DawgNotes

But if you are not upper class, and/or if you are not white, what kinds of life chances are there for you? In Marable's construction, the upper-class and white factors go together. In Delgado and Stefancic's question, one weighs more heavily than the other. Their comments suggest that race weighs more heavily. I think they are right.

Marable gives weight to the racial factor as well. He wrote, "The boundaries of one's skin become the crude starting point for negotiating access to power and resources in a society constructed around racial hierarchies" (3). I want to resist this claim. I want to be able to say the contemporary American society does not have racial hierarchies, but I live here, so I know better. We do. And if the African American has been elevated in that hierarchy, it is only because there is another group, marked and identifiable, that those groups on the upper rungs disdain even more. So I have to say race has more to do with determining one's life chances.

That American dream that anyone born in this country can grow up to become anything that someone wants isn't really true. The stories of individuals rising above their station because of hard work, industriousness and talent are almost always about white people, aren't they? While it seems possible to imagine a white child born into a poor rural family succeeding in business or politics, it seems much less plausible for a black child born in an inner-city tenement to succeed at either, if he survives childhood at all. Social class counts. It does. But other things count first.

As a student who is also a teacher, I was asked once to explain how I would respond to student writers who came from "traditionally underrepresented groups" whose writing was not in Edited Standard English. It led to a discussion about what children are taught in school, and I made the somewhat naive claim that all students get the same instruction - that's what curriculums and by-grade outcomes etc. are made of, so that in any one school, the students get the same lesson. I wasn't prepared for the simplicity of the answer I got back: what if the teacher assume the students are too stupid to learn and therefore just doesn't bother offering the information? I found it inconceivable that such a thing would happen. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was true. Some students never get the chance to learn because some authority figure overdetermines their situation and doesn't offer the information at all. Then another friend of my, and a fellow teacher, pointed out that of course race mattered more, and when I asked for an example, he said "because you never see the security guard following a white person around in REI just for being white". The built in assumption is that the high-end sporting goods/outfitter store is not a place for black people isn't a question of ability to pay. It's just about not belonging there. How in the world does one combat that sort of a problem?

As Delgado and Stefancic explain, the obvious markers of systemic racism have faded somewhat. Slavery, lynching, official segregation - those things are part of our history (although lynching is recently back in the news as a sad and pathetic reminder that the claims that racism still permeates our culture are all-too valid), replaced by less obvious but no less damaging problems like the lack of teaching, disproportionate problems with standard credit opportunities, disproportionate representation in the prison population, etc.

So why is it, then, that white people are less likely to acknowledge racism that any other group? Because they aren't having their life chances diminished by their whiteness. Because unless they themselves are committing overt racist acts, they can't even see most of the subtler problems. Because questioning one's privilege seems too weird to actually do.

Is Critical Race Theory pessimistic for holding that racism is ordinary, normal and embedded in society? I don't think so. I think you have to call the thing what it is before you can have any chance to change it. Like those stupid Terminex commercials with the house telling the homeowner about the unseen pests in the walls or under the carpet, someone has to point out the things that are wrong and attach them to a source. Otherwise there can't really be a solution. We can't educate ourselves out of a mindset we don't recognize we have.

Work Cited:
Marable, Manning. The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002