Racism need not be overt to be destructive

Friday, Aug. 31, 2007 | 10 p.m.

Atlanta

A few years ago, after an out-of-town friend snagged tickets to the Masters, we ended up riding the last few miles to the storied Augusta golf course in an RV crammed with half a dozen guys from South Carolina.

They were introduced as prominent businessmen in their hometown, and as we inched our way through traffic, I was astonished when they began passing time by telling each other jokes about black people -- although “black people” wasn't the term they used -- of a crudeness I hadn't heard since childhood.

My shock came not at the racism -- it's no secret that racism remains a force in this country with very real consequences -- but at the casualness with which it was expressed among “just us white guys.” It came as even more of a shock to my friend, on one of his first trips to the South.

Because racism is so rarely displayed blatantly these days, its influence usually has to be sensed rather than seen. In a strange way, that makes it all the more powerful and complicated.

For example, the hidden, secretive nature of racism makes its influence deniable even when it clearly exists, as in the disproportionate sentencing of black men vs. that of white men for the same crimes.

Conversely, it also means that some black people will sense racism at work even in cases when it probably doesn't exist. Its nebulous nature also means that people can cynically claim themselves to be victims of racism when the real cause of their problems is their own stupidity or criminality.

Michael Vick, to his credit, has not made that claim, although others have made it on his behalf. As far as I can tell, those claims are bogus -- racism has played no discernible role in the outcome of Vick's legal case.

That doesn't mean, however, that racism hasn't reared its ugly head in other ways.

At its core, racism is a judgment imposed on people based not on their merits as individuals but on their membership in a racial group. That's why many black people cringe when another black person is cast in a bad light. They understand that for some, one person's failure will become evidence of the group's failings.

I think it's hard for white people to place ourselves in that position. You can draw analogies -- a postal worker might cringe when a story breaks about some mail sorter out in California “going postal” on co-workers with a shotgun -- but racial identity cuts deeper than mere occupation.

Likewise, the excesses of a Britney Spears or Paris Hilton are deemed evidence of their individual shortcomings, not as evidence of the moral decay of white culture. The alleged crimes of Steven J. Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, charged with breaking into the home of a Connecticut doctor, sexually assaulting his wife and daughters before tying them to a bed and burning them to death, cast no larger shadow on white people. But had that crime been committed by two black men with a similar record of criminality and drug use, larger lessons would have been drawn in some quarters.

In a similar manner, Vick's mistakes have been viewed by some as confirmation of a “thug culture” infecting black America. Not surprisingly, black Americans feel themselves linked to Vick and grouped with Vick whether they want to be or not, and they can't help but feel that Vick's fall is in some way their own fall, because they feel that they too will pay a price for it. That also helps explain why a relatively small number of black people have rushed to defend Vick; in a sense they feel they are defending themselves as well.

That sense of group responsibility -- imposed from the outside -- is itself a form of racism, far more subtle than racial jokes but toxic nonetheless. There's no cure for it -- it will exist as long as racism exists. But by acknowledging and discussing its existence, we can rob it of some of its power.

Jay Bookman is a columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.