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Emma Behr
Professor Earl Brooks
Rhetoric and Civic Life 137H
Paradigm Shift Paper
November 4, 2014

Racism in America, the Un-Paradigm Shift

Today we are race-colorblind when we want to be and race-conscious when we

want to be. For example, when a crime is reported on the news, race is typically the first
description mentioned of a criminal when he or she is a person of color. When the
criminal is not a person of color, race suddenly disappears as a factor of the crime and the
criminal. Yet we do not know how to discuss race in daily conversation. For example, if a
store clerk asks a customer which employee assisted in the purchase, and one of the
employees is black and one is white, every physical description will be used in an attempt
to describe the correct, and black, employee. Every physical description is used except
race. This race-confusion is time-consuming, inefficient, and awkward. Race today is
in the spotlight when discussed negatively by the media, but in day-to-day interactions it
is often a subject that is skirted around and avoided. This is an imbalanced combination
of race-consciousness and colorblindness. Race is a physical description, and it should be
acknowledged and embraced, not used against people or ignored. Many people argue that
racism in America has improved drastically since the Modern Civil Rights Movement of
the fifties and sixties. While it is true that we are not living in the fifties or before, racism
is far from gone from our society and mentality. The way racism manifests itself in the
United States today has changed from the way it manifested itself prior to the Modern
Civil Rights Movement in that it has evolved from discrimination and abuse driven

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blatantly by racism, to discrimination and abuse with racism as a more debatable and
disguised motive.
According to Ford and Airhihenbuwas article which connects racism and public
health, race as a field of study was first cultivated by a French physician named Francois
Bernier. The first racial grouping was introduced by Carolus Linnaeus in 1735 and later
became the foundation of the racial policies of many countries, including the United
States.1 Both of these scientists presented racial distinctions between individuals as
biological, irrevocable differences and the results of both of their studies degraded
anyone who was not considered European.2 These studies became scientifically
affirmed and from then on, white supremacy became the norm. It appeared and was
condoned in respected journals, yet many of these scientists, writers, and scholars were
unaware of the insidious nature of their findings because they were thought of as fact and
truth.3
Fortunately, progressive scholars (often minorities) began to questions these
findings and brought to light their ramifications on people of color. By the twentieth
century, they had developed new frameworks like the Critical Race Theory, a racial lens
through which to look at social, political, and legal matters in order to identify and
eradicate racism.4 Derrick Bell is often accredited with the title of the Father of the
Critical Race Theory. He and several colleagues at Harvard Law came up with the theory
in 1989 in order to address apparent racism present on many campuses and in American

1 Ford and Airhihenbuwa, Abstract.
2 Ford and Airhihenbuwa, Abstract.
3 Ford and Airhihenbuwa, Abstract.
4 Ford and Airhihenbuwa, Abstract.

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society in general.5 It was, and still is, an academic movement that came about when Bell
and other professors became disillusioned with the results of the Civil Rights Movement.6
They saw that blacks had technically, supposedly gained legal equality, yet white
supremacy and white privilege continued to reign.
As is widely known, colorblindness in terms of race is the supposed erasing of
race and therefore the supposed eradication of discrimination based upon race.
Colorblindness as a term came about after the Modern Civil Rights Movement as a way
to claim that racism no longer existed and that everyone was equal. This, of course, did
not work and was not true. Although it sounds like a good idea in an ideal world, we do
not live in an ideal world and colorblindness was and still is often used as a way to enact
racism in a sneaky way, fitting of todays times. Racist people and institutions have used
this notion of colorblindness in order to attempt to revoke measures taken to instill racial
equality in the United States. Meritocracy, equal opportunity, and colorblind justice
ended up helping whites by masking and fortifying the deep inequalities of society.7 On
the other hand, race-consciousness is an equally controversial concept. Raceconsciousness is defined as the explicit knowledge of the workings of race and racism in
social contexts or in ones personal life.8 Critical Race Theory challenges specious yet
commonly believed views that race consciousness equates racism and that
colorblindness equates the absence of racism.9

5 Ford and Airhihenbuwa, Abstract.
6 Oremus, How Radical Was That Law Professor Obama Hugged?
7 Oremus, How Radical Was That Law Professor Obama Hugged?
8 Ford and Airhihenbuwa, Abstract.
9 Ford and Airhihenbuwa, Abstract.

