Cultural anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr., a Brainstorm blogger and author of three scholarly books on race issues, chose Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness for his first non-academic book. It’s reviewed today in The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Jackson…says African Americans live with the suspicion that they encounter racism constantly in their daily lives – though they can’t always prove it. […]
Jackson insists that racial paranoia is more than a feeling or psychological state: It shapes the way people relate to each other across the racial divide.
“People aren’t just being hypersensitive,” he says. “Paranoia defines the organizing principle . . . of how racism functions in American culture today.”
Nor is racial paranoia limited to one race, Jackson adds.
“White folks also are constantly paranoid,” Jackson says. In their case, the paranoia is “about the accusation of being called racist.”
This racial paranoia has its roots in a very real but subtle form of racism, he says. He realized it while doing research in Harlem for his first book:
“A lot of folks I studied would tell me they couldn’t wait to get back to the South once they retired,” Jackson recalls. “They told me there, at least, you know who is racist and who is not. Of course it was tongue in cheek, but it said a lot about their suspicions.”
Ironically, the racial paranoia that Jackson describes is a byproduct of victories won by the civil rights movement. It’s “a crisis of success in a sense,” Ford said. “It’s what’s left over once overt racism has been largely eliminated.”
Politically correct talk once ensured that African Americans would be free of verbal intimidation, but now has managed to stifle “any honest discussions about race,” Jackson says.
His solution to the problem is that we should communicate our fears and suspicions to one another in a safe environment. He asks, “How many of us actually have friends from a different race?”
I’m off to go watch Jackson discuss his book in a C-SPAN taping of his Penn Bookstore appearance from last spring.