Racism alive, or in death throes?

If Obama were white, would they still hate him? Of course they would, the people who oppose his policies. Does that mean racism is either largely non-existent or irrelevant in the U.S.? No, it does not.

Your perception of race in America today depends a lot on who you are and where you go. People almost never utter racist comments in my presence. There are two reasons. The first has to do with who I am and what I do. People who know anything about me know that I would not look kindly on such statements so they don’t make them. The other reason is more interesting. Making racist comments has become a private vice like getting drunk. Only a few people do it in public. People do it only among those who won’t criticize them for it. There are places where such comments are at the very least tolerated and people who want to spout off go there to do it. During Prohibition there were speakeasies where you could safely drink. The same situation prevails for taboo speech or any other taboo activity. If you know where to go, you can find it, frequently in its ugliest form.  When any activity is strongly sanctioned, speakeasies for it will develop. It doesn’t matter if it is dog fighting, illegal gambling, using illegal drugs, or making racist comments. It doesn’t even matter if it is illegal or not. If the people doing it have reason to fear even informal sanctions, they will find places to do it without interference.

I have been surprised recently by family members and close friends who have described unusual breaches of this taken-for-granted protocol. They have reported “indiscretions” of people whose prejudices heretofore were unknown to them. They have been surprised by little angry comments slipped into conversations with friends they thought they knew well. I don’t know what to make of it and neither do the people telling me their stories. Have their friends changed and become more prejudiced, or are they the same people they always were, but we didn’t know how they felt? I simply don’t know. Has the rhetoric of people like Glenn Beck changed the landscape, or are these pundits simply tapping a deep well of anger than has been kept out of sight in recent decades? When you oppose health care proposals on what you believe to be their merits, that is one thing. When you say that the plan constitutes reparations to black people, that is quite another. The airways have been filled with such viewpoints on talk radio and earlier from Southern politicians, but until recently television was spared; television was Walter Cronkite.  Radio was cheap and all sorts of programs made it onto radio that no television network would have touched. Then came cable. Has cable actually changed the country, or has it just made visible what was always there? I don’t know. I do know the trend is worrisome. We are not Rwanda; I know that. Still I can’t quite get it out of my head that the unraveling of that country happened with significant help from a radio station that played popular music interspersed with hateful messages. The people who disapproved of the messages failed to understand the power of what was being spewed out. They couldn’t believe anyone would take it seriously. They were wrong.

I don’t know if we are in trouble or not. I do know that race has always been a dangerous flashpoint for us. There is a lot of money to be made in feeding people’s fear and anger. I want to believe that what I am hearing is not a harbinger of our future but the panicked cries of that old demon racism that knows it is cornered and its days of roaring among us are numbered. 

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a Mary Baldwin College chaplain.