November 8, 2016 - 23:02
On page 7 of Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:
"Americans believe in the reality of 'race' as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men."
I very much agree with this statement. This is the argument that white people (such as myself, though I hope that I personally keep such thoughts/behavior to a minimum) have always used to justify events like those mentioned in the quote as they happen, and despite the evidence that race is not based in biology, continue to use to justify the oppression that is still happening. And the language that I just used in my previous sentence, which I considered editing but decided not to, illustrates another way that racism is portrayed as a "phenomenon... beyond the handiwork of men": I spoke of racial oppression as something that "happens" as though it is a natural occurrence and not something that has a human perpetrator behind it. This both permits us to ignore the ways in which our ancestors were complicit in that oppression and we are complicit today, and it depicts the anti-racist struggle as futile, because racism is something that will just happen.
This reminds me of a passage later on, where Coates talks about not seeing slavery as a mass of people who were enslaved, but rather imagining one person living through slavery. Making history personal in this way is important not only for doing justice to those who have suffered, but also for remembering that those who caused that suffering were real, individual people, intentionally choosing to oppress other people. Thus we can understand that it is racism is not a naturally-occurring event; it is both preventable and always possible. Since humans create it through their choices, humans can also choose to dismantle it, or at least not to contribute to it. At the same time, since humans have not fundamentally changed throughout the history of racism, there is always a possibility that we will continue to make those same violent choices.
I apologize if this is rambling; I'm too anxious about this election to think straight.