Race in America

It was right before the drunk woman vomited on my shoes.

My wife and I were with some friends at a street festival, listening to a crazed indie-rock band. I noticed the inebriated woman, a total stranger, swaying next to me.

But I was more interested in a group of cops who were policing the event. They stood off to the side, laughing among themselves. I’m guessing they thought it was a pretty cushy assignment.

When I first saw them, I was happy they were there. After all, if anyone in the crowd of thousands got out of hand, the cops would spring into action.

Later, however, I found myself getting leery of their proximity. I didn’t like being that close to cops for that long.

But I could not pinpoint why I felt this way. I wonder now if it had something to do with being Latino.

Did I subconsciously think they would get in my face over some minor offense, and so I should watch myself? Or do I just have a problem with authority, and race has nothing to do with it?

It’s perplexing to me that I felt that way, as fleeting as the emotion was. And I’m certainly not proud of the sensation.

Why are the villains in action flicks so often foreigners? Probably because Americans don’t trust people with accents. A new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology posits that Americans view non-native English speakers as less credible than native speakers. While xenophobia factors into this distrust, it’s not solely to blame.

Researchers posit that Americans find words they don’t have to struggle to understand more pleasant than words that take effort to decipher. So, the stronger one’s accent, the more distrust one will incur.

“The accent makes it harder for people to understand what the non-native speaker is saying. They misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements,” said Boaz Keysar, the communication expert who authored “Why Don’t We Believe Non-native Speakers? The Influence of Accent on Credibility.”

To arrive at this finding, Keysar and Shiri Lev-Ari, lead author of the study, asked 35 American participants to judge the veracity of statements given by native and non-native English speakers, alike. The listeners were told that the information in the statements was scripted and did not originate with the speakers. In short, the speakers were just messengers. Despite this knowledge, the listeners still scored those with the thickest accents as less truthful.

Rarely does a racial firestorm put itself out cleanly and to everyone’s satisfaction within days. But that’s what happened in the case of Nettleton Middle School in Mississippi, which has corrected its baffling policy of marking specific Student Council positions specifically for black and white students. In the aftermath, it is worth asking how racism becomes so easily entrenched and how a leadership and community can become so complacent that no one might recognize and challenge it.

The Nettleton story broke on Mixed and Happy, a blog for interracial families. Students at the school had been sent home with literature on Student Council elections revealing certain positions designated specifically for black students and others for white students. One mother wondered where her biracial daughter fit into all this and was told by the school board that a child’s race is determined by her mother, especially since fathers are absent in most minority homes.

The naked inequality, prejudice and ignorance demonstrated by Nettleton Middle School’s policy, compounded by the revelation that the school district also had separate homecoming kings and queens for black and white students, caused the story to erupt across the Internet and on television news. How could this happen in 2010?

The answer to that question is frustratingly benign. In a statement announcing the end of its practice of rotating Student Council positions among the black and white races, the leadership at Nettleton Middle School revealed the policy had been put in place some 30 years ago to help ensure diversity and added: “It is our hope and desire that these practices and procedures are no longer needed to help ensure minority representation and involvement. Furthermore, the Nettleton School District acknowledges and embraces the fact that we are growing in ethnic diversity and that the classifications of Caucasian and African-American no longer reflect our entire student body.”

So the policy was instituted with noble intentions. The concern that black students at Nettleton Middle School in the 1980s may have stood little chance of being elected to leadership positions by a majority white student body was not unreasonable. But I would argue that the school’s response to that concern was ill-conceived. What is most frustrating is that this policy went unchallenged and unchanged for so long. Year after year after year, administrators sent a message to black and white students that certain leadership positions would be closed to them because of race, while simultaneously erasing the existence of multiracial, Asian, Native American and Latino children. And parents let them do it. And lest you be inclined to blame this on a privileged majority, you should know that the principal of Nettleton Middle School and one of its assistant principals are black women.

The case of Nettleton Middle School seems to be illustrative of what happens when “the way we’ve always done things” holds sway. When we fail to give administrative tradition the critical eye it deserves, inequality and backwards racial thinking can become ingrained and institutional.

Too often in the comments here at Race in America, someone wonders why we need be so concerned with race and vigilant about inequality in Barack Obama’s America — as if the election of one biracial black man has cleansed the system of all prejudicial policies, biased processes and human frailty. Nettleton Middle School provides one answer to post-racialists’ concerns. We are vigilant, in part, because convention is sticky, people are complacent and even the racial inequality of a small Southern town’s Student Council election policy matters.

