| That is one of the best and most succinct descriptions I've read. Bravo. I mean that sincerely. I'm afraid it may read as sarcasm, but it is not. Of course we had words for this before. I studied
what would now be called “environmental racism”
in law school. We would say “minority communities
suffer disproportionately negative effects from
the siting of coal plants.”
“Minority communities suffer disproportionately negative effects from the siting of coal plants” is a nice description of that specific thing. What about more general construction and zoning choices that aren't about coal plants? What about systemic practices in general that have disproportionately negative effects on minorities? I don't feel we had an overarching term for those phenomena, besides "rascism." Language, but not a term. The recent approach has been to reuse “racism” to refer to
systems that create or perpetuate racial disparities whether
or not they’re motivated by what’s now called prejudice.
The approach has changed, but how much?Whether the year is 1860 or 1960 or 2020, surely even the most fundamental understanding of racism has always required an understanding of both intent and effect. When I was in school in the 1990s, we learned about the many "kindly" slaveowners who viewed themselves as benevolent caretakers of their slaves, whom they viewed as simple savages that would not prosper on their own. We learned how race-based humor could have innocent intent but negative consequences. And so on. The frequent dissonance between intent and effect was in my opinion vastly underemphasized, but this was not a new line of thought even 30 years ago. [The coal plant thing] is a concept I could easily explain
to my Trump-voting in laws and they’d get it. But when you
call that “racism” that implies (not only to my in laws, but
to my Biden voting non-white dad) that people involved in the
siting decisions were motivated by racial prejudice. They’d
say, “no, they’re just putting the coal plant where the land
is cheapest.”
The practical argument for calling this something other than "racism" is, essentially, that we need to make things more palatable for folks in order to help them understand the effects of their actions.I would certainly agree that labeling such acts as racism precludes many people from understanding these concepts. We have been taught that racism is one of the greatest of transgressions and nobody wants to think of themselves as racist. I don't even think many members of white nationalist groups even consider themselves "racist." |