Changing nature of racism

SIGNIFICANCE:In the United States, overt racism—such as legal discrimination and open use of derogatory language—declined sharply following the civil rights gains of the 1960s and 1970s. However racism lingers on in the form of covert racism, often manifest through the use of “code words” and in subtly, even unconsciously, racist attitudes and policies.

Various ethnic groups have experienced racism—both overt and covert—since the colonization of the Americas by European explorers in the 1500s. Although some of the worst forms of discrimination, including slavery, have been abolished, racism still exists in the United States. Recent US history contains numerous examples: During World War II, Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps, and until the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans were legally segregated from whites in residential areas and public facilities, including schools, buses, and restaurants. Despite the legislative gains of the civil rights movement, in the twenty-first century people of color continue to be incarcerated at far greater rates than white people and experience all manner of well-documented instances of racism, such as being stopped more frequently by police.

Decline of Overt Racism

Some of the events and legislation that contributed to a climate of reform and the gradual demise of overt racism include the 1954 US Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education, which legally ended discriminatory “separate but equal” policies for whites and blacks, and Rosa Parks’s 1955 refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger and the subsequent Montgomery bus boycott. The 1963 civil rights marches in Birmingham, Alabama, and the Freedom March on Washington, D.C., where Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, helped bring about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on the grounds of race or sex. Another important piece of legislation was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which banned barriers to free exercise of the right to vote and led to a dramatic increase in black voter registration.

In most parts of the United States, using racial epithets and engaging in overtly racist activities is socially unacceptable, and throughout the nation, denying someone housing, employment, education, or opportunity on the basis of race is illegal. However, racism has not disappeared from American culture. Some examples of overt racism can still be found, such as the 1998 murder of a black hitchhiker, James Byrd, Jr., in Jasper County, Texas. Byrd died after being picked up by three white men, tied to the back of their truck, and dragged. Many human rights advocacy groups noted a spike in racial hate crimes and a general emboldening of white supremacist groups during the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump and following his election. Still, for the most part, racism has gone underground, becoming either covert or unconscious.

Covert Racism

Covert racism, sometimes called inferential racism, is the form of racism that develops in a society that declares itself to be free of racism despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Such racism, according to cultural theorist Stuart Hall, is actually more dangerous and difficult to combat than overt racism, simply because it is harder to pinpoint and because it is often expressed unconsciously by “well-meaning liberals” with ostensibly antiracist intent.

One way that covert racism operates is by recoding race into what appears to be a nonracial discourse. In this way, race “can be spoken silently, its power can be exerted invisibly,” according to John Fiske in Media Matters (1994). Some people believe that race was recoded as a discourse on “family values” in Republican politics in the early 1990s. For example, in a May 1992 address at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, former vice president Dan Quayle commented on a “poverty of values” in the African American community. More specifically, he attributed the 1992 uprisings in South Central Los Angeles, a predominantly minority area, to a “breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility, and social order.” He went on to discuss the formation of a new underclass “dependent on welfare for very long stretches” and said that “the intergenerational poverty that troubles us so much is predominantly a poverty of values.” Many people believe that such statements imply that poverty and welfare problems in the United States are a matter of race, and that African Americans do not have the appropriate values (those held by the white majority) to avoid or escape poverty.

Another example of recoding race into a “nonracial” discourse—in this case, law and order—is a campaign advertisement produced in support of Republican George H. W. Bush’s bid for the US presidency in 1988. The advertisement featured African American and convicted felon Willie Horton, who, upon his release from jail on a “weekend pass” in Massachusetts, raped and stabbed a white woman and stabbed a white man. Designed explicitly to convince people that Michael Dukakis, Bush’s opponent and governor of Massachusetts, was soft on crime, the campaign spot played on white Americans’ stereotypical view of black men as violent and hypersexual.

