Societal racism is now used to refer not to an attitude but to a result, as in the kind that ensues when a society is riddled with unequal opportunity caused by (among other things) race. We say that it is, therefore, “racist” that inner-city schools educate students less effectively than suburban ones because it affects black kids more than white ones, “racist” that it’s harder for a poor black man to get a low-skill factory job than it is for a middle-class white one to get a job as a middle manager. “Not in-your-face racism, of course, but the societal kind,” we remind one another.
This abstractification seems like a moral advance, but it creates problematic habits of mind. The core sense of racism as a sentiment harbored by a morally culpable agent lingers. The head and the heart are ever in battle, and the heart seeks a story about person against person. The term societal racism sits ever at the ready to slake that basal orientation, in implying that unpleasant societywide results call for the same response we have to the “racist” who does and feels things.
This can only play a part in the vague but pervasive notion nowadays that part of activism on behalf of people who need concrete assistance is primly patrolling people’s personal racist sentiments. We, as it were, think we must teach “society” not to be “a racist.” Thus it is thought more interesting to teach whites to acknowledge their “privilege” than to espouse reading programs that have been proven effective in teaching (black) kids how to read. Thus the last celebrity caught on tape saying something tacky about black people, because they have a face to hate on, is more interesting than answering poor women’s calls for easy access to long-acting reversible contraception in order to be able to plan when to have children. The war on drugs has been ruining black lives for decades — but only attracts serious attention from black activists when Michelle Alexander phrases it as “The New Jim Crow,” putting a Bull Connor face on it.
But societies and institutions do not feel. That which distracts our sentiments from that reality misdirects efforts to help people. I would replace societal racism with “racial inequality.” Others may have better suggestions, but we must get past a term encouraging the tempting idea that the way to address societal inequity is to craft variations on scolding white people — as poor black people look on underserved.
Okay then.
