Public Space, Public Policy, and Public Understanding of Race and Ethnicity in America

Theresa A. Booker

• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781937378509
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This interdisciplinary anthology contains a collection of materials, including personal accounts, analyses of historical and/or current events, and legal rulings told through the lens of various racial or ethnic groups living in the United States. Included are discussions of housing and neighborhoods, recreation and work, crime, education, and politics.

Part 1 Case Studies

Chapter 1

The Myth of Post-Racialism

Hegemonic and Counterhegemonic Stories about Race and Racism in the United States

Babacar M’Baye, Kent State University

INTRODUCTION

Race must be foregrounded in the study of American public discourses which tend to substitute a concrete and radical civil rights agenda with notions of meritocracy and a post-racial equal playing field. The foregrounding of race shows the myth of post-racialism to be a fallacy based on hegemonic stories that minimize the effects of racism on African Americans. By contrast, counterhegemonic stories, or counter-stories, seek to emphasize and make visible the consequences of racism. While hegemonic stories ignore racial inequalities in the United States by shifting the responsibility for poverty onto African Americans themselves, counterstories reveal the structural disadvantages faced by blacks and work to challenge post-racial myths. My analysis of various hegemonic and counterhegemonic stories suggests the complexities of narratives that either elide or make visible the institutional and structural factors which explain the persistence of racism in the United States.

HEGEMONIC NARRATIVES AND STORYTELLING

Hegemonic narratives are discourses that dominant groups create in order to romanticize America as a post-racial society in which everyone is becoming equal while ignoring the systemic and structural racism and inequalities that prevent subjugated groups from gaining power in the nation. Hegemonic narratives permeate books, news, tabloids, music, and other media by creating a virtual reality that Delgado describes as a set of “archetypes” or “well-told stories” that “ring true in light of the hearer’s stock of preexisting stories” (2000). Hegemonic stories are powerful tools of indoctrination because they dictate popular views about race. Williams states: “In order to permeate and shape our perceptions and responses to race, these narratives must conform to and reproduce the dominant cultural ideology” (2004). Counterstorytelling opposes hegemonic storytelling by subverting conservative assumptions that romanticize the “American dream” as able to provide upward mobility, should an individual work hard enough, whilst ignoring the precarious socioeconomic status of blacks in the United States. Counterstorytelling is apparent in Delgado’s critique of the inherent prejudices of American legal scholarship against African Americans (1995). Delgado gives the example of civil rights laws about which the majority of white scholars “hold that any inequality between blacks and whites is due either to cultural lag or inadequate enforcement” of existing civil rights laws, overlooking “the prevailing mindset by means of which members of the dominant group justify the world as it is, that is, with whites on top and browns and blacks at the bottom” (2000).

COUNTERSTORYTELLING AS RESISTANCE AGAINST HEGEMONIC STORYTELLING

Counterstorytelling refers to the narratives that oppressed groups use to resist the discourses that hegemonic groups use to dominate them. In this vein, Delgado (2000) uses narratives that challenge conventional perceptions of race and racism, as is apparent in his concept of “counter-storytelling” which provides a framework for representing the continuing effects of racism on African Americans and for challenging the biases of academic disciplines dominated by Eurocentric thinking. In his essay, “Legal Storytelling: Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative,” Delgado defines counterstorytelling as the curative process by which a subjugated group tells stories that resist the narratives that a dominant group tells themselves and others in order to establish a “shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as natural” (2000). Counterstorytelling is a curative process since it “can shatter complacency and challenge the status quo” and, thus, “show us the way out of the trap of unjustified exclusion” (2000). Delgado’s counterstorytelling helps us to challenge the facile dismissal of race and racism in hegemonic discourses as a “finished business.” Applying Delgado’s counterstorytelling a decade later, Williams denounces how American universities and colleges “reproduce the dominant cultural ideology” by restricting Black History Month to a mere celebration of the achievements of individuals such as Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson (2004). Williams (2004) argues, “When we have our conversations about race in the context of such narratives of individualism and race as ‘other,’ we reinforce a worldview that does not address the systemic and cultural constructions of race.” Developing similar counter-stories, my chapter critiques the easy dismissal of race in legal, political, and academic hegemonic stories from the 1940s to the present which ignore the ongoing impact of racism on African Americans.

