Everywhere I turn these days, decisions and discussions seem to hinge quite profoundly on the porous (and changing) fault-line between “racial” and “racist.”
When Marc Lamont Hill went at it with Bill O’Reilly earlier this week (over the media coverage of Michael Jackson’s memorial), the former tried to challenge the latter on just this very point.
O’Reilly wanted to short-circuit any distinction between the two (at least in his analysis of MJ), arguing that if whites are buying Jackson’s albums and dancing to his music then any discussion of “race” is irrelevant and disingenuous. Or, at the very least, he appears to argue that “racial” issues are insignificant except insofar as they manifest themselves in palpably racist ways.
Is that true? For many academics who spend time reading and writing about “Identity Issues,” the answer is probably a lot more complicated. But that doesn’t say much. We spend a lot of time complicating seemingly straightforward issues, no? In fact, part of the point becomes demonstrating the sometimes hidden backdoor pathways between seemingly innocent racial inflections and self-evidently explicit racist outcomes.
Charting such a course, however, is never easy, especially when so many detractors would dismiss the very project as an ideological rabbit hole without any real bottom or productive purpose.
Where individuals draw their lines between the merely racial and the legitimately racist explains quite a bit about how they approach other contemporary social problems. This racial vs. racist division is not just about how people view the life and legacy of MJ.
With the Supreme Court taking a plank out of Title VII (in its 5-4 decision on the New Haven firefighters’ case), we saw them making a clear distinction between “racial” and “racist,” drawing a dividing line in ways that reduce racism to explicit forms of purposeful bigotry and denying would-be inadvertent “racial” outcomes consideration under the law. Indeed, the entire affirmative-action debate plays out on top of this racial/racist difference. And there are plenty of folks who would agree with another version of O’Reilly by claiming that any injection of race into the conversation is racist.
It is telling, however, that most of the discussions of America’s potential transcendence of race (with the ascendency of Obama to the White House) label the move post-racial as opposed to post-racist. Somewhere in that subtle difference, I think, is a collective appreciation of racism’s real intractability.
