Jimmy Carter & Racism Without Racists

Over at The Corner, Abigail Thernstrom has about had it with the white racist chorus:

It’s a sad and dangerous moment in American politics. As Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford has written, “self-serving individuals, rabble-rousers, and political hacks use accusations of racism . . . to advance their own ends.” Those accusations provoke “resentment rather than thoughtful reaction.”

Is that what Democrats want? The American public did not and would not have elected a Jesse Jackson figure. And yet the Jackson voice in the Congressional Black Caucus and some MSM circles is alive and well. Surely the president has to be thinking, with such friends, who needs enemies?

Disown them, Barack.

Yes, Carter certainly put Obama in a tough spot. But then Obama’s been in tough spots before. I will be interested to see how he handles this. But it’s the quote Thernstrom chose from Richard Thompson Ford that caught my attention.

I understand that the word “racist” carries so much baggage as to undermine the dialogue needed for progress. Just last month I quoted Ford from a talk he gave at Google as I struggled to find the right language to express my own thoughts on what’s going on:

The good news is that attitudes are better than they’ve been in American history. I think it’s fair to say that they’re quite a bit better than they were 20 years ago… and they’re certainly better than they were in the 1960s during the time of the civil rights movement. Not only is racism taboo and people are unlikely to express racist attitudes openly but… actual attitudes are improved. Fewer people are racists and racism is on the wane. So that’s the good news.

The bad news is that many racial inequities are as bad as they were during the time of the civil rights movement. For instance… many inner city neighborhoods are as segregated as they were during the Jim Crow era, poverty in poor minority neighborhoods is in many cases worse, joblessness is in many cases worse… incarceration rates particularly for men of color are much, much worse than during the era of Jim Crow.

So this juxtaposition has led to it to be difficult for us to know what to think and what to do about problems of race relations. Some people looking at the problem of real inequities that continue to trouble our society conclude that if racial injustices are as bad as in the Jim Crow era than racism must be just as bad too and it’s all just undercover, it’s all on the down low. And that leads people to assume that when there are conflicts, when there are problems, there’s a racist to be blamed for it.

And that’s one type of conflict that has given rise to this phrase, “playing the race card.”

For the record, I think Carter spoke the only truth he could see coming from the time and place that he does. I have not yet found the language I’m looking for, so instead I will trot out another retread. This one from October 2005.

Malcolm Gladwell was on his book tour for Blink, which I have never gotten around to reading. In his South by Southwest keynote address that year, Gladwell recounts this story from the book…

It seems the great conductors of the world once innocently believed that men were innately better musicians than women and orchestras were male bastions. When, one day, through a set of fortuitous circumstances, a male maestro auditioned a woman he thought was a man (she auditioned from behind a screen) he hired her. And when screens were broadly adopted it became clear to everyone that women were every bit as talented musicians as men.

What once was “obvious,” that men were better musicians, is now obviously not.

His story is to illustrate the power and peril of subliminal snap judgments. Says Gladwell [@48:38]:

There are certain things about somebody that all of us are really really good at knowing right away, and certain things that we may think we’re good at knowing that we are profoundly not…

Sexual attractiveness, you can do like that…

When we have real experience with something we are good at making profoundly good snap judgments, but in almost every other situation where we do not have that level of expertise our snap judgments are bad. And as a society I feel we are way too cavalier about the products of our snap judgments.

After his talk, during the questions, Gladwell made this observation that I still have seen made no place else [@50:29]:

I have become convinced since writing this book that juries should never be able to see the defendants in a jury trial; that that is just crazy. Why? Because the kind of snap judgments a jury is likely to make about a defendant from seeing the defendant are all irrelevant…

Every year someone stands up and points out that there are huge differentials in the conviction rates and sentences for blacks and whites convicted of the same crime. And yet we make that observation and kind of shrug and say, “Well, that’s America.”

We don’t have to live with that. Why don’t we do something about it?

I would bet every dollar I own that if we put the defendant in a backroom and had the defendant answer all questions by email that the gap between black and white defendants, the sentences and conviction rates would shrink.

I absolutely believe that.

I do too. Still. Do you? The challenge I see is figuring out what to do about it.