Race V. Culture

Had a recent Facebook argument with someone who is convinced that racism is over in America.  I eventually walked out on the conversation, because it was clear that no good could be accomplished from further discussion, but he did remind me of an old argument I used to make...

That is, that what we call racism today is really "culturism" - or the hatred of particular cultures rather than races.

As if that is somehow better.

But let's assume for a moment that culturism is acceptable, while racism is not.  It assumes that all of the negative things I used to say about race and which I've recently refuted about race aren't appropriate to apply to race, but are appropriate to apply to culture.

Rather than a black person being more likely to be targeted by police because of skin color, for instance that black person is more likely to be targeted because of obvious cultural elements which are expressed through clothing choices, tattoos and piercings, and so on. 

I used to believe this myself, for a brief while between the time I was unabashedly racist and the time I think I really started to understand racism.  It was a step in the healing process between the two, although only a baby step.

What I didn't realize at that time was that it betrayed certain assumptions on my part.  For instance,

We know that blacks are far more often pulled over by police, and far more often arrested for the same crimes, and far more often convicted.  If we make the assumption that those blacks who were pulled over, etc., were all members of the same culture, then we can easily say that this is a cultural issue, that police were targeting those markers of black culture rather than black race.  But, that betrays inherent assumptions about race - such as that black people will all (or mostly all) be wearing the same types of clothes, be featuring the same hair styles, or jewelry, or whatever.  

And you know what we call such assumptions about members of a race?

The fact is that black people in America are all more likely to be targeted by police, across all cultures of black.  We can't say "African Americans" even, because the fact is that foreign-born black men and women are also targeted, and in most of these cases it should be abundantly clear to us that the victims share nothing in common with what a culturism-proponent might term "American black culture" or I used to call "stereotypically-black culture."  Even applying such a name itself reveals its racist origins, and yet we all know what people mean when they say "stereotypically-black" and we can easily extend such a phrase to culture.

Because we're all racist.

And that's OK, as long as we face it head-on and try to cut it off. We can't do that if we're trying to dress up our racism as something else.

Final thought on this subject: only a few days ago, a news story broke right here in Oklahoma where a group of young men did their best to openly embrace racism, without even the veil of culture.  The students who led the racist chanting have been expelled, which is a great start, but clearly we have a long way to go.