Thousands gathered in the Northwest part of Washington, D.C. this past weekend for what appeared to be the largest patriotic assembly of white people ever to restore honor in racism.

A gathering of Latinos or Blacks would be seen as a threat on the capital, alas this mob of Glenn Beck followers were free to voice their anger and frustration. On the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, Glenn Beck and his followers gathered on the same steps where MLK had stood, but this time the message was strikingly different: reclaiming the honor of an America before a black man was President or Attorney General, an America where immigrants were mostly lesser Europeans, an America that had lost all credibility in international affairs under the presidency of George W. Bush.

The large gathering was referred to as whitestock, since it lacked racial diversity. We had men dressed in "I love Haliburton" t-shirts and even one who claimed that blacks own slaves in countries like "Mauitania" (correct spelling: Mauritania).

If you’re a Caucasian who counts an African American among your closest group of friends, you’re a rarity. Seriously. Fewer than 10% of whites have black friends, according to research by social scientists.

What’s to explain for the dearth of white and black BFFs? Whites tend to live in nearly all-white neighborhoods and attend nearly all-white schools, making it difficult for them to become acquainted with African Americans, let alone become friends with them. But even when whites work with blacks, they tend not to associate with their African American colleagues off the job, perhaps because other areas of whites’ lives are so segregated.

“People cannot like or love people they don’t see or interact with,” writes Eduardo Bonilla-Silva in the book Racism Without Racists. “…Friendship and love emerge when people share activities, proximity, familiarity and status.”

Bonilla-Silva is right on, but one thing worth noting about his book is that it debuted in 2006 — after Barack Obama rose to national prominence, thanks to a rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, but before he became a serious presidential contender. Why is this factor important? Because as some whites became familiar with the stories of Obama and his wife, Michelle, the idea of having black friends suddenly appealed to them.

In January 2008, satirical writer Christian Lander named “Having Black Friends” No. 14 on his list of Stuff White People Like, all because the U.S. would likely elect its first black president. Likewise, GQ reporter Devin Friedman penned an article called “Will You Be My Black Friend?” In the piece, Friedman is inspired by Obama’s popularity, as well as Oprah’s, to land a black confidant. Not to be outdone, tongue-and-cheek website Rent-a-Negro.com even offers “Age-of-Obama” specials to those seeking to hang out with an African-American.

It’s a stereotype that won’t go away: Black women hate it when black men couple up with white women. We see the white women in these pairs as guilty of “stealing our men.” So, white women with black mates are to be quietly resented at best and openly insulted at worst. Reaction to the Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren divorce tells a different tale, though. Not only are black women capable of sympathizing with white women in interracial relationships, they also may identify more as female than as black in some situations.

If the stereotype that black women begrudge white women with black mates held true, you’d expect African American ladies to rejoice in the humiliating sequence of infidelity that led to Nordegren’s divorce from Woods. Instead, the opposite is the case. On the black celebrity-centered website Bossip.com, many commenters didn’t hesitate to express their support for Nordegren. Some simply declared themselves on “Team Elin.” Others lambasted Woods for his rampant cheating.

These two remarks sum up black female sentiment on the site:

“I don’t care if she (Elin) is a white woman. I feel very bad for her. … I am sure she wanted to keep her family together.”

Previously, I’ve written about the ironclad grasp of family in Latino culture. Once again, I’m not arguing that Scandinavians and Belgians and Koreans don’t love their families. I’m just asserting that Hispanics often prioritize family to a level that majority-culture America may find extreme.

After all, the whole idea of sending grandma to the old folks’ home when she gets to be inconvenient is not a Latino tradition. Similarly, it wasn’t Hispanic politicians who hijacked the term “family values” to justify why they hated certain groups of people (although many Latinos were only too happy to adopt that definition after the fact; but that’s another post).

Hispanics reap the benefits of this family-centric approach. We are more likely to have a strong support base when things get rough. We tend to know the stories that go back generations. And our cousins are more likely to be viewed as siblings rather than as strangers.

Despite this and the many other advantages that our emphasis on family brings us, there are liabilities as well. Yes, the preoccupation with creating lots of babies is one of them, as I’ve pointed out before.

But the obsession with family can also backfire in other ways, particularly when it rubs up uncomfortably against another cultural positive: the strong Latino work ethic.

As I’ve written before, Hispanic culture is just crazy about working hard. But as I’ve also pointed out, this admirable trait is sometimes used to justify ceaseless, low-wage toil.

At times, therefore, these cultural positives – an emphasis on family and a powerful work ethic – combine to deliver a devastating one-two punch to another value that, frankly, is not held in such high esteem among Latinos: education.