Is America a Racist Country? is a Dumb Question

U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC)

Senator Tim Scott's response to President Joe Biden's speech to a joint session of Congress last week was most remarkable for its discussion of race. Senator Scott combined personal experience ("I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason") with defenses of Republican efforts to change state voting laws ("Republicans support making it easier to vote and harder to cheat" as if none of us was paying attention on January 6). Along the way, he made the statement that "America is not a racist country." The context:

Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them, and if they look a certain way, they're an oppressor. From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven't made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we've worked so hard to heal. You know this stuff is wrong. Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country. It's backwards to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.

There was a good deal of politics in the Senator's speech, and some reference to ongoing policy debates, but the statement that got the most attention was the one above. Vice President Kamala Harris faced the question the next day on the network TV show "Good Morning America." Her response--Well, first of all, no, I don't think America is a racist country, but we also do have to speak the truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today--was calculated but hard to beat.

"America is/is not a racist country" is exactly the sort of simplistic formulation that hijacks the "debates" Scott doesn't want shut down. It presumes that there is some clear, binary distinction between all-in racism and all-out equality. We don't get a definition of "racism," or for that matter of "country," so whatever we're talking about is the pictures in our own heads. It's the rhetorical equivalent of blasting the national anthem in the middle of a conversation.

Here's the tricky part: If every single person in America refused with a pure heart ever to judge people by the color of their skin, we would have a serious race problem. Anyway. Still. Because the country we live in is the product of decisions made in its past: the exclusion of blacks from 1930s federal housing programs, the destruction of walkable black neighborhoods in the 1950s interstate highway program, the persistence of discrimination in employment, education, and public accommodations into my lifetime. Of course, much of this is over. Of course, de jure discrimination has long been illegal. But those long-ago actions led to outcomes that reinforced centuries-old differences between the black and white experiences in America. Without redress or reparation, those disparate outcomes replicate themselves today, producing something that looks a lot like racism.

We should be talking about how we deal with that--and to their credit, a lot of people are--not arguing over phony definitional binaries.

SEE ALSO: 

Rashawn Ray, "Is the United States a Racist Country?" How We Rise (Brookings), 4 May 2021

Pete Saunders, "Racist Impact, If Not Intent, Is Built Into the American DNA," Corner Side Yard, 9 May 2021