A second type of inferential racism, according to Fiske, is denial. This occurs when the racial intent or impact of an action or comment is denied, despite protestations of racism by the offended group or others. For example, the videotaped 1991 beating of African American Rodney King during an arrest by Los Angeles Police Department officers is regarded by many people as a racially motivated incident. However, a white juror in the 1992 trial of four white police officers accused of excessive force in the beating of King, commenting on the not-guilty verdict, said of the prosecution, “They kept trying to bring race into it, but race had nothing to do with it.”

Although the denial of racism is a common strategy used by conservatives, Fiske argues that liberals who claim to be nonracist “are more likely to exert a form of nonracist racism unintentionally by marginalizing or silencing any explicit references to the topic.” As an example, he cites the white liberal senators who supported Anita Hill’s sexual harassment accusations against Clarence Thomas, the black conservative judge appointed by George H. W. Bush to the US Supreme Court. In supporting Hill, these senators emphasized her gender and ignored or marginalized her blackness, although many black and white Americans believed that race was a central factor in the culture’s prurient fascination with both Thomas’s and Hill’s sex lives and the subsequent scandal.

A final way in which inferential racism exerts itself is through American culture’s assumption that whiteness is the default value, the norm or the “natural” state of being. Whiteness is never examined or dissected, but what is instead open for discussion and debate is blackness or race in general. Therefore, any problems created by racism or relations between races are termed “the race problem”—they are deemed situations or difficulties occurring within the black community and largely that community’s responsibility. What is not addressed is the need for whites to examine their own racist values and practices.

Racism in the Trump Era

In the twenty-first century, social media has brought the issue of overt and covert racism in the United States to the forefront of public discussion in a way that had not happened since the civil rights movement. Although the election in 2008 of Barack Obama as the first African American president appeared to signal a new era in American race relations, public discussion changed as social media began to capture images of harsh treatment of African Americans at the hands of police officers. Beginning with the shooting of African American teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the subsequent acquittal of his shooter, followed by civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after the shooting death of Michael Brown at the hands of a white police officer, racism again became front and center in the news media. Relations between law enforcement and the African American community came under renewed scrutiny as organized protest movements like Black Lives Matter kept the issue in the headlines.

According to some commentators, just as the civil rights movement of the 1960s provoked a "white backlash," in the form of violent resistance to desegregation, the rise of what appeared to be a new civil rights movement in the 2010s may have contributed to the surprise election in 2016 of businessman Donald Trump as president. Running on an overtly anti-immigrant, law-and-order platform, Trump quickly distinguished himself in the campaign by his penchant for incendiary remarks against immigrants and Muslims that his supporters relished as a welcome relief from "political correctness." His brand of populism appealed especially to working-class whites in economically depressed areas of the country, and both Trump and his supporters vehemently denied charges of racism in their drive to "Make America Great Again." But from his opening campaign speech, in which he said Mexicans coming to the United States were bringing "drugs," "crime," and "rapists," to his moves immediately upon taking office to try to ban entry to the United States from a number of majority-Muslim nations, Trump's rise had great appeal not just to conservative populists, but to people who self-identify as "white nationalists"—a term some call a euphemism for "white supremacists." Specifically, a far-right movement known as the alternative right or "alt-right," whose champions included prominent white nationalists such as Richard Spencer, hailed Trump's inauguration. Combined with an uptick in reported hate crimes following his election and inauguration, the Trump phenomenon appeared to be emboldening the return of overt racism in the United States.

Issues of race and racism continued to make headlines throughout the Trump presidency. For example, the protests by athletes against racial injustice and police brutality, exemplified by football star Colin Kaepernick in 2016 and 2017, were directly criticized by Trump as disrespectful to the US flag and national anthem. Though Trump's stance won significant support from other conservatives, many cultural commentators suggested it was another example of covert racism, cloaked in patriotism or nationalism. In 2020 the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man killed in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota, set off a major wave of protests across the country. The Black Lives Matter movement again rose to prominence, with some activists arguing that systemic discrimination was so pervasive that drastic changes were needed, such as potential defunding or disbanding of certain police departments. A key focus of the movement became attention to white silence on issues of racial injustice, which many characterized as itself a highly damaging form of covert racism.

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