Team White

Posted on September 8, 2009 in Equality Hatred

Training against racism is like toilet training. It’s something every parent must do.

People are going to grab onto the latest study out of the University of Texas and declare “See. Racism is natural.” This conclusion is based on a scientific fact: children tend to bond with those who are like them. Clothe some children in red shirts and others in blue shirts, they will insist that those who wear the same shirt color as they wear bear certain superior qualities. They like to segregate.

This could be the basis of hate, Newsweek thinks, but we’re left with a problem: how come some people rose above it all before the emancipation of the slaves and the civil rights movement? One study has an interesting conclusion:

Of all those Vittrup told to talk openly about interracial friendship, only six families managed to actually do so. And, for all six, their children dramatically improved their racial attitudes in a single week. Talking about race was clearly key. Reflecting later about the study, Vittrup said, “A lot of parents came to me afterwards and admitted they just didn’t know what to say to their kids, and they didn’t want the wrong thing coming out of the mouth of their kids.”

I’m very suspicious of studies which say we’re doomed because of our nature. The Newsweek article carries that theme heavily in its headline. But the real story is more complicated: we choose based on who we’re around. White kids are fine with black people if they are around black people. It’s the message that gets passed on to them that matters.

I went to a racially integrated junior high and high school. I was attacked by black kids twice. This is the obsession of white parents — that blacks have switchblades that they will use to gut you. But I was bullied and attacked by white kids many more times. Where teachers and administrators leave the handling of violence to the kids, bullying is going to happen regardless of the races. My own experience — and that of many others — is that people tend to bully those of their own race.

It’s a bit like the plot of A Soldier’s Story — members of a group try to enforce their idea of group loyalty on “their own”. In the eyes of the whites who attacked me, I was a wimp because I would not hit back. That I didn’t believe in race hatred (an idea that I developed in spite of my parents who while not Klansmen still reveled in their own milder kind of hatred) made me a further pariah. I had to be set in line and if that didn’t work, culled. I remember even then how so-called Christians believed in the concept of racial inferiority because of their interpretations of the Bible. They would be civil and even kind towards the blacks they knew. But among whites, they would come out as haters. I have no doubt how they voted in school elections.

There’s this whole team idea that comes into play. On its most benign level, it’s the high school football or basketball game. You are one with the team no matter what color they are. But there’s still this animosity that gets encouraged against members of other teams that can reinforce racism when a white team from the suburbs plays a black inner city one. There’s a tendency to step it up to higher levels. Republicans obviously see themselves as still involved in a huge game in which they must destroy the Democrats at all costs. Team America is busy hunting down the Taliban in Afghanistan. And a large chunk of ignorant whites continue to hate blacks.

Maybe the discrimination of differences isn’t so bad. Maybe it is all right for whites to prefer whites and blacks to prefer blacks, to make their own cultures. Diversity is founded on that principle. But I think the root of the problem is this: We’re not in a big high school death match. We’re not required to think that the other team is Evil Incarnate — to be excluded, kept down, defeated, obliterated. Do we really need to see everything we do as a competition?

Enough of teams, I say, and up with people. Accept that everyone gets a place in our society that is largely their choice tempered by their abilities. Team White is still caught in the old thinking. It’s time that it reforms and learns the new plays.