My early college years really marked a shift in my thinking about race. After teaching college students for the past several years I realize that I am certainly not alone. For many young people this is the first time they are really forced to confront racism and actually engage in conversations across race. I had purposely chosen to attend a college that was racially mixed and was in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and I thought that I would be able to learn and put much of the racism behind me. Of course, I was 18, and I was wrong. However, most young adults are different from me. My experience is that they would prefer to go on living a largely segregated life just as long as there is no one else there to remind them of it. This is the difficulty teaching about racism in the colorblind era. Many students believe racism is over, or they believe that it is confined to Neo-Nazis, the KKK, or “Hicks.” I would say the vast majority of my White students and at least half of my students of color think racism is not a problem and it is something they have no experience with. One of the reasons they think this way is because they do not have an understanding of institutionalized racism.
One of the problems is that prior to college, students learn almost nothing about racism. Many students learn about diversity and multiculturalism, but not racism. This distinction is significant because the terms diversity and multiculturalism, have become synonymous with the notion that “we are all a little different, but we should all like each other.” The problem with this way of teaching is that it ignores the fact that racism is not about how different we are or who we “love or hate.” The primary manifestation of racism is structural, which means that our social and economic opportunities are profoundly connected to race. If we all love each other and know that we are different, we will still have racism. People can love people and truly be racist towards them; moreover, racism isn’t just something located in individuals. Some times the rules themselves and their outcomes are racist. Take the education system as an example. Even the most nonracist teacher must contend with the fact that school districts are generally drawn based on town lines, and towns are often racially segregated. Certainly, racial attitudes shape neighborhood segregation, but these institutional arrangements take on a life of their own. Many of my students will say they don’t have many friends from different backgrounds because there were no people from different background in their neighborhoods. When I say that racism causes this, the immediate reaction is…”I’m not racist. I just didn’t have the opportunity to meet people from other races.” Whether that individual person is racist or not doesn’t matter from my way of thinking. Racism has an impact because of the structure, and the individual person doesn’t much matter regardless of whether or not he or she is racist. I know this sounds defeatist, but it doesn’t have to be.
In my own experience the hardest thing to teach students about racism is that it exists in individuals, groups, and institutions. At the individual level, racism is about a particular persons attitudes and behaviors. At the group level racism is about collective attitudes and behaviors, and at the structural level racism is about the fundamental organization of society. One very good example of structural racism would be the electoral college. Superficially, the electoral college is a raceless policy, but in the end White votes for president count more because of it (not to mention the wholesale disenfranchisement of predominantly Black Washington, DC.). Bob Wing, former editor of Colorlines magazine details a few of the ways this works. He says:
The good news is that the influence of liberal and progressive voters of color is increasingly being felt in certain states. They have become decisive in the most populous states, all of which went to Gore except Ohio, Texas, and (maybe?) Florida. In California an optimist might even envision a rebirth of Democratic liberalism a couple of elections down the road, based largely on votes of people of color.
The bad news is that the two-party, winner-take-all, Electoral College system of this country ensures, even requires, that voters of color be marginalized or totally ignored.“The two-party, Electoral College system ensures that almost half of voters of color are marginalized or totally ignored.”
The Electoral College negates the votes of almost half of all people of color. For example, 53 percent of all blacks live in the Southern states, where this year, as usual, they voted over 90 percent Democratic. However, white Republicans out-voted them in every Southern state (and every border state except Maryland). As a result, every single Southern Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush. While nationally, whites voted 54-42 for Bush, Southern whites, as usual, gave over 70 percent of their votes to him. They thus completely erased the massive Southern black (and Latino and Native American) vote for Gore in that region.
Since Electoral College votes go entirely to whichever candidate wins the plurality in each state, whether that plurality be by one vote or one million votes, the result was the same as if blacks and other people of color in the South had not voted at all. Similarly negated were the votes of the millions of Native Americans and Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana, and Texas. The tyranny of the white majority prevails.
Wing goes on to detail how racism shaped the development of the electoral college,
The Constitution provided that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person (but given no citizenship rights) for purposes of determining how many members each state would be granted in the House of Representatives. This provision vastly increased the representation of the slave states in Congress.
