Last June, in the aftermath of two incidents involving the shootings of two black off-duty New York police officers by their colleagues, Gov. David Paterson formed a task force to study what role race may have played in the shootings. The conclusion, reports The New York Times, is that "inherent or unconscious racial bias plays a role in ‘shoot/don’t-shoot,’ decisions made by officers of all races and ethnicities.”
But of course, the fact that as a cop, you're more likely to get shot by a colleague if you're black has nothing to do with racism, because as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, there are no racists in America:
“There may well be an issue of race in these shootings, but that is not the same as racism,” said Zachary W. Carter, a former United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who served as the task force’s vice chairman. “Research reveals that race may play a role in an officer’s instantaneous assessment of whether a particular person presents a danger or not.”
What's weird is that most people will read that sentence without blinking because they know exactly what he means. Racism is a bias possessed by monsters in white hoods and swastika tattoos, not police trying to do their jobs. Saying that racism plays a factor would be the same thing as saying these cops were all terrible people.
A straightforward reading of the task force's conclusion is much more frightening -- race continues to play a decisive role in the most important decisions we make, and being a good person does not make you immune. This is part of why the American conversation on race is so counterproductive -- it's almost entirely focused on excluding almost every model of rational behavior from the category of "racism," rather than examining the very real effects race continues to have on people's lives. The first priority, essentially, is reassuring white people that they aren't racist. You can see this instinct in the piece itself, Carter's quote exonerating the shooters from the charge of racism is the first quote in the piece.
This tendency isn't based on malice; it's based on experience -- white people are more likely to be accused of being racist than suffer as a result of racism. Rather than think about how to mitigate the effects of race in American society, we waste our time with hand-wringing and soul-searching over whether or not person X is a racist.
-- A. Serwer
