The Good, Racist People

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/opinion/coates-the-good-racist-people.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

The Good, Racist People
By TA-NEHISI COATES

Last month the actor Forest Whitaker was stopped in a Manhattan delicatessen by an employee. Whitaker is one of the pre-eminent actors of his generation, with a diverse and celebrated catalog ranging from “The Great Debaters” to “The Crying Game” to “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” By now it is likely that he has adjusted to random strangers who can’t get his turn as Idi Amin out of their heads. But the man who approached the Oscar winner at the deli last month was in no mood for autographs. The employee stopped Whitaker, accused him of shoplifting and then promptly frisked him. The act of self-deputization was futile. Whitaker had stolen nothing. On the contrary, he’d been robbed.

The deli where Whitaker was harassed happens to be in my neighborhood. Columbia University is up the street. Broadway, the main drag, is dotted with nice restaurants and classy bars that cater to beautiful people. I like my neighborhood. And I’ve patronized the deli with some regularity, often several times in a single day. I’ve sent my son in my stead. My wife would often trade small talk with whoever was working checkout. Last year when my beautiful niece visited, she loved the deli so much that I felt myself a sideshow. But it’s understandable. It’s a good deli.

Since the Whitaker affair, I’ve read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a “sincere mistake” made by a “decent man” who was “just doing his job.” I believe him. And yet for weeks now I have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin Gaye’s “Distant Lover” and Al Green’s “For the Good Times.”

In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: “As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community.”

A half-century later little had changed. The comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on “Seinfeld”) once yelled at a black heckler from the stage: “He’s a ******! He’s a ******! He’s a ******!” Confronted about this, Richards apologized and then said, “I’m not a racist,” and called the claim “insane.”

The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years.

But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such.

I am trying to imagine a white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral people.

The other day I walked past this particular deli. I believe its owners to be good people. I felt ashamed at withholding business for something far beyond the merchant’s reach. I mentioned this to my wife. My wife is not like me. When she was 6, a little white boy called her cousin a ******, and it has been war ever since. “What if they did that to your son?” she asked.

And right then I knew that I was tired of good people, that I had had all the good people I could take.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, is a guest columnist. Nicholas D. Kristof is on book leave.

 

[Domingo Halliburton]

i'd rather be frisked by this guy then the NYPD

 

[big_moe]

Bro racism still happens to this day, except it aint as bad as it is now.

i was with my pops a couple years back driving down Texas towards Waco and we seen a Billboard calling Obama a Socialist n sh*t. Some white people just cant seem to brush off the whole racist ideology, it's real sad to see homie

Obama still eatin tho

 

[KillSpray]

do what you may about racism, prejudice will always exist in one form or another, its in our nature.

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

Yea the concept of eradicating it completely is a bit crazy, but at the minimum we should try and purge it from systems of power (govt, employers, police, military) as much as possible

 

[HoustonHeat]

I think we teach in our elementary schools that racism means burning crosses, hoods, and violence. We were never taught to recognize institutional racism, which is far more prevalent and committed unknowingly with our consent. So when we see examples of systematic oppression, we call it unfair, but we don't call it by the name of racism (even though we should).

i was with my pops a couple years back driving down Texas towards Waco and we seen a Billboard calling Obama a Socialist n sh*t. Some white people just cant seem to brush off the whole racist ideology, it's real sad to see homie

When I drive through I-10 in Texas, the two billboard signs I always see are the "Texas Secede" board, and the very large board for a strip club in east Texas called, "Plantation", which has a picture of an actual plantation

I wanna know what goes on inside club Plantation

 

[big_moe]

I think we teach in our elementary schools that racism means burning crosses, hoods, and violence. We were never taught to recognize institutional racism, which is far more prevalent and committed unknowingly with our consent. So when we see examples of systematic oppression, we call it unfair, but we don't call it by the name of racism (even though we should).




When I drive through I-10 in Texas, the two billboard signs I always see are the "Texas Secede" board, and the very large board for a strip club in east Texas called, "Plantation", which has a picture of an actual plantation

I wanna know what goes on inside club Plantation

I dont think u wanna go in that "club" bro
I'd be like f*ck this and dip
texas azz crackas
some of them are racist as f*ck and they try be slick but they still act racist them cac b*tch n*ggas

 

[TLR Is Mental Poison]

I dont know if I'd call a bodega clerk asking to frisk someone institutional racism. A bodega really isn't an institution. Plus as much as I hate negative stereotypes they aren't born out of thin air. Still though for dude to make the accusation based on nothing but Forrest's appearance and skin color is racist.

 

[mtu wa chuma]

Forrest whitaker is a big dude. Why would he allow some peasant to come anywhere near him to actually touch him and let him frisk him just like that. Not even I would allow that without creating a rucus and im not big or a celebrity.

 

[mbewane]

To expand on this, the worst for me are the so-called "opened" people, often left-minded and often actually involved in anti-racism/intercultural movements and activities...a lot of them (in Europe) still have tosn of prejudice, and are sometimes what I call "good prejudices" like "Black people dance so well", "Africans are so nice", "Africans are beautiful". For me, a prejudice is a prejudice, because it still shows ignorance of complexities and a tendency to talk about people as part of a group, as opposed as individuals. Which is exactly what racists do when they say "Black people are lazy".

 

[rocksteady]

To expand on this, the worst for me are the so-called "opened" people, often left-minded and often actually involved in anti-racism/intercultural movements and activities...a lot of them (in Europe) still have tosn of prejudice, and are sometimes what I call "good prejudices" like "Black people dance so well", "Africans are so nice", "Africans are beautiful". For me, a prejudice is a prejudice, because it still shows ignorance of complexities and a tendency to talk about people as part of a group, as opposed as individuals. Which is exactly what racists do when they say "Black people are lazy".

even on this forum (HL)

bigoted trolls allowed to run rampant.