Racism All Grown Up

2 Pages 568 Words

I swear to the Lord
I still can’t see
Why Democracy means
Everyone but me.
-Langston Hughes, The Black Man Speaks

When my father was younger, handlebar moustaches and bellbottoms were in style. In fact, he was wearing an all-white, bellbottomed tuxedo with a gigantic gold chain slung across it on the day he married my mother. This was top-notch attire then. When my mother was younger, hot pants and mood rings were in style. She refuses to show me any photos from these days, but I know they happened. When Racism was younger, outright bigotry was in style. Complexion-based hate was just another one of those things. Since then all three have grown up, and since then it is no longer fashionable to dress one’s self in a bellbottomed tux, or hot pants, or bigotry. Racism is certainly still around however, it has simply taken on a more socially and politically acceptable form. In “The Possessive Investment of Whiteness,” George Lipsitz lays out, in a series of statistics quoted from numerous social studies and surveys, what modern-day racism looks like. Modern-day racism, what the bigots of the past might have referred to as “the racism of tomorrow,” lies in a hypocritical acceptance of freedom-loving whites that patriotically pride themselves on their melting pot of a country, all the while indifferently condoning a system that relies on the neglect and exploitation of its non-white citizenship.
Very chic.
In a lot of obvious ways this new fact of Racist America is for the better. There’s less outright hate speech. There are less proactive attempts by individuals to quash any sign of racial progress. The flipside of that, however, is that there doesn’t really have to be. An undercurrent of fear and greed alongside of warped and misleading policies and fund allocations has replaced the red-faced, raving white supremacist as American minorities’ newest and fanciest hurdle. In many ways this can be more dangerous, be...