When I was about 15 years old, I drove my mother to Walmart with my new learner’s permit and agreed to wait in the car while she shopped for groceries. I only took my eyes off my phone screen when I noticed an old car pulling up next to mine. Out stepped a young black man covered in tattoos with pants sagging to his knees. Immediately, I put down my phone, reached over and locked the doors.
Suddenly, a wave of guilt and shame came washing over me. “Am I racist?” At the time, I did not know the answer to that question, but I did know that my ignorant judgment of that young man made me question my character. I have come to realize that the answer to the question regarding the conflict involving what I thought was my “I don’t see color” character and what I know was my “You look like a dangerous black man” reaction can be found in answering a more fundamental question, a question that fuels the fiery controversy that inspired violent riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, multiple efforts to rid the south of Confederate flags and Beyoncé’s Super Bowl half-time performance: are Americans racist?
In a national poll taken by CNN, 49 percent of Americans reported they feel as though racism is still a “big issue,” with 66 percent of black people polling in favor of this stance and 43 percent of white people agreeing with them.
One who is also in agreement is President Barack Obama. In an interview he conducted with podcaster Marc Maron, President Obama stated racism is “… part of our DNA that’s passed on.” While President Obama is on to something, he is not exactly right either. Consider the implication behind what the concept of racism being biological really means, just as Larry Elder, black author and talk-show host, did when he stated in a video on behalf of Perdu University, “If racism is in our DNA, doesn’t that mean it’s immutable? Unchangeable? But America has changed, and dramatically so.” He goes on to point out that President Obama was elected twice in a nation whose population is 77.4 percent white when, in 1960, 60 percent of Americans said they would never vote for a black president. Either the racist-DNA that President Obama referred to somehow mutated before 2008, or racism has been wholly rejected by the vast majority of modern Americans as a delusional ideology of hatred and superiority.
If Americans as a majority reject racism, why do we find ourselves in the midst of a Black Lives Matter movement? While Americans as a whole are not racists, we are very capable of showing prejudice with varying degrees of personal-awareness. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines racism as “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Contrastingly, the word ‘prejudice’ is defined as “a preconceived judgment or opinion” or “an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.” The former describes superiority and hatred; the latter describes subjectivity and a bias that affects members from all races.
Will Smith did an excellent job of highlighting the stark differences between these two in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s Actor Roundtable when he said, “Everybody is prejudiced… Everybody has their life experiences that make them prefer one thing over another — it makes them prefer blond hair over a brunette; if you see somebody with dark skin walking down the street, you have a different reaction than you have [with] someone who is 5-foot-1 and white… I have to say, I live with constant prejudice, but racism is actually rare — someone who thinks their race is superior.”
Why do we share this level of prejudice, or bias, towards racial groups that are not similar to our own? First and foremost, statistical data reinforces the prejudices Americans form from the media and popular culture about today’s generation of black Americans. For example, even though black people only make up 13.2 percent of our nation’s population, they committed almost 50 percent of all homicides in 2013, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is important to note that some of these prejudices are formed in part by the way the media portrays these numbers, by only acknowledging a small portion of the young black community that is drawn to an unorthodox lifestyle associated with obtaining money and local power at the expense of violence and drug solicitation. Secondly, the psychological principal of similarity describes the human tendency to trust and identify with people who resemble us. While this makes sense and is not inherently discriminatory in and of itself, this clearly opens the door for unfair prejudice everywhere, from the work place to our personal lives. I am not saying that all of this makes actual racism a myth.
According to the Huffington Post, the Public Policy Polling firm “revealed that 29 percent of likely GOP voters surveyed in Mississippi believe that interracial marriage should be illegal.” This statistic paints an accurate picture of clear, conscious racism. That being said, this sort of racist bigotry is rarely found throughout the United States, especially more so when one explores our nation outside of a region that worships Robert E. Lee like a confederate god.
Prejudice is a part of our DNA, not racism. It is one of the unpleasant qualities of the human race. The human race also has a quality that nullifies any excuse to not claim responsibility for the way we view and treat members of a race different than our own: choice. We can choose to acknowledge our tendency to show prejudice. We can choose to combat these prejudices by maintaining a state of self-awareness. We can choose to recognize the dual importance of both understanding the cause and prevalence of formed racial stereotypes in relation to their perceived legitimacy, and not allowing those same stereotypes to pull a veil of racial bias over our eyes.
The “race problem” in America is not a problem between white people and black people. In fact, it is not even a problem between racist ideas of superiority or hatred. The race problem in America is the shadow of our internal-conflict regarding what we must work hard to change versus what comes to us naturally.
