The USA Is/Is Not Racist

The headline from Politico “‘America is not racist’ becomes a GOP 2024 mantra” came across my news feed recently, and I thought, just as with critical race theory, GOP members are talking to themselves again. Beyond being a mantra, this could be the title of a fairy tale Republican leadership is using to lull their 36 million voting beauties to sleep.

If it were true, that the USA was without a racist resident, each and every one of us aracist to the bone, then our great country, including all its people, defined as all its people, must not be racist. If, though, there is one racist person, then the country is racist. It’s just a question of how racist are we. But by a more complete definition, if there is one racist law, social protocol or ingrained habit that is being followed, even by a population with no racists at all, then the country is also racist, because at least sometimes, as a system, it yields racism. Again, it’s a matter of “How racist are we?”

“Hold on,” one might say, “I wouldn’t call a country racist, if it were predominantly anti-racist. Wouldn’t that be bad characterization?” Racism is like cancer. You may have a lot of it or just a bit of it, but you have it, if you have it. If your cancer gets you down in your daily life, or has you suffering from time to time, or if it is shortening your life, then no matter how few of your cells are cancerous, you’ve got a debilitating case.

“America is not racist,” Republicans want to say. If it were true that only Democrats are racist, as some GOP pundits have purported, then surely, with 49 million members, control of the Executive Branch plus majorities in both Houses of Congress, this country could easily or at least understandably be defined as racist. For some modicum of consistency, what their mantra could be is “Make America Not Too Racist Again” — MANTRA the new mantra, red hats and all.

In my 20s, I was a junior high substitute teacher. With their regular teacher out, I was going over homework problems with a class, and a student asked the age-old question, why were they learning this stuff. I took up the challenge of presenting the students with a quick and quite elegant linear algebra proof that contains their junior high math lesson. Linear algebra, so great, how it builds on vector addition, its theorem-proof-theorem-proof certainty, to be so powerful in real world applications! They’d have to wait for college to really get into it. That’s a problem with math. It becomes more beautiful the more you learn. What if I could show, at least the curious, what could be in their academic futures?

The principal heard what I was doing, must have started late listening outside the door, and intervened, stopped the class, with the strong suggestion that I teach junior high math only. This is what I think of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools. For breadth and fullness, it requires life experience, a high social IQ, a desire to learn it, and a college semester or two. It will be at the core of many a doctoral thesis to come.

When it comes to race and racism, there are much simpler “maths” we can use, in order to keep the discussion at the junior high level. These kids don’t have jobs, rent apartments, or even vote. Yet they understand that they are walking into such a life and want the knowledge and character they’ll be needing. Even by their junior high days, many dark-complected students have already experienced racism of the nastiest sorts.

Let’s talk, not about blacks and whites, but rather in terms of the light-complected and the dark-complected, while keeping in mind the medium-complected. To “complect” means to weave, as if our parents gave us these custom-made Saks Fifth Avenue jogging suits, Mardi Gras masks and Adidas racewalking shoes to wear our entire lives. In “complexion”, we have the word “complex” as well. With the 2021 Tokyo Olympics happening now, we see all the different “races” from all the diverse “countries”. The history oriented know how the national flags got woven into colors and patterns, know of the past and present migrations, political takeovers, invasions, occupations and wars that have led to different-looking people representing where they walk around and hang their hats nowadays.

Speaking for myself, and this is a little CRT on the light-complexion side, I don’t like the popular term “white.” What do you mean by white? Aryan white? Anglo-Saxon white? I am predominantly neither. It’s a politically-charged misnomer. Nor am I Caucasian. I am indeed light-complected, mostly of Irish weave if I may share, some Persian, some Native American, but more Sardinian than the latter two. My sister asserts that we have Greek threads in our fabric, and one grandmother had at least some English tapestry in her double-helix design. At present, this translates into a fair portion of white privilege. From European history and more specifically the history of the Irish in my own neighborhood, we know such a VIP pass can be suddenly revoked.

Let me talk frankly to just my light-complected comrades for a moment. (We’ve all been around bad N-word jokes, people who have spewed the hateful remarks, too often behind the backs of those with darker complexions, most often when it was just us present, yet sometimes blatantly and aggressively. Racists believe in white supremacy and the hate they share. When we were young and naïve, this took many of us by surprise. We had to learn not to tell those jokes in turn. We had to mature, learn to speak up, leave these social predicaments, no longer follow along with undeveloped character. For all of us, there’s no honest denying that racism exists in the USA.)

Soon after my dark-complected life partner Mary and I got together, I went with her to a medical appointment. The doctor talked down to her and seemed to place her in a mental compartment he made up, brushing off the crux of her malady. I was appalled. Was this because of her complexion? Seemed so. Then again, it could have been that he was neither a misogynist nor a white supremacist. Ego maniacs and narcissists talk down to everyone, often indiscriminately. It can be hard to tell and harder to prove when racism is involved. It could also be, that the doctor is misogynistic but not racist.

Furthermore, if this doctor is indeed racist, it could be perceived by his victims that they are not being discriminated against when they are. How would a dark-complected patient know the experience of anyone else, if she is never there to see the smiles and care given to another? Why would a good-hearted person suppose such a negative character for someone, especially someone in a healing field?

I prefer the word “aracism” to “color-blindness” because, unless physically blind, we see colors, hues and shades. And anyway, I love Mary’s darker skin tone and her complex weave. Yet it is the sight of darker skin such as hers and her progeny, by many out and about in our cities and towns, which sparks often implicit racist micro-aggressions. This is where it can be shown that racism is rearing its ugly head all around us every day. Pedestrian fatalities and driver decisions show this emphatically.