At the demand of James Madison and other Virginia slaveholders, this pro-slavery allocation of Congresspersons also became the basis for allocation of votes in the Electoral College. It is a dirty little secret that the Electoral College was rigged up for the express purpose of translating the disproportionate Congressional power of the slaveholders into undue influence over the election of the presidency. Virginia slaveholders proceeded to hold the presidency for 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years.Since slavery was abolished, the new justification for the Electoral College is that it allows smaller states to retain some impact on elections. And so it does–to the benefit of conservative white Republican states. As Harvard law professor Lani Guinier reports, in Wyoming, one Electoral College vote corresponds to 71,000 voters, while in large-population states (where the votes of people of color are more numerous) the ratio is one electoral vote to over 200,000 voters. So much for one person, one vote.
This year the Electoral College will apparently enable the winner of the conservative white states to prevail over the winner of the national popular vote–a tyranny of the minority.
This election system continues until today, in spite of how open minded modern politicians, political parties, or racial groups may or may not be.
To some extent when people learn about institutional racism, it can be very defeating because institutional racism is much more difficult to challenge. But there are also advantages. One major advantage is that it removes some of the guilt students (especially White students) have about racism. Once young people realize racism is less about blaming individuals (not that there isn’t some blame to go around) and more about strucutral organization; their defensiveness goes down a little. However, discussions of structural racism must also include examples of how strucutral racism can be challenged. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950-1960s provides such an example.
Because racism is pervasive and institutional, it needs to be attacked at the individual, group, and structural levels. I think this is highly relevant when we discuss the legacy of Martin Luther King because Dr. King always understood the institutional nature of racism, particularly at the end of his career. People often forget that when he was assassinated in Memphis, he was trying to help low income predominantly African American workers organize. Certainly, we can work on changes our individual attitudes, but in order to challenge racism today we cannot forget the important of social movements as a means of changing the social structure. A movement to end the electoral college, DC disenfranchisement, and the structure of the criminal justice system would be a few areas where we can begin a modern Civil Rights Movement.
This post can also be found at Rachels Tavern.
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WTF?
The three-fifths of a person reduces the amount of members (as during the early days of the U.S, no black had full citizenship rights, and most blacks were slaves).
The three-fiths was more likely a measure against the slave-holders.
After that display of “logic”, I just can not take anything that Mr. Wing writes seriously.
Tuomas you said, “The three-fiths was more likely a measure against the slave-holders.”
3/5 was a compromise. Both the north and the south did not wants slaves to have voting rights and other citizenship rights (i.e. marriage, right to own property, etc.), but the south wanted slaves to be counted as one full person for voting purposes. The north felt that slaves should not be counted at all for voting purposes since they were not citizens.
Thus, this south ended up getting disproportionate representation because slaves counted even though they could not vote. So for example a northern area with less slavery may have 50 free Whites and 10 enslaved Africans. Thus their representation would be worth 56 people. The southern areas had more slavery at the time. Thus a southern area with 50 free Whites and 40 slaves would end up getting equivalent to 74.
Hmm…
Well, that’s a fair point. I was bit too hasty with my criticism.
While I agree that the original definition of eligible voter was racist, I think that the numbers you are using in the Electoral College argument could equally well apply to a rural/urban dynamic. In colonial times, the North had the superior numbers of white men, and many of them were living in cities. (The three biggest cities in colonial times, if I remember correctly, were Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.) The South, on the other hand, had significantly fewer numbers of white men, and these were (for the most part) living on farms and plantations. The original design of the Electoral College, and the reason for the compromise on counting slaves, was intended to ensure that the citydwellers couldn’t automatically win every election. I’m not sure to what extent the Founding Fathers foresaw women and black freemen, let alone slaves, being able to vote when they drew up this system – I seem to remember from my reading about colonial history that there was considerable concern about letting what nowadays might be referred to as “poor white trash” get the upper hand. I would need to think about how maintaining this system nowadays would relate to modern racism and racist institutions for a while though, without the rural/urban lens.
I also agree that the current disenfranchisement of D.C. residents is largely racial in nature. There is no moral reason for the situation to continue, IMO. However, to quote economist Milton Friedman, “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Which could be applied to political compromises of all stripes.