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Structural racism evolves over time and is relevant to its current period. Todays

racism is characterized by it subtlety and ordinariness.10 For example, prior to the

Modern Civil Rights Movement, a black man or boy could be arrested, harassed, or
murdered for behaving inappropriately towards white people, particularly white
women. The reasons for punishments like these were not skirted around, evaded, or lied
about. The motive was blatantly and frankly racism. However, todays racism takes on
subtler forms. For example, today many people of color experience racial profiling when
they are shopping and notice an employee shadowing them on the assumption that
someone of color would be more likely to steal than a white person.
This subtlety is ingrained unconsciously in American society by means of the
media and the subsequent model of consumerism. In the media, it is evident that there is a
serious lack of representation of people of color as opposed to their white counterparts.
When someone of any race goes to the store to buy makeup, band aids, or pantyhose and
sees the color beige instead called nude or skin tone, the message of racism is
whispered unconsciously into minds, perpetuating the cycle of racial inequity. This
subtlety is dangerous because people are either becoming accustomed to it, or they
simply do not notice it and therefore deny its existence. Or worse yet, people take
advantage of its subtlety and ordinariness in order to deny the existence of racism in
todays society and world.
The enigma gets trickier. Nicholas Kristof writes in his article for the New York
Times, research in the last decades suggests that the problem is not so much overt
racists. It is, rather, people who consider themselves to be liberal, progressive and

10 Ford and Airhihenbuwa, Abstract.

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advocates of liberty and equality but unconsciously discriminate in all the ways they so
ardently preach against.11 Some of these unconscious discriminatory actions include, but
are not limited to, the mass incarceration of a majority of minorities, the related drug use
discrepancies; black Americans and white Americans use drugs on a fairly equal level yet
white Americans convicted on drug crimes usually are sent to rehabilitation centers while
their black counterparts are usually given long prison sentences (thus contributing to the
mass incarceration problem in the United States). Also related to these ideas is the war
on drugs in America, which is could instead be called the war on minorities.
Furthermore, school suspension rates are much higher among black students than
white students. Minority students skills in English, math, and science are far behind their
white counterparts, as far as four years behind.12 Black and minority children are born
with severe educational disadvantagesBy the time this child is three years old, theres a
gap of about 800-words difference between the two groups. And that gap just increases
every year after that.13 Minority children are behind white children in school, but what
schools are teaching (or are not teaching) is just as disheartening. Schools are leaving out
crucial moments in history, such as slavery and the oppression of minorities. To
whitewash one of the darkest practices in American history, conservatives proposed that
textbooks refer to the slave trade as the Atlantic Triangular Trade.14 While this may
sound so ridiculous it is laughable, it is a grave and frightening issue. It is also not a new
concept. During the eighteenth century in America, the foundation of American institutes

11 Kristof, Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?
12 Burrell, Brainwashed, 165.
13 Burrell, Brainwashed,165.
14 Diamond, Tennessee Tea Party Demands that References to Slavery be
Removed from History Textbooks.

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of higher education was dependent upon the institution of slavery; the academy never
stood far apart from American slaveryin face, it stood beside church and state as the
third pillar of a civilization build on bondage.15 Slaveholders and slave traders paid
tuition at American medical and science colleges and faculties, as well as imposing
severe controls on the scientific research that was conducted and what results were
presented.16 Furthermore, doctors often give lower quality treatment to patients of color
than to white patients, which solidifies the fact that poor families are less likely to have
good health care.17 Job hiring and the ability to purchase or rent real estate are also
skewed by racism. Kristof shared the chilling fact that Americans unconsciously
associate American with white.
More unsettling yet is that most of these examples, excepting perhaps the more
serious examples such as racial profiling leading to murder and mass incarceration, but
the seemingly normal day-to-day discrimination is probably unknowingly committed by
these people who think they stand for racial equality.18 It can be argued that the media
and its racist drilling into the subconscious of American society as a whole is responsible
for a large part of these micro aggressions, although the history of our country and its
traditional foundation play roles as well. Racism is not an issue of individual racists but
the unconscious biases of American attitudes and institutions.19 Racism can be an

15 Wilder, Ebony & Ivory, 11.
16 Wilder, Ebony & Ivory, 228.
17 Burrell, Brainwashed, 165.
18 Kristof, Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?
19 Oremus, How Radical Was That Law Professor Obama Hugged?

