I learned a new word today. I was following the hyperlinks on Wikipedia—typical Sunday afternoon procrastination—when I found myself reading about bicephaly, the condition of having two heads.
There isn’t much else to know about bicephaly, so I soon moved on to my next procrastinatory activities—calling my parents and browsing Facebook. While leaving a voicemail for my mother, I noticed a post on my newsfeed from Nadia, an old high school friend. The combination of my mother’s voice in my ear and Nadia’s face on my screen brought back an old memory.
Nadia is Hispanic. She is good friends with another of my old high school friends, Tarasha. Tarasha is black. My mother, who is a literal white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, could not for the life of her keep herself from calling them Natalie and Teresa.
My mother is liberal with a capital L. She devoted months of her life to fight a losing battle for President Obama in western Colorado, and she spends hours every day tutoring Hispanic children in my hometown. I knew that nothing about her slip-ups was intentional.
But nevertheless, they made me uncomfortable. They betrayed the fact that we are so endlessly exposed to white culture and nothing else that difference doesn’t easily fit into our understanding of our world. Even more troublesome, I worried that she wouldn’t have subconsciously corrected the name of someone she saw on the news. I suspected that the fact that they were her high-achieving daughter’s friends primed her to think certain things of them—preconceptions that primed her to think of names like Natalie and Teresa.
I have been taught what to do when I encounter racism. You don’t worry about offending the racist. You spare no niceties—you go to any lengths to rectify the problem. "Mom!" I said. "You’re being racist." Never mind that her face was already bright red.
Her embarrassment deepened when I called her out, and she immediately became so defensive I couldn’t have a constructive conversation with her.
One of my mother’s earliest memories is of her mother crying about Martin Luther King being assassinated on April 4, 1968. It was her birthday, and she couldn’t understand why Mom was so sad. To my mother, racism is a thing that stems from conviction of superiority and resulting hatred. It is a thing that purchases a gun, that aims a gun at the second balcony of the Lorraine Motel, that sends neurons to a finger telling it to apply pressure to a trigger. It requires intent.
My understanding of racism is very different. It comes from implicit bias training, from hearing stories from black friends about being in group projects and having kind, well-meaning people not look their way for the answer. It comes from reading about experiments in which resumes with names that were more stereotypically black got interviewed at lower rates than those with names that sounded white, even when all else was equivalent.
Thinking about these dueling conceptions of racism, I thought back to the idea of the bicephalic beast. I saw one head of racism—structural, implicit, the fault of few who are alive but many who are dead. My mother saw the other head—the still living, breathing hatred that is the fault of the one who holds it.
And I understood—when people say that racism is dead, they’re talking about the beast my mother knows. They mean that in this era where you’re fired in an instant for stating that any race or gender or, soon, even any sexuality is lesser, the “isms” are no longer particularly meaningful opponents. I’m not sure that’s true—I think we still see hatred-driven, intentional racism pulling triggers all around the country.
But the far more prevalent and nefarious beast is racism’s other head. It is racism that comes not from intent but from the structure of society, how institutions are designed and predispositions crafted.
We know how to fight the first kind of racism: full-frontal assault. Make people feel guilt and shame a la Frederick Douglass’s The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro. Shove their hypocrisy in their faces. Show them by any nonviolent means necessary that the hatred motivating their oppression is wrong.
But these tactics don’t work with the second kind of racism. There was no hatred motivating my mother’s habits. There was no bad feeling. The worst she could be accused of was ignorance, but even this she actively tried to combat. She is simply the result of a society that has been unfairly structured. And I took her red face and made her feel worse. In being so combative, I stopped her from examining whether her behavior stemmed from preconceptions she should actively try to correct.
This happens with other types of –isms, too—most notably sexism. Men who treat women like they’re weak or comment inappropriately on women’s appearances are sometimes treated like they’re actively, intentionally trying to oppress women, when sometimes these men are just going along with what the?y’ve been taught all their lives.
Treating people who are the unassuming products of an unfair system like they’re the enemy—assigning them intent where none exists—only inspires defensiveness and creates backlash. Because people speak out unproductively, using the weapons for the first head on the second, we come to stigmatize speaking out at all. Two camps develop when there should be only one.
The battle for the second head–the systematic oppression head–is no longer an issue of us vs. them. Once the ill will of the oppressors disappears, it’s us vs. it, us vs. an unfair system. And to fight it, we need to treat everyone like they’re an ally, not an enemy—because we need everyone on our side.
Ellie Schaack is a Trinity senior. Her column runs every other Tuesday.
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