Eh. The examples you give are pretty weak examples of institutionalized racism. In a society as soaked in racist attitudes as ours indisputably is, the electoral college is not on the agenda of any rational anti-racist – unless the anti-racist actually simply wants to abolish the EC in order to make democracy more direct, and is just using “racism” as a cloak to deflect criticism of that effort. It is simply an accident of history and geography that the electoral system is benefiting white conservatives (to the degree that it is – things are more complex than suggested here). If things had broken slightly differently, the electoral college would be privileging the votes of blacks or other minority groups (as it has in the past). A “racism” that is contingent on accidents isn’t much of a racism. I’m certainly not going to waste cycles on it.
Where structural racism is really hurting black Americans is in the transmission of cultural values compatible with economic success. As a species, we are very much monkey see, monkey do, when it comes to inculcating values to children. They do what they see; you can talk about the rights of women all day long, but if you’re hitting your wife, that’s the value that your kids take away about the treatment of women. Currently, poor blacks are very rarely exposed to the behavioral information they need to see and assimilate in order to become non-poor due to economic segregation. Poor black kids don’t see the successes of the black middle class very often, and are left with role models that lead in dead-end directions. That’s the structural problem that’s killing black achievement.
The use of the Electoral College and the 3/5 rule to ensure Southern hold on power is well known among Revolutionary/early 19th C. era historians.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is something similar to your housing discrimination example. If a social institution was created using underlying racist assumptions, is it _necessarily_ still racist even after the base on which the assumption rests changes dramatically? The Electoral College was created with a specific purpose in mind – to prevent the “unwashed masses” of lower-class white men from having more voting power than the presumably better-bathed elite white men. Now that almost all living U.S. citizens 18 years of age and older can vote, regardless of skin color or sex, is the Electoral College still racist? I submit that the Electoral College is classist, but I think that local voting laws and practices are where the racism lies. But that’s just me.
Another thing the EC does is make the votes of people who live in states with alot of nonvoters (ferriners, felons, children, and eligible nonvoters) count for more. Because kids and legal immigrants count as population, but can’t vote.
It also empowers people who voted for the winning side in a very close election in the state.
OTOH, presidential elections are at the end winner take all, so except in the event where the EC goes against the popular vote, everyone who voted for the loser, their votes didn’t count.
I think one of the difficulties in teaching this is that we use the same word, “racism,” for several different (albeit causally related) things: individual racism, group racism, and structural racism.
Feminist theory makes a good distinction between sexism and patriarchy, where “sexism” is analogous to “individual racism”, and “patriarchy” to “group racism” or “structural racism.”
Many of my students will say they don’t have many friends from different backgrounds because there were no people from different background in their neighborhoods. When I say that racism causes this, the immediate reaction is…”I’m not racist.
I hope that this is just rhetorical license and you’re not actually up before a class making such a statement. It’s not racism, meaning a conscious or unconscious rejection of people based on skin color, rather it is simply preference for the familiar over the unfamiliar. Go play around with this housing simulation applet and set the condition to no ethnic preferences and also choose economic disparity and see what results. While you’re at it why not play around with the other assumptions, like the fact that many ethnic minorities do not automatically presume to find living in white neighborhoods to be preferrable to living amongst people they find more familiar. You’re not really trying to say that to combat “racism” one must reject the familiar and embrace the unfamiliar, are you?
As for the argument of the EC being structurally racist, I agree with the above commenters that this is indeed a poor choice and I’ll add that your analysis neglects to account for internal migration within the US. So, a jurisdiction, like D.C., that is predominantly Black today, wasn’t predominantly Black a few centuries ago and it’s fallacious reasoning to point to the circumstances of today being the result of a conscious decision made 200 years ago under different conditions.
Part of the reason the current electoral college ends up granting more votes to Whites is because almost all of the small population states–Vermont, South Dakota, North Dakota, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire and so on are disproportionately White. Because every state has 2 senators, these states end up getting more votes per person than the larger states. Thus, if you calculate it, on the whole states with more racial minorities end up having fewer votes.
Vermont, South Dakota, North Dakota, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire and so on are disproportionately White
But why are they disproportionately White? With unrestricted rights to internal migration the racial balance in these states can change over time. Look at what happened with the various Black migrations, and the current Hispanic migrations.