HEGEMONIC STORIES OF COLOR-BLIND RACISM AND POST-RACIALISM

Another dominant hegemonic story is the representation of racism as a problem that has either been resolved or difficult to prove. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva acknowledges the prevalence of this hegemonic narrative in the United States when he argues that color-blind racism has a “slipperiness” because it blames the victim (blacks) “in a very indirect way” through the “now you see it, now you don’t” rhetorical style “that matches the character of the new racism” (2010). Color-blind racism is insidious since, as Bonilla-Silva suggests, it ignores “the effects of past and contemporary discrimination on the social, economic, and educational status of minorities” by “supporting equal opportunity for everyone without a concern for the savage inequalities between blacks and whites” (2010). William J. Bennett (1992), a former US secretary of education, reproduces this narrative when he argues that America has already gotten “angry about racism and decided [that] it was wrong, [and] the country didn’t wait to eliminate the ‘root causes’ before going after it aggressively, in law and through social stigma.” Bennett’s argument assumes that racism is over and that it must be stricken from the American English vocabulary since it leads blacks to develop separatist notions of race that undermine American individuality. Bennett writes: “Along with abortion, race has become the most divisive issue in contemporary American politics. The great body of the American people believe in individual rights, not group rights, not rights conferred by sex, race, and religion.” Bennett’s rationale for individual rights comes from the hegemonic narrative of color-blind racism which allows whites to remove race from the factors that impede the social and economic mobility of blacks. In doing so, whites disculpate the government, states, and courts of the United States from any responsibility for the socioeconomic conditions of African Americans by “blaming them [African Americans] for their own misfortune” (Cohen 2010). This strategy of blame is deceptive because it frames racism in such a way that blacks appear as the people who perpetuate the problem, thus making the conversation revolve only around blacks as opposed to whites who contribute to inequalities without having to acknowledge and resolve them.

A parallel of color-blind racism is the hegemonic story of post-racialism which represents the Unites States as a post-racial society in which blacks and whites are treated as equals. This hegemonic narrative stems from an ideology, espoused by both Democratic and Republican leaders, which argues that race equality has been achieved in the United States. Post-racialism has become popular in the American media since the moments preceding the inauguration of President Barack Obama. A few hours before Obama was announced the winner of the 2008 presidential election, Anderson Cooper, a reporter for CNN (Cable News Network), asked a panel of commentators including Bill Bennett the meaning of the election “in terms of change of race relations in the United States.” Bennett replied, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing it means.…You don’t take any excuses anymore from anybody who says, ‘The deck is stacked, I can’t do anything, there’s so much in-built this and that’” (CNN 2009). Bennett’s comment suggests that African Americans can no longer complain about racial inequalities in the United States when there is a black president. His statement is emblematic of the hegemonic narrative of the first decade in this century that portrays America as a post-racial nation in which all the promises of black civil rights struggles have been fulfilled.

Post-racialism also emphasizes the importance of individuality as opposed to group identity. Lawrence Auster (2008) writes: “Presumably a post-racial, beyond-race America will be one in which no one thinks about race any more, an America in which we all just see each other as individuals.” According to Auster, post-racial America also reinforces “the notion that the election of Barack Obama to the presidency will inaugurate a ‘post-racial’ America, an America that has gone ‘beyond race.’” Post-racialism is an admirable goal because it imagines a world in which blacks and whites in the United States live without racial division. As Patricia Zengerle (2010) suggests, post-racialism envisions the United States as a country in which “division and tension between black and white Americans” have disappeared. Despite such noble intentions, post-racialism constitutes more of a rushed idealism than what Zengerle calls “a thorough thinking through” which would reveal the persistence of race in the United States. As Zengerle suggests, post-racialism avoids the fact that “Racial conflict is America’s deepest wound.”

COUNTERHEGEMONIC STORIES OF RACISM AND DISCRIMINATION

Counterhegemonic narratives oppose hegemonic stories of the Unites States as a post-racial society in which blacks and whites are treated as equals in the absence of race. In an interview with Amy Goodman (2008), Glen Ford argued that during the 2008 presidential campaign some Democrats tended to represent African Americans as people who had “already come 90% of the way on the road to equality” and simply needed to go 10% of the rest of the way by voting for Obama. Ford (2008) rejects this narrative by arguing,

No indexes show blacks 90% of the way towards equality in any area of life. We’ve never made 65% more in income than white people. Black median household wealth is one-tenth white median household wealth.…In fact, we can’t find 90% figures relevant, outside of NBA teams and prison. But no white man, no white Democrat who said that would avoid being excoriated by the entire spectrum of black political opinion.

Similarly, in his counterhegemonic story, Tim Wise (2009) opposes the narrative of post-racialism because it contradicts the grim realities of the majority of people of color in America. Wise explains: “For while the individual success of persons of color, as with Obama, is meaningful (and at this level was unthinkable merely a generation ago), the larger systemic and institutional realities of life in America suggest the ongoing salience of a deep-seated cultural malady—racism—which has been neither eradicated nor even substantially diminished by Obama’s victory.” Abby L. Ferber (2009) develops a comparable counterhegemonic criticism when she writes:

Even in the face of legal and political gains, there is no evidence to suggest that the racial economic divide is decreasing. And the reality is that during economic downturns, minority communities suffer first and worst. Economic gains made by people of color are generally only very recent gains, and thus most tenuous and vulnerable. They are much less likely to have inherited wealth from previous generations to soften the blow during a crisis.

