Institutional Racism

In a large Southern city, he was an earnest, honest, smart young white man who told me he had never encountered "institutional racism." He wanted to consult with me, whom he trusted to be earnest, honest, smart, and white with him.

Possessed of no special wisdom, I realized two things immediately:

1. that I didn't trust the comfortable public postures, sociological cant and categories that we hear so often about the subject, and
   
2. that I had to say something because he was on the cusp of changing, had begun perhaps to suspect that his world was tainted by our contemporary version of white resentment--the sort that's niggled like a worm under his skin by moral claims proceeding from oppressed minorities and the bone-deep conviction that he and his people, cultural privilege aside, have "earned" and "chosen" responsibly in this "greatest country in the world."

EHSWYM said he had never seen anything about IR that he couldn't ascribe to merit, level of competence, work ethic, etc.

But when I told about construction workplace practices I knew about, where work teams were divided into ethnic groups (partly for language reasons, we know) and where the white bosses' spite and condescension--in full-blown racial epithets--toward Blacks and Latinos, sometimes pitting one group against another, EHSWYM recalled his own simiar experiences, especially the feeling that he, white, was implicated in the bad talk and high-handed preferencing.

Like EHSWYM in that discriminatory workplace, we often whitewash systemic discrimination by declaring it the individual actions of the ignorant, the bigoted individual at fault, not the organization, nor the larger culture.

It's cowardly, isn't it?

There's a parallel here, somewhere, between

• catching the tiny few identifiable bad guys in huge corporate fraud and
• configuring corporate culture in which the so-called bottom line is understood to be arbitrary, driven by what used to be shameful aspirations that we used to call greed.
  

There's also a parallel here, somewhere, between

• jerking around and jailing a few vulnerable non-coms and
• configuring a national political culture that doesn't have to wait for John McCain to bludgeon our highest leaders into agreeing that torture/inhumane treatment is simply wrong.

We are all culpable. God willing, we are able to fix a lot of our culp.