I used to say there were no true ethnic slurs for white people. Sure, there are âcrackerâ and âhonkyâ and my personal favorite, âWonder bread,â but Iâm willing to bet the number of white people who have been called those names and ended up with a dark night of the soul contemplating how society dehumanizes them is very small. I was wrong, though, because it turns out there is a slur for white people.
Itâs âracist.â
As Key and Peele pointed out, âracist is the n-word for white people.â
People are literally driven mad by the implication that anything they enjoy might have racist aspects, and that they might be racist for enjoying them. Nothing will cause a white person to storm out in a rage more than calling him or her a racist. It is a word that has developed the same emotional baggage as a slur.
I understand why. We have finally as a society agreed that judging people based on their skin color is wrong. The acme of modern evil was a racist dictator who exterminated people because of their ethnicity. Racism is bad.
This idea is very, very recent. In terms of our species, it just happened a second ago. Itâs progress, but you canât magically undo centuries of unabashed and openly enthusiastic white supremacy overnight or even over decades.
That supremacy is how the word âracistâ developed a power similar to that of the n-word. Call a white person a racist and we immediately sense the specter of a whip-holding slave-owner looming over our shoulder and we get a gut-sick feeling about it. Itâs not even as fractionally bad, Iâm sure, as being reminded of a time when your ancestors were on the other end of this whip scenario, but itâs a whole new pain that a demographic is not used to feeling nonetheless.
The usual response to this is denial. Sometimes literally, like
trying to downplay or erase the effect race has had on American history in our schoolbooks. More often, people claim that we live in a post-racist world with racial inequality left behind. I mean, America canât be racist. We have a black president, right? Thereâs your proof.
But you are. So am I. Everyone is, and likely always will be.
Iâm going to borrow an idea from
Ian Danskinâs Why Are You So Angry? for a moment. Racist isnât a person. Itâs a condition, like being drunk. In gaming terms, itâs a status effect, not a character class. Itâs something you do, not something you are. When we hear the word âracist,â we picture something like the Ku Klux Klan, but that just defines the extreme end of the spectrum of racism, sort of like how getting blackout drunk and crashing your car defines the extreme end of the spectrum of alcohol abuse.
Holding onto that cartoonishly evil definition of racism is what makes white people so defensive about the word because if thatâs your definition of racism, then being accused of racism is like being accused of being a lynch-happy hatemonger. The problem is that hooded figures arenât the face of modern racism.
Our dragon is largely invisible to us. I doubt that many officers sit around and express a desire to kill black people, but that doesnât change the fact
that blacks make up 29 percent of police fatalities despite being only 13 percent of the population.
Racism is everywhere, but itâs not open most of the time. Since we hold onto that KKK image as racist and we arenât that, we wave off systemic inequality as something else. Iâm always told there must be another explanation, but Iâm never told the actual explanation.
There
was a study awhile back that looked at how we perceive the physical pain others feel. Subjects were given a photo of a person and rated what they thought the pain level was that person would feel from various scenarios on a one-to-four scale. Most subjects rated the pain level of blacks as less than that of whites even if the subjects were black themselves. The idea that blacks feel less pain goes all the way back to slavery, where it was used to justify harsh beatings. Thatâs how institutional racial attitudes are. Ideas like this persist in the minds of us all, black and white, without us even knowing it, decades, even centuries after they were introduced.
There is no sticker you can wear that will absolve you of racism. You can have black children and still be a racist. Thousands of slave owners did and were. You can vote for Ben Carson and still be one. You can say âBlack Lives Matterâ and still be one. You can be black and still say racist things toward blacks
like Herman Cain did.
Because, again, being racist is a condition like being drunk. Ads tell us to drink responsibly, but we also have to think responsibly. Listen to the bartender when he or she says you have had enough and listen when youâre told, âThat was racist.â The first doesnât mean youâre a lush and the second doesnât exile you to the land of the unrepentant bigots with a Scarlet R forever. It just means, âConsider how what youâre doing might affect those around you.â
The only way weâve come this far is by slowly addressing racism one bit at a time, and that largely means addressing the little things we say and do that fill the cultural air with pollution. Itâs not our fault that we participate unconsciously in a racist world we inherited, but it is our problem to deal with if weâre not going to leave that same world to future generations.