State of Denial

We live in interesting times. These days we can all pretty much acknowledge that race does not exist as a scientific construct; these days, we can all agree that racism is wrong. It breaks down pretty much after that. For example, I think Southern Partisan, the neo-Confederate magazine John Ashcroft praised as "set[ting] the record straight" in its defense of "Southern patriots," subscribes to racist ideas. But Christopher Sullivan, its editor in chief, would beg to disagree: "A racist is someone who fire-bombs churches or who hates people of a different race or thinks that a person of a different race shouldn't have the same rights that they do." Supremacist ideas, according to Sullivan, are not necessarily racist because they are not always premised on hate. Thus, he is not, repeat, not, a racist when he muses: "Could somebody love a person of another race and still think that they were inferior? Yes, I think so."

Clearly, acknowledging there's no biological basis for race is not the same as saying it has no force in the world. Acknowledging that we do not pop out of the womb with our religion, or national identity, or political ideology inscribed on our foreheads is not to say that belief about others or ideology about color doesn't matter.

Yet nationally, the momentum for addressing these historical problems is on the wane. In my last column I wrote of my concern about Proposition 54, on California's recall ballot, which would prohibit the gathering of statistics regarding race, color, ethnicity and national origin. Police investigations and publicly funded medical experimentation would be the notable exceptions. This sweeping suppression of all mention of such categorization would make it virtually impossible to monitor profiling in police departments, in housing rentals and sales, in lending and banking practices, in public schools and hospitals or to fully comprehend the implications of environmental disasters or pollution. Yet again, if the one goal that most of us can agree upon is the elimination of prejudice, why is the attempt to measure any gap contested so bitterly? Why this proposed muzzling of the messenger?

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