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everyday fact of life for people of color even if whites rarely notice it.20 Stereotyping
therefore remains ubiquitous.21
Comparisons can be made between the flagrant racism of the pre-Civil Rights
Movement era and todays sneaky, subtle racism. The twentieth century and prior
lynching of blacks for being black can easily be compared to todays racial profiling by
law enforcement officials that resulted in the recent deaths of three unarmed black men
named Trey Von Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. These are just three names
out of an endlessly deep pool of names of those who have died due to police brutality in
the United States. Very few of the officers who commit murders like these ever get
prosecuted. The victims are denied trials, by death. The difference between the two
examples is that lynching was unquestionably motivated by sheer racism, while the
shootings of black youth today can be skewed and argued that they were out of selfdefense, ignorance, or simply accidental. But a question that could be raised is, Is there
any difference between the lynching of the past and what could be called the lynching of
today?
Another example is that of the restrictions put on blacks attempting to vote and
register to vote in the South prior to the Civil Rights Movement, despite the nineteenth
century addition of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments which granted African
Americans citizenship and the right to vote, respectively. These restrictions were
carefully laid out so as not to technically evade the law, but they were clearly and
unabashedly to prevent the spread of the black vote. They included literacy tests and the
Grandfather Clause. The literacy tests required hopeful black voters to read and explain

20 Oremus, How Radical Was That Law Professor Obama Hugged?
21 Kristof, Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?

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a passage from the United States Constitution. This was an unfair request because to be
literate in the Deep South was more than unusual and difficult, and most southern whites
could not accomplish the same task, although they were never required to. The
Grandfather Clause stated that one could vote if their ancestor (grandfather) had had the
right to vote prior to the Civil War. This unfairly excluded the vast majority of poor
southern blacks from the polls. White supremacy is deep-rooted in American culture. Its
ugly head continues to rear itself in all aspects of American life.
In very recent years, a similar restriction on voting and voters was discussed and
could potentially be enacted. This is the infamous voter identification law that requires all
voters to bring a government issued form of photo identification to the polls when
attempting to vote. Ostensibly, this law is helpful in that it aims to prevent and eliminate
voter fraud, but it has more sinister undertones. The law assumes that everyone has a
government issued photo ID or that everyone is able to acquire one. These abilities and
privileges require time, potentially time away from a job that does not give time off
without ramifications, and money for transportation or to be able to afford the costs of
taking the time off from work in order to procure a photo ID. The voter identification law
is easily disguised and is very subtle, yet very dangerous and discriminatory when viewed
objectively. Kali Holloway wrote in her article, Were Doing Bigotry Wrong, in a
society where racism, sexism, and bigotry impact nearly every measure of American life,
honesty about prejudice and discrimination serves as a sort of useful tool for moving the
conversation around issues such as race and gender forward.22 We need to open up the

22 Holloway, Were Doing Bigotry Wrong.

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conversation of racism in todays American society and become aware of its subtleties.
We need to not lie to ourselves about the manifestations of racism.
A study in the Week Magazine from October 2014 shows that according to a 2014
statistic, only three percent of the United States population stated that they think that race
relations and racism are the most important problems facing our country.23 This
information shows that racism is less of an issue in the American eye because racism is
thought to be a solved problem of the past. It is discarded because it is an issue that has
been swept under the rug by people who claim that racism is no longer present. There is a
saying that states that, the new racism is to deny that racism exists.24
Another study at Tufts Universitys School of Arts and Harvard Business School
shows that many white Americans believe that they have replaced blacks as the main
targets of racial discrimination in the United States.25 The study finds that despite the fact
that both white and black Americans concur that racism towards black Americans has
improved since the Modern Civil Rights Movement, whites believe that anti-white racism
has actually increased.26 This is despite the fact that alarmingly enormous disparities still
exist between black and white Americans regarding issues ranging from income to health
and employment. It could be postulated that these feelings on behalf of white Americans
stem from bitterness toward Affirmative Action policies that promote the inclusion of
minorities in professional and educational settings, when the truth is, Affirmative

