Charleston and Racism

The brutal murders in Charleston and the disgusting responses of commentators on Fox News and from some prominent Republicans, once again demonstrate that we don’t live in a post racial society. Racism, both on the individual level (more correctly described as prejudice and hatred) and on the societal level (institutional racism) are still, as H. Rap Brown said many years ago, “as American as apple pie”.

Our country’s failure to deal with every social, political and economic issue stems, in large part, from its failure to deal with its history of racial oppression and the consequences of that history for today. That system of racial oppression may have evolved – from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration (see Michele Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow”) and economic inequality (check out the median wealth of blacks and compare it to that of whites), but it is alive and well in all aspects of American society.

The individual violence that targets blacks and makes headlines is just the tip of the iceberg. All aspects of American society – income, wealth, healthcare, housing, education, political representation and so on – are still separate and very unequal. And getting more so. This kind of violence kills just as surely as that of a gun. One man pulled the trigger in Charleston, but to the extent that we fail to take up the struggle against racism and make sure that black lives matter as much as white lives, we are all complicit.

George Vlasits, June 19, 2015