Twenty years ago, I was a college junior and a recently appointed columnist for the Duke University Chronicle. Around that same time – April 19, 1995 to be exact – Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building and killed 168 people.
My first column for the Chronicle, "Oklahoma Scapegoat: Fear Led to the 'Obvious' Conclusion" sought to weigh in on the knee-jerk reaction the media had in the immediate wake of the bombing: it focused on the stereotype of Arab Americans as terrorists rather than report the facts (including the fact of not knowing the facts).
In 1995, I wrote:
[T]he media sent the American community on the first step towards our greatest national trap–racism. How? By pointing unrelentingly (and with bias) to Arab terrorists as the perpetrators of this terrorist act, the media catalyzed and reinforced stereotypes running against Arab Americans in general. This focus caused us to unfairly direct our anger about the bombing towards not only the possible terrorist groups, but to Arab Americans in general.
[. . .]
[Given this,] it is not surprising that a wave of hate and racism arises whenever Islamic fundamentalists are blamed for a terrorist act–a wave of hate directed toward all Arab-Americans.
Looking back, I see at least three lessons about how negative racial stereotypes filter our understanding that are worth repeating today. First, over the scope of these twenty years, we seem to continually repeat this exact mistake of perpetuating Islamophobia. (Professor Beydoun's recent discussion on Islamophobia in the classroom offers a helpful definitions and perspective on this.) And by we, I mean we as a society continually replicate versions of the "Arab as terrorist" and "Islam as threat" tropes. Indeed, the trope as been repeated again and again in punditry, law, and policy in the wake of September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
Second, to make plain the obvious, these stereotypes serve as a means to reflexively blame people we find threatening for what we cannot explain. It is easer to demean a person or a community with thoughts that amount to "Arabs are terrorists," or "African Americans are thugs," rather than to inquire into circumstances and structures as they present themselves. The ability to view through stereotype gives us short-term feelings of security and comfort and the expense of replicating traditions of subordination.
What might not be so obvious is my third point: our blaming of the stereotyped group allows the people actually at blame (and the privilege(s) associated with them) to escape accountability. Put more pointedly, white privilege has the effect of not only blaming others but of insulating itself from blame.
In the Oklahoma City bombing context, pundits did not consider that white supremacists terrorists could have committed this crime. For two days, the kind of terrorists McVeigh and Nichols represented remained invisible precisely because their terror groups weren't on the list. Though I can't read the minds of the pundits of 20 years ago, what is suggested here is that homegrown white terrorists don't fit the stereotype of who ought to be considered a terrorist, and thus they don't make the list of speculative suspects. This suggests that in this case, whiteness (as a category of privilege) eschews blaming and culpability.
We as a society have internalized these filters and they express themselves in a variety of contexts. One only need look at the commentary concerning Baltimore to see how some pundits fell victim (again!) to the varieties of stereotype blindness. Moreover, our stereotype filters manifest on a personal level depending on our life experiences, our identities, the ways that our identities intersect with the myriad forms of privilege and subordination, and our level of fear at any given time. They manifest on a policy level when we create rules to impose or maintain a social order, and we create rules that allow us to ignore the effects of policies like mass incarceration, police brutality, and the effects of de facto segregation.
Thus, whether one is unaware of the stereotypes one espouses, one is avowedly anti-racist, or something in between, or whether one looks from an individual or structural perspective,
the internalized racism remains. . . . Racism raises its ugly head when we want the easy explanation which fits the categories and explains all the problems. Racism comes in our thoughts when we want someone–or some group–to blame for what we cannot understand.
When I wrote these words as a college junior, I had not (yet) had opportunity to read the seminal paper, "The Ego, the Id and Equal Protection" by Charles Lawrence III or to think about how unconscious bias informs critical race theorizing. Fortunately, the literature in law, sociology, psychology, and other disciplines concerned with analyzing racism has grown immensely. That literature makes the point in far more detail than this blogpost can allow.
But the point remains: our stereotypes serve as filters for us all, and many of them are informed by long traditions of white supremacy and the subordination of people of color. No matter who we are, we should proceed with awareness of that fact, especially when our fears trigger our reflexes.