23 The Week, Americans Are More Concerned about Ebola than Poverty, Terrorism,
or Crime.
24 David, Study Finds White Americans Believe They Experience More Racism Than
African Americans.
25 David, Study Finds White Americans Believe They Experience More Racism Than
African Americans.
26 David, Study Finds White Americans Believe They Experience More Racism Than
African Americans.

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Actions largest number of beneficiaries are white women.27 All of these truths reinforce
the existence of white supremacy in the U.S. White supremacy, particularly its existence
in todays world, is a hotly contested subject, especially when so many white people feel
that they are now more discriminated against than black people. If an extremely
impoverished white man questions how he could possibly be blessed with white
privilege, the response would be that privilege is relative to elements other than race; this
white man would be more likely to be sent for treatment if caught with drugs while a
black man just as poor as the white man would be sent indefinitely to prison for that same
drug charge.28 That is the embodiment of white privilege; the white man may not have
class privilege, but he absolutely has race privilege, leaving many black Americans with
neither.29 Many today assert that racism is not a pressing issue and that black Americans
are thriving economically.30 However, according to the BBC, black household wealth
[in the United States] is just over the median wealth of an adult in Palestine.31 Notice,
this information was put out by the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. The
racial injustices occurring within the United States are attracting international spotlight
and disdain. The United States was one of the last countries to formally abolish slavery in
1865; the first nations and civilizations to recognize the atrocity of slavery and therefore
condemn it did so as early as the third century BCE.32 The United States remains behind
the times, and the rest of the world knows it. All throughout the Modern Civil Rights
Movement, oppressed African Americans have turned to the United Nations for help

27 Adichie, Americanah, 274.
28 Adichie, Americanah, 429.
29 Adichie, Americanah, 429.
30 BBC, Ranking Black America as a Separate Nation.
31 BBC, Ranking Black America as a Separate Nation.
32 Abolition of Slavery Timeline, Wikipedia.

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against the racist United States, even going so far as to declare the genocide American
blacks by the United States. The late Michael Browns family recently travelled to the
United Nations headquarters seeking justice for their son, whose murderer, Darren
Wilson, failed to be indicted. The United Nations, unfortunately, has yet to actually
respond to outreaches such as these, mainly because of its economic ties to the United
States. However, these outreaches create shaming publicity for the United States and
could eventually embarrass the U.S. into taking measures to end racist practices.
Taking a step back in time to look at the post-Civil Rights Movement legislation,
Derrick Bells interest convergence theory which states that whites will support
minority interests only if they are benefitted. Race is often thought of as a social construct
rendered to benefit some and marginalize others.33 This notion appears with regard to
the Brown vs. Board of Education decision of 1954 which officially ended racial
segregation in American schools. In this case, the theory argues that the famous Supreme
Court decision to desegregate schools was made in order to improve the United States
image and standing with third world countries during the Cold War.34 This was a
common occurrence during the Civil Rights Movement because the executive branch was
focused more on international affairs such as the Cold War than what they considered to
be the petty interruptions of protesting African Americans. The oppression of American
blacks and the Civil Rights Movement reached all far corners of the globe and reflected
poorly on Americas supposedly spiffy image as the land of the free, and the
government knew it, so it often appeased black demands in order to improve international
image and relations.

