The Great Capitulation

I have been trying to digest a recent Associated Press-NORC poll about Americans’ perceptions of racial discrimination. The data show that Americans’ views have shifted rather significantly over the last four years. That after the public murder of George Floyd, 61% of respondents said that “there was a great deal or quite a bit of discrimination against Black Americans.” But today only 4 out of 10 say that “Black people and Hispanic people face quite a bit or a great deal of discrimination.” Most agree, though, that certain groups are treated unfairly “at least sometimes.”

The poll also revealed a decidedly negative judgment about the effectiveness of DEI policies in the workplace. Some hold that the policies increased discrimination against groups, including white people.

What’s clear is that the country has turned its back on the so-called racial reckoning. But the question is why? Or was it a reckoning in the first place?

It seems to me that we have to view the data from 2021 as skewed by the George Floyd lynching. Because of the pandemic, millions of Americans were stuck in their homes and found themselves witnesses to that horrific moment. And, of course, before Floyd’s murder, the country convulsed with Black Lives Matter protests over policing. We had seen repeatedly video footage of police killing Black people. And before that we were in the throes of the racist backlash to Barack Obama (despite declarations that after his election that the country was post-racial and that the Tea Party was really an expression of economic anxiety).

Prior to these events, the standard view among most white Americans was that the country was steadily improving with regards to race matters. But the data betrayed that optimism. Racial inequality continued to haunt the country. And most white Americans rejected policies aimed at addressing explicitly race matters.

In effect, most white Americans consistently misperceived the persistence of racial inequality.

What the poll data revealed in 2021 was a heightened attentiveness to racial inequality driven by the spectacle of protests that had seized the nation. To the extent the country addressed race matters explicitly, public opinion reflected the judgment that Black people faced racial discrimination “a great deal or quite a bit.” Policy, or at least stated commitments to racial justice, followed. The shift in perception today reflects a recalibration – a return to a cultural practice that enables the reproduction and misperception of racial inequality. And policy follows.

Of course, Trump and MAGA Republicans trade in explicit racism. And many who claimed a commitment to racial diversity and justice after George Floyd’s death were lying through their teeth. But the fact of Trump’s racism and the lies of so-called white liberals alone do not account for the pace of the capitulation to the current status quo. Something else underneath it all is at work. Something that was barely disturbed during the so-called racial reckoning and is now being fine-tuned: the rip tide of America’s racial habits and culture.

In Democracy in Black, I wrote about what I called “racial habits.” These are the ways we live the belief that white people are valued more than others. They are the things we do, without thinking, that sustain the value gap. They range from the snap judgments we make about Black people that rely on stereotypes to the ways we think about race that we get from living within our respective communities. We live race in the way space and place are organized in this country. And declarations about racial justice alone cannot undo, especially in four years, the force of how we have been habituated in this country to live racial inequality.

In her brilliant book, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality, Imani Perry thinks about these habits as not simply the possession of individuals but as features of a broader cultural practice of racial inequality. Thinking of racial inequality as a cultural practice allows us to avoid the confusion of reducing the problem to either individual choices or structural realities. Both are at work in the ways that habits shape our choices and how those choices result in accumulated disadvantage. What is required then is a much more nuanced response to the ways Americans act consistently to sustain and extend racial inequality, and attention to the actions that deepen advantage and disadvantage based on group membership.

I asked Professor Perry about what she thought about the relevance of her argument for today.

“It’s funny, I spent years thinking that perhaps I was wrong in that book. Perhaps my argument that explicit racism was no longer the standard and that we had shifted to a cultural habit of inequality. Democracy in Black helped me understand that there is no ‘getting past’ old fashioned racism because the habits remake meanings. But one of the things I say in the book is that habit can always easily slide into overt and explicit racial inequalities and we see that in the rapid turn from racial reckoning to this current moment of racial retrenchment. Moreover, the fact that the stories of Black life and achievement are being erased is so instructive because part of what I explain is that shifting narratives is essential to disrupting the practices of inequality. Of course, our stories are becoming verboten for those who want to barrel us back into Jim Crow. All the more reason for us to continue to fight on the terms of history alongside organizing and activism. As Ida B. Wells famously said, ‘the people must know before they can act.’”

We must dig deeper to understand Trump and “the great capitulation,” and that begins with the history and the cultural practices that shape how we live and see in this place.