So back in January I promised a pair of posts entitled “Visibility/Invisibility of Brown Brilliance.” Part I went up almost right away, but Part II has proven to be a lot of work. I tried to bang it out a couple times but got stuck in questions of exactly how personal I wanted to get. So I shelved it until after I finished and defended my PhD thesis.
Which, by the way: defended! You may now address me as “MF Doctor.”
Also, I’m on twitter now, and plan on actually using it.
So, anyway, looking forward to finishing Part II. But I realized it might help to more explicitly create the frame for the type of conversation I want to have. I got added impetus by reading Yen Duong’s sweet and brave post the other day, entitled Am I Racist?
In it, Yen describes going to a football game with her spouse, and noticing that she perceives the white players as younger than the black players. She connects this with a 2014 study showing that white male police officers and white female undergraduates tend to overestimate the ages, and underestimate the innocence, of black boys aged 10 and up. She asks her spouse if she is being racist. He recoils and insists she’s not.
What came up for me was the critical, critical importance of being able to talk about the way that living in this world and this country, with all their glorious and sordid history, distorts our perceptions of each other based on race, without getting sidetracked by a conversation about whether or not we are good people.
I think something really beautiful and important was said about this some years ago by Jay Smooth. I’ve linked the below video twice before, but let me make it the focus this time.
The main idea:
Being a good person, with respect to race (and more generally), is like being a clean person. It’s not something you are or not, it’s a practice. Like dental hygiene.
The world we have inherited has racial “dirt” everywhere — tendencies to misperceive each other accrete in our minds, like plaque on our teeth, daily, just from living life in this world. The root causes of this fact were in place long before anyone alive today was born. So when we notice one of these accretions in ourselves, or have it pointed out to us, the question of whether that makes us a bad person is a red herring. It doesn’t: these accretions are inevitable, for everyone. The right question is how to train ourselves to perceive each other more clearly.
The video:
Watch this right now. I’ll wait.
What I want to add:
Two things.
1) In the video, Jay says, “There are many things in our day-to-day lives that lead us toward developing little pockets of prejudice.”
I think one aspect of the racial “dental hygiene” he’s calling for is the search for awareness and understanding of these processes. My major purpose in writing the Visibility/Invisibility of Brown Brilliance posts is to call attention to the subtlety and effectiveness with which our media and cultural environment, whether by design or not, programs us to underestimate the minds of the black and brown Americans among us. (How could I not have noticed, before Queen of Katwe and Hidden Figures were announced, that I’d practically never seen a movie centered on the brainy pursuits of a brainy black woman, despite the many brainy black women in my life?)
But for the benefit of those reading who are unsure what is being referred to, here is a very concretely documented example:
Here is a twitter user comparing Google image searches of the phrases ‘three black teenagers’ vs. ‘three white teenagers’, turning up mugshots in the former case and cutesy, wholesome stock photos in the latter.
This is the “dirt.” It is going to get on us, every day. The question is what to do with it.
2) I love Yen for her reflectiveness about the football players and the study. This is what the “dental hygiene” looks like — this is how you do it.
I also relate to her spouse. If somebody (even your partner) is calling your partner a bad name, you defend! BUT, I have the feeling that trying to reassure Yen she wasn’t being racist was pulling them both away from the good stuff. Look, a study of hundreds of cops and college kids found that on average they tended to overestimate black boys’ ages a dramatic amount. Presumably, lots and lots of people do this. I bet I do it. What are we then going to do? Take note, and look for ways to do a better job? Or, waste energy trying to prove the improbability that we’re somehow immune from this poison?
Again, I feel him. And I don’t blame him. The issue is that our cultural understanding of how to be a good person is so limited. An alien watching video of lots of Americans talking publicly about race would surely conclude that we believe that good people are never prejudiced and if you ever have a prejudiced thought, you’re bad. In the language of the video, the “tonsils paradigm of race discourse” — “I can’t be prejudiced, I had my prejudice removed in 2005!” We would all grant that this is absurd, abstractly, and yet we have an anxiety meltdown, or get angry and defensive, at the slightest suggestion of prejudice — what other conclusion could our hypothetical alien come to?
This limited frame makes it impossible to attend to a racially problematic habit of thought without implying that you’re a bad person. This forces us to hide the dirt. Then we just get dirtier and dirtier and keep hiding it.
I’m offering Jay’s video as an alternative frame. What if instead of hiding our racial dirt we were trading ideas about how to deal with it? Working on better and better “toothbrushes” for our stereotypes?
On that note — above I mentioned Google image searches as a quick and concrete measure of the “dirtiness” of our environment of racial images — here is a “toothbrush” that was designed in response. A photo / video / poetry art piece by 19-yr-old Myles Loftin, addressing these images. Enjoy!
Research in Practice 