“… But I’m Not Racist”: Toward a Pragmatic Conception of “Racism”

from my first courses as an undergraduate in African American studies, I have been concerned about the dynamics by which white and Black¹ people discuss race. For one, I was troubled in my undergraduate African American studies courses by the ease with which white students would insert themselves into conversations where, it seemed to me, they simply did not belong, for example, conversations concerning visions for the future of the Black community and strategies for achieving such visions. Shannon Sullivan speaks of this phenomenon, accurately I believe, as “ontological expansiveness”: one central feature of privilege is a sense of entitlement to enter every room without first considering whether or not one is welcome or belongs. Because of my concerns about entering where I might not be welcomed, I was long hesitant to write or speak about race at all, believing that those who suffer from racism should be the ones who talk, and that those of us who benefit from it should first listen long and carefully before speaking. In this regard, I am very grateful for my years of conversations with Tommy Curry, while he studied and taught with me and wrote his dissertation under my direction: those conversations did much to help me sort out what I, as a white person, might and might not rightfully say about race, and I expressed some of my thoughts in this regard in the paper I presented at the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, on what I termed “methodological Afrocentrism,” an outline of what I proposed white scholars, such as myself, might do in order to listen better to Africana voices before speaking, and what we then might say about race and racism without being guilty of ontological expansionism.

A second major concern of mine in the discussion of race has been the enormous gap that separates white and Black Americans over matters of race generally, and over what counts as “racist,” in particular. For example, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, a large percentage of African Americans believed that the spread of HIV was part of a genocidal plot against them. I was one of the vast majority of white people who thought that such a belief was just plain crazy—that is, until I learned more about the Tuskegee experiments and the pharmaceutical industry’s routine use of African people to test new drugs. As a result, I no longer think that beliefs in such plots are unreasonable.

A second example was the O. J. Simpson trial: a substantial majority of African Americans believed that Simpson was the victim of an elaborate plot on the part of the Los Angeles Police to frame him, while an overwhelming majority of white Americans believed Simpson to be guilty and that such a conspiracy theory expressed undue paranoia on the part of Black people. The enormous gap in perceptions between white and Black Americans regarding Simpson suggested to me that America has a much bigger problem than determining whether or not he was guilty.

More recently, 54% of whites believe the not-guilty verdict for George Zimmerman, in the death of Trayvon Martin, to be “right,” while only 7% of Blacks think so, and while 68% of Blacks think that “the American justice system is biased against black people,” only 25% of whites think so (Newport).

A further example of the gap between Black Americans’ and white Americans’ perceptions of race and racism is the huge divide over the extent to which there has been significant racial progress, especially since the start of the Civil Rights Era: Is America today significantly less racist than it was in, say, 1960? Many white Americans believe that America has entered a “post-racial” age, especially with the election of a Black president, and that race and racism are no longer significant factors in American life. Virtually no people of color agree with that judgment. Fifty-four percent of white Americans believe that “[c]ivil rights for blacks have ‘greatly improved’ in [their] own lifetime,” while only 25% of Blacks think so, and 9% of...