Post-Racial Race Challenges

Henry Louis Gates, a prominent Harvard professor, is presumed to be a burglar as he seeks to enter his home in Cambridge – and is arrested even after he shows two forms of ID.  Black and Latino children attending a summer camp are disinvited from swimming in a pool in a suburb of Philadelphia.

Would either incident have occurred if the people in question were white?  And are whites and people of color likely to answer this question differently?  And most importantly, what role does race continue to play in a society that many have proclaimed “post-racial”?

Since the election of President Obama in November, the idea that we are in a post-racial era has become commonplace in some quarters.  And it is true that most Americans take the idea of racial equality seriously and view themselves as non-racist.  So if post-racial means that the vast majority of people want to be non-racist, then we have made sufficiently great strides that we can call ourselves post-racial.  But if post-racial means that race has become irrelevant to shaping peoples’ experiences – then we have a ways to go.

President Obama doesn’t seem to have subscribed to the post-racial claim.  While he rarely talks about race specifically, when he addressed the NAACP earlier this month, he painted a sophisticated picture of our country’s racial progress.  He acknowledged our achievements – illustrated most vividly by his own story – and the fact that the vast majority of people subscribe to egalitarian values.  But he also talked in detail about the work yet to be done by both the government and the people. 

Not surprisingly, the President’s admonition for parents to put away the Xbox has received the most press attention.  But he was as passionate about the need to eliminate structural barriers to equality – for states and cities to provide excellent early education opportunities and comprehensive health care.

Now our distance from a post-racial America does not mean that all whites are guaranteed privilege.  As President Obama would be the first to acknowledge, many whites are struggling as the economy sheds jobs and the housing crisis continues to force families into foreclosure.  Health care and college costs strike across racial lines. 

Race, though, continues to infiltrate both opportunity and aspirations for equal dignity in ways that are reminiscent of a past in which ideals of equality were not so broadly shared. 

What recent events force us to confront is why race still divides us if our consciously held values reject racism.  Recent advances in science tell us that our unconscious biases hold part of the answer.  Many Americans – even those who are egalitarian – continue to harbor unconscious biases against people of color, which reflect the array of negative images in the media that inundate every American. 

Unconscious bias – and the harm to individuals and society that results – can be challenged.  Our consciously held egalitarian values can trump – but this is most likely to occur when we are aware of the potential for bias. 

In a fascinating study of jury decision-making, scientists found that white jurors were most likely to treat black and white defendants the same in scenarios involving cross-racial crimes (black defendants/white victims and white defendants/black victims) in which race was made explicit (“you can’t laugh at a black/white man”).  By contrast, in the same scenario, without the comment, white jurors were more likely to convict a black defendant and give him a longer sentence. 

If the police officer who arrested Dr. Gates thought that he was motivated by his unconscious assumptions about a black man in a white neighborhood, he likely would have acted very differently.  If the white parents who pulled their children out of the pool when black and Latino children jumped in realized that their behavior would be reminiscent of the Jim Crow south, they, too, would be appalled.  If we allow ourselves to step back and reflect on our behavior, our values of fairness are more likely to guide us.  The way to achieve racial justice is not simply asserting our aspiration for a post-racial society, but by constructively engaging racial issues not just in our intent but also in our structures and our unconscious bias.  

Research suggests that the best way to achieve fairness in matters of race is not by being "color blind"  but by constructively engaging race.  Just assuming that issues of race are a thing of the past, sadly, dooms them to be part of our future.