Societal Traps
(a.k.a. How to Racism without even Trying)
Over the course of the next few months, I’m going to be merging my blogging for http://www.rightandfreedom.com, my socially-conscious website that a couple of my former Marine buddies work with me on. I separated these at first because I thought that perhaps my particular social leaning might scare people away from my entertainment novels, which do, if you’ve been paying attention, follow along with some of the social problems that we see today (in a very entertaining way).
Except Drift, published under my pen name Roman Hawthorne. That’s a total escapist horrorfest. Get your copy for Halloween! Thank me later!
Back to more serious topics though. I might lose some folks with this, but it’s close to my heart so I’m going to do it anyway. Buckle up!
So I was listening to a podcast today that was discussing a couple of things that, really, seemed quite innocuous on the face of it. One of them was the recent rollback of affirmative action’s ability to use race on admission applications. This bothers me, but it’s kind of hard to describe why. The other thing that they talked about was the recent Louisiana court case that rolled back environmental protections supporting marginalized communities. This is the one that got to the Supreme Court and basically said that states can’t consider race when considering where to put industrial facilities. But it was kind of sneaky. What the decision really said was that the Legislative Branch wasn’t prescriptive enough about the what they wanted the Executive Branch to do about racial disparity.
By now, your eyelids are drooping and you’re slowly dozing off. Yes, this stuff is dry. But it’s also super-important, so WAKE UP!
There’s more. They said that it would be unfair to consider race at all when determining where to put factories and industrial complexes. At this point, you’re probably like, well…so what? Isn’t making decisions about where to put factories and industrial complexes…racism? Yes. You’re right. If we were dropped into a world where all races historically have been treated equally. You’d be surprised at the current situation, and just how much more exposure minorities have to cancer-causing agents. And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? For a long time, our zoning laws and home sales strategies in this country were flat-out racist (explicitly so, in many cases). So as a collective, we basically funneled black and brown people into industrial districts, where they are more likely to be exposed to toxic chemicals. And then, like in Flynt, Michigan, we just kind of forget about them until someone finally complains loudly enough that they can’t be ignored. Fix one site. Move on.
What the Supreme Court did was took away the systemic fix that Congress had put in place. By requiring intent (as they indicated) and limiting the Executive Branch to only address intentional racism as opposed to looking at disparate outcomes, as the Executive Branch used to do, the runaway Supreme Court knee-capped the governments ability to affect systemic change around this topic. Again, it wouldn’t be a big deal…if we were all on the same playing field already. But I think we all know that’s not the case (yes, all of us, even if we don’t admit it out loud). So if we’re already in a bad situation that past racism produced and perpetuates, there is no way out of anymore.
Know your role. Shut your mouth.
That’s basically what the Supreme Court implied with this ruling. Yes, I take it personally. Being half-black, I take a lot of things personally that others might scoff at, but it’s important. Who was it that said if you don’t cry out when you’re being hurt, they’ll kill you and say you liked it? Paraphrase anyway.
Think of racism as it truly was: a system. It was a systematic way to disenfranchise a huge swath of Americans for many years. Just like the interstate highway system makes it easier to get to certain destinations, and harder to get to others, racism has paved over two-hundred years of roads that lead black and brown people to destitution and poverty. You can take all the “no blacks allowed” signs you want down, but the roads are already there. People will take them. They will just not know why the roads are there. And if you can’t address why the roads are there (racism), then do you also not acknowledge the outcome? And if you don’t acknowledge the outcome, do you even make an effort to fix it? Or do you just tell the people in Cancer Alley, Louisiana that they’re SOL, because there’s no racism, and they should just move. Despite…all the things that keep them there in the first place?
Man, racism sucks. Ugh.