A Governors Highway Safety Association report is out called Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities by State: 2020 Preliminary Data. On page 15 is a chart called Percent of Total Pedestrian Fatalities and Population by Race, 2015–2019. The group labeled “White, Non-Hispanics” makes up 62% of the living population, but only 52% of pedestrian fatalities. Call this white pedestrian privilege, a VIP pass not to be killed by an automobile while on foot. It was, at least from 2015 through 2019, a privilege shared with the group labeled “Asian, Non-Hispanic/Unknown”.

The group labeled “Black Non-Hispanics” makes up 12% of the living population, yet 21% of our pedestrian fatalities. US residents with dark complexions are, therefore, 1.75 times more likely to be killed by an automobile than the general population. But the general population includes this especially imperiled group. Having a darker complexion, compared to everybody else, is twice as fatal. The group labeled “American Indians” are even worse off.

There exists an urban problem here to be sure, even though suburban crashes are more likely to be fatal, as noted in this Twin Cities research presented by the Star Tribune: In crashes that kill pedestrians, the majority of drivers don’t face charges. That noted, 73% of pedestrian fatalities occur in urban settings: Traffic Safety Facts 2011 Data — Pedestrians.

The easy explanation is that there are more dark-complected people in urban areas where pedestrians get hit. If an asteroid were to hit Central Harlem today, we would expect 63% (triple that 21%) of the fatalities to be “African Americans” — and asteroids are not racist. This argument leads us down a road of history and CRT. How and why 63% in the first place? For the good reasons and the bad, a topic for another day.

As a momentary tangent, however, let’s note the Complete Streets program as an important place to put infrastructure funding to work. Safety precautions save lives and money. Some cities have adopted this program already. See Complete Streets Act of 2021. See also Smart Growth America: Dangerous By Design, which has a headline, “Failing to act is consenting to more preventable deaths.” The idea in Complete Streets is prevention, to bring down the pedestrian fatality numbers as a whole.

According to a 2003 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration analysis of Pedestrian roadway fatalities, three out of five pedestrians fatalities occur during attempted street crossings. But we also find that drastic and racist disparities remain in driver decision making even after safety precautions are installed.

In 2013, researchers Tara Goddard and Kimberly Barsamian Kahn of Portland State University, with Arlie Adkins of the University of Arizona, found “that Black pedestrians were passed by twice as many cars and experienced wait times that were 32% longer than White pedestrians. Results support the hypothesis that minority pedestrians experience discriminatory treatment by drivers at crosswalks” (NITC-SS-733 Racial Bias in Driver Yielding Behavior at Crosswalks or here.

In 2017, led by the same Kimberly Kahn, a project called Walking While Black: Racial Bias at the Crosswalk was published. It examines “whether racial discrimination occurs at crosswalks, which may lead to disparate crossing experiences and disproportionate safety outcomes.”

In the time between those two studies, Portland had “installed signage and crosswalk markings” to improve safety at these mid-street downtown crosswalks. These precautions resulted in cars stopping more often, but it was still as racially disproportionate. And another racist behavior was discovered, “In particular for black men and black women, the cars, on average, stopped much closer to them than to white pedestrians. With a black pedestrian, cars were more likely to stop after the stop bar, infringing on the pedestrian’s crossing space.” Do light-complected people even know they have the privilege of this VIP pass? What would it be like, to have twice as much difficulty crossing a street? Do dark-complected people know this? Do they know that the extra anxiety they experience and the extra time it takes them to cross are not normal?

One might say that the study includes only downtown Portland, that maybe Portland drivers are peculiar in their racism. But the findings were substantiated by a 2017 University of Nevada study done in Las Vegas called Examining racial bias as a potential factor in pedestrian crashes.

We know there are overtly racist drivers out there, the ones who spew the N word when passing too close to a dark complected person. We can even understand that purposeful bumping off is perpetrated, murders of all degrees among the fatalities. These explicit racist acts are hard to prove. It’s hard enough to track down the hit and run driver who is not racist.

For most or many, it may be a matter of habits we’ve learned but never matured through. Implicit bias in action is racism, but not conscious or not conscious enough to overrule a well-meaning driver’s poor decision making. Being surrounded by the metal of our larger-than-human automobiles, traversing faster than human legs can take us, fatally magnifies these implicit subtleties. When not fatal, the human costs include injury, permanent disability and shortened life expectancy. The financial costs include ER and ICU bills we are all paying for, followed by life-long SNF bills.

Goddard, Kahn, and Adkins further point out, “The longer waits faced by Black pedestrians may result from drivers observing the behavior of vehicles preceding them and replicating this behavior. That is, they may observe other drivers not stopping for Black pedestrians and use this evidence to inform or even justify their decisions to not stop.” These drivers are unconsciously or subconsciously following a racist leader, whether that leader is acting on his own explicit or implicit bias. Racism spreads like a cancer attacking good cells.

Our country is racist and we need to cure that. The remedy is not to deny that racism exists by internalizing the fairy tale that “America is not racist,” but to realize when we are racist, become mindful of it, and mature beyond it, to no longer be sleeping beauties, but responsible citizens. Wouldn’t it be great for all of us to be united, to be able to say in unison that this country is not racist? That mantra is a goal for every patriot, but not a present reality.

We are the adults. How do we answer the junior high school student who asks, “Why don’t drivers stop for black pedestrians?” She could also ask, “Why don’t taxis stop for dark-skinned people?” or “Why don’t drivers stop for Native Americans?” or “Why do black people die so much younger than other people?” No matter her complexion, she needs to know. Why should she need to ask?