“Everyone’s a little bit racist, right?”

Sure. But what are you actually trying to say?

Every so often I decide to court my family history of high blood pressure and heart disease by engaging in a conversation about race and racism with friends in a casual setting. (Once I tried to do it at work, but that just made everyone really uncomfortable and it was awkward for at least an hour after the conversation had evaporated into the ether so I’m probably not going to do it again.) First you get the “No one’s really racist anymore, I mean I have [insert minority] friends.” Then after you provide a rough overview of the effects of systemic racism you get the shrug and the, “Well, so everyone’s a little bit racist, really nothing you can do about it, I mean it’s how we were raised right?”

Ahhh. The Carrie Prejean excuse. The “I’m so intellectually cloistered and slothful that I haven’t looked past the preconceptions my parents held and have unquestioningly accepted them as my own” excuse. The “I’ve consistently shown that I’m smarter than this, but I still think it’s a valid excuse” excuse. The “You can’t rebut this so I’m going to use it” excuse.

Like hell I can’t rebut this.

Discussions of race understandably make people nervous and frankly I blame the “Racial Harmony Day” level of discourse that we’re presented in schools. It frames racism as an attitude held by an individual and posits that racism can be countered if you eat enough foods from other cultures. It doesn’t teach that the power of racism is in the fact that it’s institutionalized, ingrained and practically invisible. It’s this more sinister (but in turn more accurate) model of racism that gets to hide behind the henna doodles and misplaced bindis, the stiff Chinese collars and the just-for-a-day songkok. It’s because no one sees the man behind the curtain (again, apologies for anthropomorphising the kyriarchy) duping all of us into believing that as long as we have [insert minority] friends, we can address any and all “race-related issues”.

It’s because of this complacency that we allow ourselves to tell racist jokes, to share Russell Peters videos and to guffaw at Tokyo Breakfast (guilty as charged). Sure, some of us are laughing because we understand this to be a send-up of the respective stereotypes, but given the Archie Bunker effect (see Mary Beth Oliver’s lecture on race in the media where she points out that some people were laughing at his bigotry and other were laughing with) and the frankly piss-poor understanding of racism-proper it’s just irresponsible to tell and laugh along with these jokes unless you have explicit knowledge of your crowd’s level of awareness. But how to bring it up without actually ending up calling all your friends and co-workers racist (the one sure way to impugn their honour, y’know)? Jay Smooth breaks it down very well:

So yes. Everyone’s a little bit racist because we all participate in a racist society where we are subtly conditioned through regular rewards for upholding the order of things. But that’s not an excuse to stop talking about it. That’s not an excuse to not examine your own actions and eliminate those which may be contributing to the unhealthy race-smog we breathe in daily. That’s not an excuse to change the subject whenever someone tries to point out that you’ve done/said/laughed at/been complicit with something racist. In fact, that everyone’s a little bit racist is why we need to be pushing this conversation into every social circle we’ve got because this shit has got to change.

Get out there and consciousness-raise! Fly my pretties! Fly!