Looking back, I realize that my peers and I were invited by community leaders, both sacred and secular, to exercise a simple "sleight of mind,:" to believe, without regard to evidence, that those downgraded and placed below us in the pecking order fully deserved this fate. No injustice was involved, hence we were not complicit in anything disreputable. If black people, or brown for that matter, did poorly it was because of bad attitude, poor parenting, and cultural degeneracy. Evidence that whites with bad attitudes, poor parenting and terrible cultural role models tended to do just fine, was irrelevant.
Not so long ago, a group of white peers, many proud to be called "liberal," to a man refused to acknowledge my proposition that prison violence is less likely orchestrated by powerless black prisoners than by the powerful officials who run prisons: white wardens, obedient to white mayors and governors, controlled by white elites. Nor would they consider that crime infested black communities might well be ruled by thugs kept in business by police and FBI. I assumed this to be mainly a function of their lack of exposure to sources illuminating how white forces act to insure black inadequacy: popular movies such as the film Boys in the Hood, or documentaries such as Mario Van Peebles 1995 Panther, or surveys such as Tara Herivel and Paul Wright's 2003 collection of studies and essays, Prison Nation, or the archives of journals such as the Black Agenda Report and Black Commentator Imagine my surprise at how their perceptions shifted dramatically as the evening wore on. As alcohol flowed, one after another indicated at length how well and how long they had perceived exactly what these sources reveal.
When sober, facts have little relevance for people whose need to believe in the inadequacy of others is rooted in their own insecurity. This was certainly the case regarding my teenage peer group. We desperately clung to our "right" to see ourselves as society's potential movers and shakers rather than small-fry allowed to act as bullies backed by people with real power. We blotted out awareness of ourselves as parties to, if not designers of a system of cruel repression. To have done otherwise would have placed us at odds with principles of morality and ethics we wanted to believe defined us. Some of us have broken this pattern, but many, including some who consider themselves to be politically progressive, have not. This fact always baffled me, but finally its root cause seems clear.
3
Relinquishing racism requires acknowledging one's failure to declare independence of a process that denigrates oneself as an individual. In Escape From Freedom, social-psychiatrist Erich Fromm, a colleague of Allport, built upon Theodore Adorno's studies of authoritarianism to provide the insight that this may be the most damaging effect of all. The "main theme of this book" Fromm states, is that man, "the more he becomes an 'individual,' has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self." Kicking racism, in short, is no less difficult than kicking any addiction. And like any other addiction, Fromm implies, racism should be regarded as a form of illness.
Adorno and Fromm found the pathology of authoritarianism, with racism one of its core components, to be powerful and complex. It renders its proletarian benefactors passive and weak, ready to coalesce into angry or obedient mobs but unable to pursue the goals of a self-actualized citizenry. "The loss of the self has increased the necessity to conform," Fromm tells us , "for it results in a profound doubt of one's own identity." This terrible alienation from self he calls the "despair of the human automaton," which he finds to be "fertile soil of the political purposes of Fascism".
During the 1970s, Herbert Marcuse reigned as the most publicly acclaimed member of The Frankfurt School, a group which included Fromm, Dollard and Adorno. In One Dimensional Man he asked how ordinary citizens, implicitly white people, could free themselves of self-destructive mindsets such as racism. These only set them up to fill the very role of those they felt irrationally privileged to lord it over. Marcuse urged his readers to acknowledge and reject the pathologies that rendered them mere shadows of whom they could be.
Most psychological studies since Allport have focused on how racism adversely affects its victims. While these effects are terrible and debilitating, they would not, however, seem to undermine the basic functionality of the black community. Myrdal's An American Dilemma team, one of the best funded and most prestigious collaborations of social scientists ever mobilized, found post-slavery African Americans to be a demographic as poised and ready for assimilation as any European immigrants had ever been. This finding contradicted the scholars' initial assumption that blacks must have suffered severe psychological damage during slavery. Extensive interviews and tests revealed no support for this conclusion. However, they found substantial evidence that white racism would very likely create a barrier to black assimilation. Subsequent research, including their own, reinforced this finding.
In 1966 James Coleman published the weakly researched but widely reported Coleman Report, purporting to show that black culture failed to support stable family life. It was heavily attacked by sociologists and social psychologists immediately, but achieved huge publicity and media support. Two decades later, following social scientists' unanimous endorsement of William J. Wilson's elegant studies showing that in U.S. society families of all colors deteriorate when men can't get work, Coleman continues to be cited. . While Wilson never characterized racism as basic ruling-class policy in the United States, he demonstrated that any genuine attempt to understand the conditions of America's sub-populations of color must abandon focus upon their allegedly unique social or individual psychology. It must address the unique context in which they live, created by social forces external to them. ..
4
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
