A Good Racist?

An eighteen-year old photo of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in blackface has led to a furor of shock and self-righteousness, and I really don’t get it. No, I get it that blackface is a banned activity these days, that it has too direct a connection to the time when whites wore it to depict gross caricatures of blacks, as savage, ignorant half apes, or as cartoonish buffoons, either incapable of surviving the world, or deserving of extermination from it.

And, as a Black American born in the 1950’s, I’ve known the sting: a realization that another thinks you beneath humanity and not worth respecting, not because of who you are, but because of something about you. Even if such an experience isn’t followed by an oppressive use of power – physical harm, incarceration, loss of job, home, agency – it still hurts.

But, while I like to think that all forms of ‘isms’ can be overcome by knowledge and by human to human contact, I don’t for a moment expect I’ll ever live in a world where they don’t exist. Should we really make life-long purity in the area of racial expression the minimum standard to remain acceptable in public life?

Racism is bad. But is everyone who is racist a bad person? You might think, from the reaction that gaffes such as Trudeau’s get these days, that the merest ‘racist’ expression makes one as loathsome and beneath contempt as a murderer or a serial pedophile. But, in my opinion, it’s an over-reaction to treat such things as extreme examples of wrong-doing.

No, everyone who has a racist thought isn’t a bad person. Many such people grew up in a culture where isms abound, or were influenced to mistrust and look down on some type of ‘other’, and simply accepted that. Most of us have such flaws, whether the very obvious kind, like being anti-black or anti-woman, or a less observed or well-defined kind, like being anti-young, anti-poor, or anti-uneducated, or maybe anti-the unhygienic (those who never developed the habit of brushing their teeth or changing their underwear as needed. Most of us have a revulsion, an active dislike, or at least a discomfort and wariness about some particular type of 'other' person, which is expressed through an automatic discounting, or worse. Obviously, that’s not good. It’s not even okay. But shall we just dismiss a third, or a half, or ninety percent of all human beings as unredeemable, because of the epidemic of stereotyping and pre-judging? I don’t think so. I’m not willing to write off that many of the flawed yet somehow endearing human beings I know. And I’m grateful for those who have chosen not to write me off, for my insensitivities and worse.

As much as I hate what Trump stands for, I’ll even defend something he said and was blasted for, when he commented that there were ‘good people’ on both sides of the Civil War monuments protest in Charleston in 2017. Though he may have intended to equate the virtue of the two sides, it wasn’t what I heard. And I think it was absolutely true – and fair to point out – that there were essentially good people supporting the presence of those confederate statues.

Most people who don’t carry and display an active prejudice have probably worked long and hard to overcome one. And most of them probably know that such aversions have their roots in fear. And they’ve probably learned not to be so afraid.

People. That’s what we are. And racism is like a low IQ, or a genetic defect, or really bad breath. It infects quite a lot of us without removing us entirely from the category ‘Good Person’. What makes it so much worse than those other sins, of course, is that a single racist outlook, shared by a large number of people, as in the US, or which is encoded into the very blueprint of a nation, historically and over time – again, as in the US – can oppress and even destroy an entire people. This is the form of racism that most demands our attention: the institutional, law-encoded kind, that's often so integrated into the social fabric that it's near invisible.

But must vigilance go to the point of bringing down every individual who cannot prove that they’ve never offended a people, even out of ignorance? I find this current state of hyper-vigilance both sad and disturbing. Is there anyone who wouldn’t fail such a test? I know I’d fail it, and if what people tell me is to be believed, I’m a pretty decent guy who doesn’t intentionally hurt or hate anyone, even racists.

Even intentional racism isn’t the incurable disease we often treat it as. I could tell you about a few good racists I’ve known. But I’ll hold it to one. Bud was the father of a white woman I loved and lived with. He wasn’t happy about her associating with the likes of me. Of course he didn’t know me, and this wasn’t about me, after all. Stoned racist.

He wouldn’t allow me to stay in their home for a particular Christmastime visit, but he allowed me into the house when I came to pick up his daughter and his grand-daughter, who was not my biological child, though I always wished she was. He studied me, cross-examined and debated me for half an hour, and politely shook my hand when I left. But still he did not approve.

A few years on, I met Bud again at a graduation for his grand-daughter. He apologized to me for his previous behavior, and thanked me for the role I’d played in his daughter’s and grand-daughter’s lives. Good racist.

As least by my account, by my experience. So yeah, it took him coming around. He hadn’t always been good. But when he started to take me in as just another human being, apart from the fixed ideas and categories in his head (something I must have managed too, though my own are harder to see and not at all fun to acknowledge), ultimately, our lives were lived in love-connected support of one another.

I’m glad I didn’t write Bud off. Nor he, me. But if you judged either of us by things we’d said, done or thought, five or ten or eighteen years earlier, writing us off might have been the only option. Trudeau is my no means a faultless politician or public figure. But judging by what he has attempted to accomplish, and his efforts to humanize government and political discourse, I’ll give him a pass on the blackface.