As I was reading the introduction to The New Jim Crow, I noticed that the author, Michelle Alexander, mentioned that she didn’t always believe in racial castes. Then I remembered one of the white men in The Color of Fear, who said that he didn’t see, understand, or believe that non whites lived such an oppressed life because of white dominance. In my short lifetime, I’ve run into people who claim the same thing : Barack Obama is President and Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey are major successes, so how can we be living in a time of racial castes or institutional racism. I find this question fascinating because I’ve been able to recognize racial stratification since I was a kid. This thought reminded me of an experiment I’ve been familiar with for a few years now. An interviewer places a piece of paper with drawings of children of different skin colors in front of real kids and asks questions like: Which is the the good child? Which is the ugly child? Which is the smart child? Which is the mean child?
As the video goes on, a pattern becomes clear. The lighter-skinned children are identified as children with positive traits (like good, smart and nice). The darker-skinned children are given negative traits (like bad, ugly and dumb). The children being interviewed are reflecting what they’ve seen and experienced in real life, which is something that I don’t understand about adults who claim that there is no racial caste system.
In chapter five of The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander makes an observation about how people know and don’t know the truth about mass incarceration:
“For more than three decades, images of black men in handcuffs have been a regular staple of the evening news. We know that large numbers of black men have been locked in cages. In fact, it is precisely because we know that black and brown people are more likely to be imprisoned that we, as a nation, have not cared too much about it. We tell ourselves they ‘deserve’ their fate, even though we know-and don’t know-that whites are just as likely to commit many crimes, especially drug crimes.”
So how can social stratification be so easily recognized by a child, but somewhere between childhood and adulthood some individuals suddenly fail to see it?
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