It has been a news-heavy few weeks, so today I want to reach back to April to share a joke I heard. Rick Hasen on the Election Law Blog posted his annual April Fool's story on April 1. Under the title "House Republicans to Push Bill Declaring 'End to Racism' in U.S.," he writes:
WaPo: “In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down a key portion of the Voting Rights Act, a group of Southern House Republicans have put forward a congressional resolution declaring that ‘racism is a thing of the past’ in the United States. The resolution would call upon Congress to overrule the remaining portions of the Voting Right Act and other civil rights laws as ‘no longer necessary to insure American liberty.’ The resolution has begun to gain Senate support, including from Senator Richard C. Shelby (R-AL), who missed the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Selma civil rights march to participate in mundane events at the opposite end of Alabama. Senator Thad Cochran (R-MI) could not say whether or not he supported the resolution, or if he supported or opposed the Voting Rights Act, but declared that ‘racism is bad.'”
I thought it was funny. Not funny "ha ha," but funny "uh huh" as in, this post is just believable enough to make a great prank. So, when I put it on my Facebook wall, I had at least one reliably progressive friend ready to go to war–until she realized it was a joke. I am confident that a number of my friends saw the post and (wisely) didn't bite. And another friend commented: "I have never been more on the fence as to whether a post today has been an April Fool's Day joke or not."
Indeed.
There is, as the readers of a "Race and the Law" blog would probably agree, an ideological movement that believes that America has overcome its racial problem. The proponents of this view point to the election of a Black President, the fact that America is not an apartheid society, and (to stay with the law of politics theme) the increase in minority voter participation as indicators of being "past race." This narrative has a certain appeal as it strikes at our collective aspiration that each of us be judged, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it "not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character."
But post-racialism as an ideology is ultimately deceptive and reaffirming of the problem of white supremacy in the United States. It imagines that an America that has gotten past the color line exists already, despite all data to the contrary. Such a belief suggests that the race conscious civil rights project is concluded, and that the ideological battle for equality (for liberals and conservatives alike) can move on to topics other than race. Like many others, I have written about this, and I anticipate in a future blogpost offering more citations to resources that discuss the rich post-racialism literature.
Seen from this perspective, Hasen's "joke" is too true to be funny. He points out the failings southern members of Congress in relation to race and voting. Hasen takes the "racism is the past" message of Shelby County and extends that narrative to its ultimate conclusion–that we are in a post-Civil Rights, post-race conscious voting rights era. Accordingly, one is within their rights to dismantle the Second Reconstruction. Or so the narrative goes.
As I have argued elsewhere, this is precisely the message of the conservative majority of the Roberts Court. And it appeals to some in Congress and to a certain constituency in American society. The post-racialism narrative and the policy pronouncements based upon it make it wholly believable that while acknowledging that "racism is bad," some in Congress would declare an "end to racism."
The truth is that we have seen many, many instances where individual racism has been decried. This spring has had many news-worthy moments of overt racism: think back to the various episodes on college campuses that offered evidence that naked, personalized, name-calling, lynching-invoking racism. And we've seen another covert version of it in the language of thuggery and the tactic of blaming the victim (this time, Freddie Gray) deployed in response to the events in Baltimore.
We as a society can agree that this is unacceptable. But for all the dialogue about attacking that kind of bias, there is so much more reckoning we must do with how unconscious bias affects our lived experiences at work and in society, how our perception gulf between whites and people of color makes real conversations about race difficult, how people of color are still targets of state-sanctioned violence in America, and how our racialized structures that facilitate ongoing white racial domination that has not seriously been confronted.
Post-racial ideology allows our society an out from facing those hard questions. But maybe we can open the dialogue with thinking about the meaning behind a joke.