7/30/2019 why conversation on race usyally fail

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It allows Jonah Goldberg to write in the Los Angeles Times that racism currently exists only in

"pockets," Ann Coulter to compare calls for justice in Trayvon's death to a lynch mob and PatBuchanan to refer to this situation as an "exacerbation of and the exploitation of racial conflict."

To honestly believe any of these assertions requires cultural blindness and a deep misreading of 

history, one in which the lives of marginalized people do not exist unless they serve the self-

aggrandizing agenda of the controlling group.

When racism exists only in the extreme in the dominant historical narrative and the publicimagination, it's not difficult to understand why the conversation becomes stalled. We

understand racism as the domain of slaveholders and violent segregationists, cross-burning

members of the Ku Klux Klan and ignorant Southerners. Racists possess cold, black hearts andeyes that become engorged with blood and hate at the sight of skin that differs from their own.

And they can be defeated only by the good-natured and colorblind folks who believe in one race:

human.

Of course, that isn't true in the slightest. Racism doesn't require vicious hatred -- only passive

acceptance of an idea of human hierarchy based on mostly arbitrary differences. It is internalizedbeliefs about the inferiority of one group that in turn grants power and privilege to another.Racism is not a battle of good vs. evil, of individual actors of a heroic or demonic nature

determining the worth of people. It is a story of subjugation, exploitation, resistance and the

messy complexities that make humanity so intriguing. We would know that if we bothered tostudy.

In a best-case scenario, Trayvon's death should allow for a moment in which we re-evaluate theway we think racism operates. Racism need not be overt or expressed only in the use of racial

epithets. Racist ideas can and do lie in the subconscious, since we are all bombarded with racist

images and messaging every day. Racism exists in the fabric of what makes America America,

and we make judgments of people based on those ideas without necessarily meaning to do so.And while this affects all of us, whether black, Latino, Asian or other, white Americans are the

only group that actually benefits from this system.

Instead, the killing of Trayvon Martin has become another opportunity for some to deny the

existence of racism and distort the history of race. And once again, we have a national

conversation on race in which everyone talks past one another and nothing gets resolved.

Attorney General