds of the recent past. The transformation in individual attitudes and achievements in such a relatively short time is miraculous testament to the power of social change. But it is an unnecessarily limited framework for thinking about bias and leaves out a lot about lost opportunity. Another way that people discount present-day racism through the focus on individuals is by requiring very strict proof of racial animosity —specifically, conscious racial animosity. (They don’t tend to recognize the potential threat from unconscious animus.) In this view, the fact that there has been a spate of beatings and even murders of Latino workers on Long Island, New York—some of them during hunting expeditions called “beaner hopping” where the assailants admitted to preying on Latinos for sport1 —is about the only form of racism they will admit. This is clearly intentional conduct, so much that we’ve called them “crimes” of “hate.” They are. But this idea of racism as an obstacle to opportunity would not cover the “Bamboo Ceiling” limiting the managerial and executive aspirations of qualified Asian workers in, say, the technology sector. Wesley Yang wrote about these struggles in New York magazine, describing the effects of stereotypes that Asians endure as proficient workers but deficient leaders, routinely passed over by and for white men who understand the subtle loopholes in strict meritocracy. Yang writes, “This idea of a kind of rule-governed WE RENAMED THE PROBLEM AND IT DISAPPEARED 125 rule-breaking—where the rule book was unwritten but passed along in an innate cultural sense—is perhaps the best explanation I have heard of how the Bamboo Ceiling functions in practice.”2 Under our current legal standards, however, Asians seeking to sue to remove barriers created by unconscious, unspoken, and unwritten workplace norms would have great difficulty proving their case. Race—in this book anyway—is mainly important for its material implications. Anything else is what my uncles used to call the okey doke—nonsensical swindle, clever surplusage, distracting jive, tactical pablum. If we define racism in terms of its material consequences and call it the power to subordinate members of a distinctive group to inferior opportunities based...