Navigating the racial minefield

The other day, in a really interesting post about race, which quoted a really interesting Ta-Nehisi Coates post about race, Megan McArdle prefaced her remarks by saying, "White people writing about race are always walking a minefield... ."

Freddie responds by saying:

Our racial dialogue is a hair-triggered and anxious phenomenon, and to no one's benefit. Many white people feel that speaking about race is simply too dangerous, that the stakes are too high, that they stand little to gain and everything to lose from participating. There are few things more dangerous to our democracy than that which we don't talk about, and nothing good can come from not having a frank national discussion on race.

There's another sense in which that statement is a problem. For too many white people, fear of the consequences of being accused of racism has come to seem a larger problem than racism itself.

And later:

No, what we must privilege is behavior, and this is why I think we have to return social correction to our racial dialogue. We all have racial prejudice, and sometimes, we say and do things that are insensitive or biased. These behaviors have to be corrected the same way any are, through gentle- and if warranted, not so gentle- reminders about what is and isn't socially acceptable behavior.

For this to happen, however, cries of racism cannot amount to "you are a bad person; you must be excommunicated. Prepare for your shunning." People must hear "What you said or did was racist", not "You are a racist." Accusations of racism should become more prevalent, but have less at stake. Racism must become another socially corrected behavior, like mild sexual harassment, excessive profanity or boorishness. Familiarity must build moderation.

This is important because we must have corrigibility; we must have correctability. No one is an end. Everyone is a process. Even the most noxious racist must have the ability for repentance, though we are under no obligation to invite them back into respectability. I am not suggesting that we should never have harsh censure for those who are persistently, maliciously racist. But we must keep the question open, and we must give everyone the ability to make a good-faith effort at ending their own racially unjust behavior.

I would like, in short, for Megan McArdle to no longer feel she is walking a minefield.

In principle, I agree with Freddie. But that's not the way the world works. I am reminded of this comment by a liberal Crunchy Con blog reader in the sexual harrassment thread below:

Several years ago, I had an official complaint put into my personnel file while working at ABC Television in NYC. My offense? Complimenting a co-worker on the dress she was wearing.

Here's the context: It was a Friday evening, around 6:30pm. Most of the deptartment had gone home, the only ones left in the office (I thought) were my and my boss (a female). While going to the break room to grab another cup of coffee, I see a co-worker, an attractive late-20's female, coming out of the bathroom, dressed to the nines. Turns out she was going to a black-tie affair immediately after work, so she was dressed up in the long black dress, slit to the thigh, low cut, with high heels. My comment? "You look great. That's a beautiful dress."

Monday morning I get called into my boss's office, and a woman from HR is there, along with our Union Rep, because I'm being charged with sexual harrassment.

Fortunately, I left the company 2 months later.

The end result of this experience has been to create a bias for me against hiring women. Unfair? Absolutely. Pragmatic, realistic and better for my fiscal health? Absolutely.

Sad, but true.

At one job I had, in the course of commenting about a news story involving a terror attack, I called the terrorists "animals" or something like that. The terrorists were not black, but a black co-worker complained that I'd been racially hostile with that characterization, and suddenly I was facing the prospect of having to explain myself to Human Resources. I got out of that pinch, and decided that as long as I worked there, I wouldn't comment about racial issues at all, even though that made me less effective in that particular journalism job. I knew there was no way I would prevail in a dispute like that with HR, no matter what. And I knew that my job would likely be on the line if this went to HR. Furthermore, I'd be known as the guy who got fired because he was a racist. I was genuinely afraid to talk to the (likable) guy who'd made the ridiculous accusation about his beef, and ended up keeping him very much at arm's length, for fear that some innocuous thing I might say would strike him the wrong way, and cost me my job.

Contra Freddie, I would never claim that fearing being tagged as a racist is worse than being the actual victim of racism. But I will say that he perhaps underestimates the stakes for white people in making a single slip -- or what is interpreted as a racially hostile slip -- within certain professional environments. See, this is one reason why Robert Putnam's famous study finding that "diversity" tends to reduce social solidarity and social capital: it makes people terrified to trust people of different races and demographic groups, because the price to be paid for a single mistake can be devastating. Better not to walk across the minefield at all than to risk blowing up your career. Excerpt:

But even after statistically taking them all into account, the connection remained strong: Higher diversity meant lower social capital. In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to "distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television."

"People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' -- that is, to pull in like a turtle," Putnam writes.

In documenting that hunkering down, Putnam challenged the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the "contact" theory and the "conflict" theory. Under the contact theory, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord.

Putnam's findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

"Diversity, at least in the short run," he writes, "seems to bring out the turtle in all of us."