Where does America’s racism come from? If such a question is put to them, Americans generally think slavery, often called “America’s Original Sin,” started racism. But, if reminded that slavery is gone but racism still remains, they get quite puzzled. It is equally puzzling that, while living in a certifiably racist society, most white Americans are not even aware they are racist, and are surprised, even confused, when they witness instances of blatant racism such as in George Floyd’s death or the May 14 shootings in Buffalo, New York. Many white people get really irate when they have to confront something that is deeply buried in their subconscious.
Why is it so deeply buried in the subconscious of America? Because it has its origin in Jim Crow segregation, not in slavery as most people, even among Blacks themselves, tend to think. The slavery system had a definite ending point in history: The Emancipation Proclamation. Why didn’t racism end, like slavery, when Brown vs. Board of Education outlawed segregation in 1954? Slavery ended with the Proclamation, but racism, replacing slavery, only began with it. With the monumental Supreme Court decision, many of the structural remnants of segregation, such as “separate but equal” school segregations, were torn down. But, alas, what had grown silently and settled deeply in white America’s subconscious could not just disappear. Slavery was broken and was made to go away, but segregation, now as the new garden of evil that pushed white America into insidious racism, only invigorated racism. Slavery chained Blacks physically, but segregation shackled whites mentally.
Slavery was physically visible and painful, but once the chain was broken, the slave was free. But segregation was a psychological system. During the four generations of Jim Crow segregation, Blacks were free and equal on paper, but Jim Crowism kept them in a very strange, contradictory and, certainly racist, position in society. Everybody in America was told that Blacks were finally “equal,” but they were kept “separate” in social reality. How did white America reconcile this obvious contradiction? By whispering to each other, and to their children, the “truth:” Blacks are not really equal, they whispered and nodded to each other; they are equal only on paper; in truth, they are inferior, subhuman and alien to America and its superior white race and culture. White Americans, unable to speak it in public, had to exchange such knowledge in subdued, hushed contexts of exchanged knowledge, nodding to each other and whispering to their children the hidden truth about America’s races.
The good society of America could not openly admit or accept that its nation was racist. So, only in the deep recesses of their hearts could they acknowledge that, indeed, whites were superior to Blacks. Not being KKK, or George Wallace of Alabama, good Americans kept it in their hearts, even persuading themselves that racism had vanished from America. Many liberal Americans would be shocked if some kind of hypnotized confession revealed their deeply-held racism.
The few generations of segregation made skilled, if inwardly tortured, liars out of white America. Unlike South Africa’s open apartheid that built walls between white and Black communities and brazenly killed and imprisoned Blacks, white America had to do it only in whispered campaigns and high-sounding legalistic decisions and moral sermons. The long shadows of American idealism, like “all men are created equal” and “liberty and justice for all,” made them hypocrites as well.
Slaves were human machines and, with only minimum maintenance, were very productive for their owners. It would be against human nature to give up such privileges voluntarily. As slaves were gone with the winds of the Civil War, white America turned to psychological pleasure as substitute for slavery’s physical privileges. With no slaves working in the field, providing cheap labor, white America had to get pleasure by keeping Blacks from the lunch counters, hotels and neighborhoods, and from God’s America. While slavery was purely a physical system of cheap productivity, segregation produced only psychological pleasures. But, what kind of human pleasure is it that we get when we willfully cause other human beings to suffer, such as in calling Blacks “N”?
Indeed, what pleasure did white America experience when it tormented Blacks in their segregated nation, or as they still do in their “open society” today, with no physical benefit as dramatic or tangible as in slavery? Unlike the benefits of slavery, segregation provided only psychological privilege and pleasure for white America. Racism in post-Jim Crow America merely continues this atavistic but entirely common human pursuit. It existed well tucked away in the whispered exchanges of secrets among white people during segregation, and, now lodged in the depth of subconscious whose existence is denied by everyone, even by confirmed racists, it is not going away for that very reason. Since it was formed in the recesses of mind in a hushed way, it needs no loud daily articulation to continue. If two whites and one Black enter an elevator, or other confined spaces, two whites immediately form an unwitting and unspoken alliance between them and the Black feels, even fleetingly but defensively, the racial mark of distinction among them. Such is so natural but subconscious that neither side would even think about it for long. There are many secret ways racism can be exchanged and enforced among whites. Even Trump’s supporters use only code words, led by Trump who calls Blacks “dogs,” and that’s enough of a message among racist whites.
Jim Crow has the last laugh as segregation has left a scar in the American psyche as its permanent birthmark. Only a massive national trauma can help white America break its crippling racist chains and exorcise its true inner demon.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.