In the test administered by Kiri Davis some sixty years later, Davis asks a little girl, "'Can you show me the doll that looks bad?' The girl immediately chooses the black doll. Why does that look bad," asks Kiri. "Because it's black," the girl answers.
In fact, 15 of 21 children (ages 4 and 5) "said that the white doll was good and pretty, and that the black doll was bad." [Ibid] How's that for the impact of present-day racism?
Symbolic racists also would do well to consider the deadly present-day impact of previous racism. For example, when you think about hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on the lives of African-Americans living in New Orleans, think racial segregation. As Richard Thompson Ford writes, in recent book, The Race Card, "Racism didn't flood the black neighborhoods of New Orleans, but racism established and enforced the residential patterns that made those neighborhoods black." [p. 55]
And New Orleans wasn't alone. "Many American cities were segregated by force of law until the Supreme Court invalidated racial zoning in 1917. Those cities and many others replaced racial zoning with an almost equally effective private substitute - racially restricted real estate covenants - until those too were invalidated in 1948. Banks, real estate agents, residents, and in some cases the federal government conspired to enforce segregation informally until Congress prohibited housing discrimination in 1968." [Ibid]
Yet, although the evidence of present-day racism is overwhelming, such widespread and continuing racial discrimination does not justify the growth of a very troubling, self-destructive black "oppositional culture" in inner-city ghettos (See Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street.)
On the other hand, when a white Department of Defense colleague asked me to comment on a speech by Bill Cosby - in which Mr. Cosby tore into blacks, especially black parents, for the poor upbringing and resulting social pathologies of so many black children - I not only recommended Elijah Anderson's sobering book, but also asked why white Americans weren't equally outraged by the social pathologies of low-class whites - a much larger American sub-group, often called "white trash" by mean-spirited folks. I suggested to my colleague that the double standard, itself, constituted evidence of widespread racism in this country.
But, beyond this racial double standard, symbolic racists do their country a double disservice. Not only do they belittle the existence of present-day racism, thereby turning a deaf ear to potential remedies, they also provide fertile soil for the reemergence of overt racism.
As with Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "God Damn America" (a sentiment that was shared by Thomas Jefferson, see part one of this article here: http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/damn.html ), Sean Hannity and FOX NEWS also has heaped scorn upon Rev. Wright's reference to the "US of KKK A." Again, Hannity's racial hypocrisy was astounding!
Simply consider that on November 14, 2007, Hannity's former co-conspirator to fill WABC's airwaves with hate, Hal Turner, went on the Warren Ballentine radio show and asserted: "We are going to begin lynching blacks in this country again next year!" He followed that assertion with a suggestion that we must return to what worked in the past, a rope. ["Hate Groups: Mainstreaming the Far Right," The Center for Democratic Renewal, February 2008]
Turner made his assertion in the wake of the huge September 2007, "Jena 6" rally against racial discrimination and hate in Jena, Louisiana that sparked a flurry of some 50 to 60 "noose incidents." The flurry marked a spike in noose-specific offenses that, according to a Justice Department report in 2000, have been increasing in professional environments. In fact, in October 2007 "seven black workers employed by an Oklahoma-based drilling company won a $290,000 settlement in a discrimination lawsuit which claimed they felt threatened by the display of a noose on a Gulf of Mexico oil rig." ['Noose incidents; Foolish pranks or pure hate?" CNN.com, Nov. 1, 2007]
In fact, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement (NSM) had put out a call: "All across the country, white people are spontaneously hanging nooses from trees to say that white people will not be intimidated by n-word mob rule and to show support four our 'Lynch the Jena 6' campaign."
The NSM appears to have picked up where the KKK left off. As the authors of "Hate Groups: Mainstreaming the Far Right" have written: "The practice of lynching exploded following the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan in 1867 as the organization used lynching to promote the concept of white supremacy. It has been estimated that between 1880 and 1920 an average of two African Americans per week were lynched in the United States."
"Lynchings weren't just murders - there were, in many cases, sanctioned murders: casually reported in the newspapers, ignored by law enforcement; celebrated with family picnics; photos of hanging victims turned into postcards, and 'souvenirs' were taken from the scene of the crime." [Ibid]
Mr. Turner's prediction of more lynchings came just last year, when the number of hate groups operating in America rose to 888. That number represents an increase of 48% increase since 2000. ["The Year in Hate," Southern Poverty Law Center, Spring 2008] And it came just a year after law enforcement agencies reported that 4,737 single-bias hate crime offenses were racially motivated. Of these offenses 66.2 percent were motivated by anti-black bias.
Thus, although it might be a bit of a stretch today (but certainly not during the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century) to refer to the United States of America as the "US of KKK A," Rev. Wright's assertion did not merit the outrage it received across white America, especially in light of the "noose incidents" that have increased since 2000 and spiked in 2007. Are we a nation of amnesiacs?
My closest African American friend, Stanley Brown, gave me his considered opinion about the outrage, which I publish here with his permission: "They finally found Barack's swift boat issue. It will probably never stop. Politics is a dirty business and Americans are easily led around like sheep (sheep are dumb). This issue of Rev. Wright allowed race to become the issue, to which white America can assert their sense of superiority making white (thought) right. The media disguises the whiteness as patriotism because most Americans have little knowledge of world events unless provide[d] by our fair and balanced media. It's as if the sons and daughters of slaves and victims of a Jim Crow society, now James Crow, Esq., should have the same perspective of America. It would actually mean that African Americans [were] insane, if they did. We are all a sum of our experiences. It's a testament to how far we haven't come and our lack of desire for real intelligence."
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