The drastic conditions of African Americans are apparent in The Future of the Race (coauthored with Cornel West) (1996) in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes his experiences with racism. In his counterstory, Gates describes his humble socioeconomic background in a small town in Piedmont, West Virginia, where he was born on September 16, 1950, and how his father “worked two jobs—loading trucks at a paper mill, plus a night shift as a janitor for the phone company—to keep” his family “well fed and well clothed.” Gates describes the drastic poverty of black families in the 1950s and ’60s when “only 3 percent of blacks had a college degree. And more than half of blacks fell below the poverty line.” Gates notes, “In the year I graduated from high school, almost half of black households took in less than fifteen thousand dollars.” Gates observes a similar predicament among many African American families in 1993, when the median net worth of blacks was “zero” while those of whites was “ten thousand dollars.” To these bleak statistics, Gates adds, “In 1993, 2.3 million black men were sent to jail or prison while 23,000 received college diploma—a ratio of a hundred to one.” Ironically, Gates experienced racism on July 16, 2009, when Cambridge police officer James Crowley arrested him on the front porch of his own home and sent him to jail after he allegedly refused to step outside when he was asked to do so. Gates’ arrest is not an isolated incident because it is part of the structural racism that routinely subjects blacks to racial profiling in the United States.

In his book, Driving While Black: What to Do if You Are a Victim of Racial Profiling, Kenneth Meeks (2000) describes “a classic example of racial profiling,” which is “the tactic of stopping someone only because of the color of his or her skin and a fleeting suspicion that the person is engaging in criminal behavior. It’s generally targeted more toward young black American men and women than any other racial group.” Gates’ arrest is an example of racial profiling because police were reportedly told by a white female caller that two black men had broken into a home. In the wake of instant fury and accusations of racial profiling from prominent African American civil rights activists such as Al Sharpton and Tom Joyner, the Cambridge police dismissed their charge of disorderly conduct. Although he received an apology from the Mayor of Cambridge (E. Denise Simmons), Gates did not obtain a public request for forgiveness from James Crowley (Bloom 2009). In an interview about the incident, Gates said: “There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them. This is outrageous and this is how poor black men across the country are treated every day in the criminal justice system. It’s one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it” (Pilkington 2009).

Gates’ counterstory reveals how even a renowned African American scholar whose work emphasizes racial tolerance and multiculturalism is vulnerable to racial bigotry. Gates’ counterstory shows that America is not a post-racial society, a fact that President Obama acknowledged near the end of a press conference of July 22, 2009, in which he said that the “Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody [Gates] when there was already proof that they were in their own home.” As Nicholas Graham (2009) points out, Obama noted that racial profiling has “a long history in this country” though “he stepped lightly regarding any role race may have played in the situation.” Obama did acknowledge that blacks and Hispanics are frequent victims of racial profiling, though, as Andrew Mytelka (2009) argues, he also emphasized the “incredible progress that has been made” in race relations in the United States and cited himself as “testimony to the progress.” Obama later invited both Gates and Crowley to a “beer summit” at the White House where the two people shook hands and had a cordial conversation.

The Gates incident reveals there are limitations in the ways structural racism can be discussed in media and political discourse at the highest level. This incident shows that post-racialism is a myth akin to wishful thinking that does not address the structural inequalities upon which blacks and whites in the United States have historically been taught to live with one another. Such systemic barriers need to be dismantled before the idealism of post-racialism, which is apparent in Obama’s desire to get beyond race, could be achieved.

COUNTERHEGEMONIC STORIES OF PRISON INJUSTICE

The continuing significance of race in the Unites States is apparent in counterhegemonic stories that reflect the effects of historically racist policies on the lives of African Americans. This racism is apparent in the disproportionate imprisonment of blacks at an unprecedented rate; which is also comparable to the incarceration of Hispanics in the United States and non-white minorities in countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. According to a study entitled, “America, the so-called ‘land of the free,’ has more people in prison than any other country” (2015), at the end of 2002, “Black inmates represented an estimated 45% of all inmates with sentences of more than 1 year, while white inmates accounted for 34% and Hispanic inmates 18.…As of December 31, 2002, black males from 20 to 39 years old accounted for about a third of all sentenced prison inmates under state or federal jurisdiction. On that date 10.4 percent of the country’s black male population between the ages of twenty-five to twenty-nine was in prison, compared to 2.4 percent of Hispanic males and 1.2 percent of white males in the same age group.” In the same vein, the US Bureau of Justice Statistics states, “At midyear 2008, there were 4,777 black male inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents being held in state or federal prison and local jails, compare...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Case Studies
• Part 2: Representing and Imagining Race: Language, Music, and Community
• Part 3: Physical and Mental Well-Being
• Part 4: Housing and Space
• Part 5: Politics and Activism
• Part 6: Law and Justice
• Contributors