A White Mans Take On Modern Racism

Contemporary forms of prejudice, however, continue to exist and affect the lives of
people in subtle but significant ways. For these subtle, contemporary forms of prejudice, bias is
expressed in indirect ways that can typically be justified on the basis of nonracial factors
(Dovido, Gaertner, Kawakami & Hodson, 2002, p. 90).
Racism is not a figment of the distant past. The biggest misconception White America
suffers from is the idea that racism went away with segregation. Simply because African
Americans and other people of color are not designated to separate water fountains or special
classrooms, does not mean that all racial prejudices have been eviscerated. It wasnt until 1964
that Brown V. Board Of Education outlawed segregation in education. What people fail to
realize is that the same people who enacted those segregation laws; the shop owners who
wouldnt allow people of color in their store, the police officers who blasted people of color with
hoses, are still alive today. When Brown V Board Of Education passed, it did not remove the
people in power who supported segregation. Racism didnt disappear with the supposed equal
rights people of color earned, it simply became less overt.

I am a straight white male and I have experienced extreme prejudice and racism against
people of color my entire life.

I grew up in a multiracial household. I was raised alongside my brothers, one black and one
white, by my black stepfather and white mother. Even though I grew up in the same household,
and was raised by the same parents as my brother who is African American, we grew up in
completely different worlds. Every time we sat down to watch television, whether it was
Saturday morning cartoons as children or police procedurals as teens, the characters we could
each identify with were night and day. I could be any member of the Justice League because they
all resembled me. Every doctor, every cop, every superhero on television looked like they could
be a member of my immediate family . My brother, unfortunately, did not get to experience that
same level of representation. Instead, while I was watching and identifying with almost every
protagonist of every show, my brother was stuck with empty caricatures of people of color. The
teen movie craze of the nineties brought the token black friend trope. This concept was
rightfully taken down by the otherwise insignificant parody Not Another Teen Movie. While I
was getting to see myself reflected in every imaginable way, my brother was stuck with black
actors whose words were horribly written by white writers.

The different world my brother and I lived in transcended the fictional world of movies
and television. I had first hand experiences of the kinds of everyday prejudices and racism
experienced by my brother. Candy and soda runs on my way home from school with my brothers
always seemed to bring a lot of attention on us from store owners. In my naivete, I thought the
amount of attention paid to my brothers and I was simply because we were young, because we
were kids. I was shocked when I went to get slurpees with my white friends after practice and
there wasnt a store employee in every aisle with us.

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It is satirical, but not too far off from what really happens.

I understood that the color of my brothers skin was the variable in the equation. My life and the
life of my brother are littered of stories like this. When we both started driving our stories of
getting pulled over by police were completely dichotomous. Mine comprised mostly of warnings
and being let go, while my brothers routinely involved searches and stepping out of the car.
Those are some of the larger of what we experienced and I cannot even begin to count all of the
micro-agressions my brother had to deal with.
How many times my brothers and I were introduced to strangers and within minutes them
praising my brother for how articulate he was. That one always confused me, since my
brothers and I all spoke the same exact way and used the same slang with similar cadence. I
know now as an adult it was because people did not expect a child of color to speak the same
way as two white kids.

There is a mentality that exists in the alt-right and conservative circles that people of
color are making themselves victims when they bring up racism and microaggressions they face.

This quote from an article on black racism from the far right leaning FrontPageMag.com,
Black racism hides behind alleged victimhood. Every act of bigotry, from name-calling to race
riots to murder, is justified by the claim that every single white person is part of a conscious or
unconscious conspiracy to discriminate against them.

That idea is bullshit, and dismisses the people who are being racist and causing these tensions,
and instead focuses on telling the people who are systemically suffering to simply get over it.
If there is one thing I hope I can tell other white people with this, it's that I hope they understand
that just because they do not see racism, does not mean it does not exist. If we who hold
positions of privilege do not step in and address racial inequality then we are on the side of
wrong. It was Desmond Tutu who said it far more eloquently than I ever could, If you are
neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its
foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your
neutrality.

I may not have had to personally experience racism but I have seen it and I can say that racism
exists.

References
 Bell, D. A. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma. Harvard
Law Review,93(3), 518. doi:10.2307/1340546

Dovidio, J. F., Gaertner, S. E., Kawakami, K., & Hodson, G. (2002). Why can't we just get
along? Interpersonal biases and interracial distrust. Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority
Psychology, 8(2). doi:10.1037//1099-9809.8.2.88