Last year, I was in a conversation about race and privilege with a black friend over Facebook. At that point, I knew little of how race played out in modern-day America. I had the attitude many people seem to share about issues of social progress in our country – just give the issue a decade or two, and it will disappear.
Still, discussing race with a black man made me nervous, but I held my own until the conversation turned to affirmative action. And then I made the classic-rich-white-kid point that being a rich white kid came with its own disadvantages when applying to college. His reply is branded into my memory:
"You are racist. And you can't even admit it to yourself."
At first, his comment made me want to cry. Then I wanted to accuse him of libel, slam my laptop closed and surround myself with consoling white friends. But instead, stomach churning, I asked him for things to read. He sent me Peggy McIntosh and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the rest is history – or journalism.
Over the next year I spent 4 months reporting in South Africa, a setting that forced me to confront the privileged dimensions of my identity. I filmed a documentary this July about how, 20 years after Archbishop Desmond Tutu coined the term "Rainbow Nation" to describe a post-apartheid South Africa, more than 30 percent of the country’s black female citizens are using illegal skin bleaching creams to attain complexions closer to my own – because the words “light” and “beautiful” are used interchangeably there, because in Cape Town, people who look like me are nearly always better off.
Clearly, South African racial relations are not in perfect shape. But I noticed something different about young South Africans' approach to the issue: They talk about it. All the time. Nearly every conversation I had with a South African touched upon apartheid’s lasting legacy; usually the subject came up without my prodding. Most people I talked to acknowledged that current black leader Jacob Zuma is massively corrupt but that his opponent, Helen Zille, would be less effective at healing apartheid’s wounds simply because she is white.
During a conversation with several university students, I witnessed a white man tell two black women about his fetish for black women. The women spent several minutes yelling at him. Then one of them clapped him on the back and said, “I love South Africa, because we can say all this shit and have a beer together afterwards.”
These conversations happened with, around and without me. They are continuing to capture the minds of young people and transform the country. For South Africans, racism has not sunk beneath the volume of everyday discourse – it is a gaping hole in the fabric. And they are stitching it up, insult by insult, joke by joke, beer by beer. Experiencing this process is powerful, even secondhand: after witnessing my friends navigate the above situations, I felt like I'd appropriated their catharses.
But I was not a stereotypical racist to begin with. I was not undereducated, or blindly patriotic, or unexposed to cosmopolitan settings and ideas. Before I "unpacked my invisible knapsack" on the shores of South Africa, I went to an extremely liberal private high school, one which preached the phrase "diverse community" so often it ceased to mean much, and boasted a "diversity rate" of 40 percent, though the "diverse" (nonwhite) and "non–diverse" (white) students tended to self–segregate. When I got to college, I saw more of the same. Northwestern University is located in a wealthy neighborhood only an hour-and-a-half train ride from Chicago’s South Side. Its brochure displays more racially integrated settings than a year on its campus, and one of the most common sample questions from prospective students batted to tour guide applicants cuts deep: "Where are all the black people?"
The Economist described pre-protest Ferguson as having racial tensions "bubbling beneath the surface.” At Northwestern, these tensions have been boiling over – a teddy bear lynched above a black maintenance worker's desk; several students donning blackface on Halloween; the egging of Asian students from a car window.
Most white Northwestern students don’t set out to lynch teddy bears. We grapple with subtler situations, like whether it's okay to wear headdresses at Bonnaroo, or to use the n–word if you're quoting a rapper, or to enjoy the fried chicken and watermelon our school cafeteria serves us during black history month. Many of us may wonder whether we are racist when, after hearing that Michael Brown robbed a convenience store minutes before getting shot, we sigh internally and think, "of course he did." Or wonder how affirmative action can possibly be fair to the working–class white student with higher test scores than the working–class black student. We encounter racially–charged topics daily – both subtle and blatant.
Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at Penn State University, has an analogy for the way the U.S. is handling race. "We live with the problem of race like someone lives with very bad wallpaper," she told me. "We want to change it, but we just don't have the energy."
I agree that we’ve had a tough time trying to change our stripes. But racism isn't the wallpaper; it's the whole building. Our economy was literally built on slavery, and institutionalized forms of segregation like redlining will inevitably dog us for decades to come. Focusing too microscopically on the aesthetic outcomes of racism can blind us to its more literal manifestations, such as longer prison sentences for crack cocaine users or massive income disparities.
The wallpaper won’t come off until we remodel the building – a decades-long process at least, one that will require a deeper understanding of our own architectural flaws.
Except most young Americans I know – especially most young whites – never ask the kinds of questions that will enable them to reach this level of understanding. We are scared of being racist, scared of being wrong. So instead we fall into one of two categories: we are silent, or we relentlessly criticize each other for small flaws in our discourse. In exchange for political correctness, we shut ourselves down.
This is a massive obstacle in the way of growth and repair. It prevents conversations that need to be had between blacks, whites and every other color about the future of race relations in the United States. They might be messy or painful; that’s good. It means we are learning from each other. I never thought I needed a lesson on race until a black man called me racist. He was right.
If any good has come of Michael Brown's death, it's that it has built upon the civil discontent surrounding Trayvon Martin to string neon lights around our country's racist policies. But if we want to change those policies, we need to be more like the South Africans I met. We need to think about race when it's not on the news. We need to be willing to ask uncomfortable questions. And when we get the answers, we need to brave our own growing pains.