Why do we still have racism? Maybe, the efforts to combat racism have actually backfired and fueled racism. A recent survey of the social science indicates that current efforts to stem racism may serve the politics of upper-class White American liberals rather than the interests of minorities.
White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities. Rather than actually dismantling white supremacy or meaningfully empowering people of color, efforts often seem to be oriented towards consolidating social and cultural capital in the hands of the ‘good’ whites.
Charges of “racism,” for instance, are primarily deployed against the political opponents of upwardly-mobile, highly-educated progressive white people.
The politicized nature of these accusations is not lost on their intended targets. The blowback against a perceived overuse of “racism” charges seems to have significantly contributed to the rise of Donald Trump and other demagogic figures in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Similar problems emerge with respect to other popular approaches: training on ‘multiculturalism’ seems to reinforce race-essentialism among those who go through it. Teaching whites about racial privilege seems to do little to change attitudes or behaviors towards African Americans — it merely increases resentment against lower-SES whites.
Metanalysis after metanalysis fails to find strong empirical links between “implicitly racist” attitudes and actual racist behaviors in the world. It seems as though the primary effect of such training, among those who go through it, is higher levels of racial resentment.
Excerpted and adapted from “Who gets to define racism?” by Musa al-Gharbi in the May 15, 2020 Context magazine, a publication of the American Sociological Association.