If you want to play up the racism angle then I’d look at the White Flight from California over the last generation and the consequences of that phenomonon. Not that I think it was and is a racist response because it is primarily driven by other social factors linked to race, like tax policy, crime, etc. I can see why you would call it racism, though I wouldn’t agree.
disproportionately White
What’s disproportionately white, pray tell?
History of settlement and land ownership in rural upper Midwest states is predominantly white, and the manufacturing jobs and other attractive non-farm jobs are insufficiently numerous to attract large numbers of blacks who may find the social situation relatively unfriendly (Idaho, etc white-supremacy militias, for instance, attract noone other than other white supremacist gun nuts). Plus, the weather sucks sufficiently that US-born WHITES not from the region don’t migrate there in great numbers, at least to rural areas. I’d move to Minneapolis, but I can’t say I would go anywhere else in the region, and my specific ethnicity is well represented in the rural upper midwest (sveeeedish – if norwegian, insert joke here).
As far as I can tell, when people talk about “institutional racism,” they mean anything that, on average, affects people of different races in different ways, regardless of whether or not there’s any actual racism involved.
Is that correct?
Lee:
In the 1792 election, nine of the fifteen states had no popular vote for president (electors were selected by the state legislatures), and the great unwashed generally couldn’t vote at all because of property requirements. So it seems unlikely that the Electoral College was designed to keep power out of the hands of the masses.
Brandon Berg: But if you read the letters and commentaries of the men involved in designing the voting system (and the names are stuck in my class notes, so I’d have to go do the research again to find them, my apologies), one of the big concerns was how to structure things so that there wouldn’t be “mob rule”. For the election of 1792, if I remember correctly, the decision was made to leave it up to the states how the voting was to be done – and nine of them chose not to hold direct elections. I think that’s a pretty strong statement that they didn’t trust their own residents at some level.
Rachel S. said,
“The two-party, Electoral College system ….”
The Electoral College system has nothing to do with how many political parties there are. You can have 3, or 100, or none.
The Electoral College negates the votes of almost half of all people of color. For example, 53 percent of all blacks live in the Southern states, where this year, as usual, they voted over 90 percent Democratic. However, white Republicans out-voted them in every Southern state (and every border state except Maryland). As a result, every single Southern Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush.
The Electoral College system does not require that the states allocate their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. The states are free to allocate their electoral votes on a state-wide proportional basis, or on a Congressional district basis (where the majority vote in a given Congressional district apportions that one district’s vote, and the votes allocated on the basis of the Senate seats go to the State’s overall winner).
There is an analysis of how the Electoral College vote would have changed if the Congressional district basis was used to apportion EC voting that I’ve seen out on the web somewhere, but I have no time to search for it now. IIRC, there would only have been a change in 2 elections since the country’s beginning, neither of them recent.
Note that if you read the Constitution, there is absolutely no provision or mention of political parties. George Washington actually advised against them – even though you’ll see him listed as a Federalist, he never joined that party or used it to support his elections. Parties are only mentioned in state-level laws.
IIHMW, I’d make political parties pay for their primary elections themselves, instead of having them paid for by my taxes. Why should I pay for the Democrats or Republicans or Greens to figure out who they should have run for office? I’d just have one general election; if no one gets a majority, then cut the number down to the top, oh, say, 3 vote getters and have a runoff.
Hi friends, I dont know much about racism as they call it. I have been called names based on my race, but then again I have been called names for being extremely thin too. What is the problem and where should this kind of naming convention stop? The most recent examples are the duke university case and mckinney case. Both cases can and probably will be addressed by an institution of law. However, in the Mckinney case, the alleged attacker did attack without much reason. In the duke case, not much concrete evidence has been accounted for yet. Either ways both are calling it as an incidence related to race. I dont understand, why do people have to relate it to race? Isnt the crime itself enough to punish the people who committed it? Would it be any less heinous if the crimes were to be committed by people from the same race?
From a bystanders perspective, I think more capital is made out of the alleged incident than really should be and that makes me question the motives of people involved. I think people who want racial equality should refrain from supporting individuals before knowing the facts of the matter. Doing that will only serve to fuel anti-racist and pro-racist arguments.
I dont think many will understand my view point, but I hope some of you do.