33 Oremus, How Radical Was That Law Professor Obama Hugged?
34 Oremus, How Radical Was That Law Professor Obama Hugged?

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In conclusion, racism in the United States prior to the Modern Civil Rights

Movement has evolved from undisguised, blatant, and overt racism to todays subtle,
ordinary, and concealed form of racism. The manifestation of racism has changed but
the language has not.35 Life in America as a minority tends to be extremely more
difficult and less pleasant than life in America as a majority. Slavery, racism,
discrimination, oppression, and abuse has left many minority groups within the United
States in a bad predicament. According to Tom Burrell in his book Brainwashed, there
are several serious contemporary manifestations of these problems that stem from
historical roots. Some of these include todays fear of failure that inhibits minority
parents to have a why even try? attitude, usually with regard to academics. This stems
from slavery, when it was dangerous for a slave to be literate let alone an independent
thinker. These had to be stifled at all costs for fear of severe punishment and death. This
consequentially leads minority parents today to be fiercely protective of their childrens
feelings so that they do not feel like failures. This stems from the brainwashing of slaves
to believe that they were inherently inferior and that they were doomed to fail.36 All of
these unfortunate scenarios contribute to the plight of American minorities.
Racism, contrary to somewhat popular belief, has not been eradicated; it is still a
present and pressing issue. However, do not be discouraged. For, prejudice is not
immutable, and over all the progress in America on race is remarkable. In 1958, four
percent of Americans approved of black-white marriages; today, 87 percent do.37
Progress has been made, and will continue to be made as awareness is raised of the

35 Adichie, Americanah, 390.
36 Burrell, Brainwashed, 176-177.
37 Kristof, Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?

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persistent presence of racism in America. We just need to be honest with ourselves about
racism and the serious consequences for its victims. The journey for racial justice rejects
the notion that truth is an effect of power. It is based on the notion that truth transcends
powerAccepting truth wherever we find it, no matter how painful it is to our
sensibilities, is even more important when fundamental issues of justice are at stake.38

38 The Week, Did the Media Get Ferguson Wrong?

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Works Cited

Abolition of Slavery Timeline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline

Adichie Chimamanda Ngozi, Americanah (New York: Ramdom House LLC, 2013).

"Americans Are More Concerned about Ebola than Poverty, Terrorism, or Crime."The
Week. N.p., 21 Oct. 2014. Web. 03 Nov. 2014.
<http://theweek.com/speedreads/index/270301/speedreads-americans-

are-

more-concerned-about-ebola-than-poverty-terrorism-or-crime>.

Burrell, Tom, Brainwashed (New York: Smileybooks, 2010).

David, M.B. "Study Finds White Americans Believe They Experience More Racism
Than African Americans." Political Blind Spot. N.p., 3 Jan. 2014. Web. 02 Nov.
2014. <http://politicalblindspot.com/study-finds-white-americans-believe- theyexperience-more-racism-than-african-americans/>.

Diamond, Marie. Tennessee Tea Party Demands that References to Slavery be

Removed from History Textbooks. ThinkProgress. 01 January, 2012.

Accessed 15 December 2014.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/01/23/408974/tennessee-tea-

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party-demands-that-references-to-slavery-be-removed-from-history-

textbooks/.

"Did the Media Get Ferguson Wrong? The Week. N.p., 23 Oct. 2014. Web. 02 Nov.
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Ford, Chandra L., and Collins O. Airhihenbuwa. "Abstract." National Center for
Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 29 Sept. 0005.
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<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2837428/>.

Holloway, Kali. "We're Doing Bigotry Wrong Time. Time, 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 02
Nov. 2014. <http://time.com/3507470/were-doing-bigotry-wrong/>.

Kristof, Nicholas. "Is Everyone a Little Bit Racist?" The New York Times. The New
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Oremus, Will. "How Radical Was That Law Professor Obama Hugged?" Slate
Magazine. N.p., 9 Mar. 2012. Web. 02 Nov. 2014.
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/03/der
rick_bell_controversy_what_s_critical_race_theory_and_is_it_radical_.html>.

"Ranking Black America as a Separate Nation." BBC News. N.p., 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 2
Nov. 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-29621219.

Wilder, Craig Steven, Ebony & Ivory (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).