Negrophobia and Reasonable Racism. Jody David Armour
writs and other legal memoranda, delivering his own oral arguments before appellate tribunals, my dad ultimately vindicated himself through federal habeas corpus, the legal procedure by which state prisoners can go to federal courts to argue that they were unconstitutionally convicted or sentenced (see Armour v. Salisbury, 492 F.2d 1032, 6th Cir. 1974). Sentenced as a first-time offender to twenty-two to fifty-five years for possession and sale of marijuana, he could still be wrongfully rotting in a jail cell if the current hostility to habeas had been in effect. The five years it took the slow wheels of justice to grind out his vindication, however, took a great toll, putting my mother on the public dole and resulting in the replacement of my dad’s red brick high-rise apartment building—what he liked to call his “forty acres and a mule”—by a parking lot for police vehicles. Made the devil wanna holler!
The secret of my dad’s popularity with the city fathers and guardians? As hinted earlier, for one thing he was an “uppity nigger.” As history shows, “uppity nigger” is an appellation applied to Blacks who do not shuck and grin and walk on tippytoes around certain Whites, literally or figuratively. Standing 6 feet 8 inches tall, weighing 260 pounds, possessing a better command of the Queen’s English than most, blessed with keen business acumen, and flouting all the racial conventions of his day, my dad stood out as a Black Gulliver among the lily-White Lilliputians who controlled Akron’s essentially segregated social, economic, and political institutions in the 1950s and 1960s.
But Dad was guilty of one affront even worse than uppityness, one many orders of magnitude more subversive of the racial caste system: miscegenation—the dread commingling of gene pools. Of course, the commingling of Black and White gene pools has a long history in the American experience. White male slave owners forcibly injected their genes into the Black population through the owners’ rape of their Black female chattel for hundreds of years under slavery. But the thought of a 6 foot 8 inch barrel-chested Black man skinny-dipping in their European gene pool unhinged the “Lily-putians.” (Recall, incredulous reader, that until the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, in numerous Southern states interracial marriage was a crime. And certainly the racial attitudes that gave rise to the antimiscegenation laws in the South were not confined to Dixie; as Malcolm X put it: “Anything south of the Canadian border is ‘The South.’”) The rankling sight in the late 1950s and early 1960s of my Irish-American mom, with her head full of flaming red hair, and my strapping Black dad, kicking along main street in stride—one, two, arms locked, indubitably matched—undoubtedly contributed to his false imprisonment.
In college, I scoffed at the naiveté of my classmates who were applying to law schools with the stated objective of serving justice. In my view, entering a courtroom was like entering a crooked casino in which the decks are stacked, dice loaded, roulette wheels fiendishly rigged. It took my dad—who more than anyone had reason for cynicism—to disabuse me of my own. He hammered home that even though the Lily-putians had twisted the law to vent their own venomous prejudices, he himself had found redemption in the law, for he had found the key to his own jailhouse door in a lawbook of the prison library. The law is not inherently racist or oppressive; it is merely a tool. It can serve as well as subvert justice. In the pages that follow I hope to draw on my dad’s stubborn optimism to develop a more hopeful picture of the legal process than that drawn by some of its critics.
The primary reason for my cautious optimism about the future of the American justice system—despite its tragic history of racial injustice—is that I do not believe that most White people today are Lily-putians. Most White people today truly desire to be above racism. In this, I differ from some of my friends who hold that most Whites are incorrigibly prejudiced. Our hope for progress toward racial fairness in the courts and society, however, lies precisely in the empirically demonstrable desire of most Whites to promote egalitarian ideals and avoid invidious racial discrimination. The main challenge today is to forge a consensus about what constitutes racism and what to do about it.
Racism on Stilts
Perhaps the gravest threat today to progress toward racial justice comes from the right-wing ideologues bent on convincing White people of good faith that negative stereotypes about Blacks are justified. Trotting out discredited studies, unscientific experiments, and cooked statistics, these pundits try to prove that Blacks are inherently less intelligent and more violent than Whites. The unmistakable implication of these “proofs” of Black inferiority is that disparities between Blacks and Whites in education and employment must be blamed on Blacks’ own inferior genes, not on past and present discrimination. A further implication is that Whites need not resist the influence of some profoundly derogatory stereotypes on their thinking about Blacks. After all, according to these learned men, many of these ugly stereotypes are true!
Old-fashioned racism of the Ku Klux Klan variety is still out of fashion. Growing in its place, however, is the highbrow, pseudoscientific variety—racism on stilts, if you will—one that hides its fascist boots beneath a laboratory coat. Pseudoscientific apologies for racial subordination are nothing new in the American experience. One aim of this book is to add a nail to the coffin of this most recent embodiment of highbrow racism, though I am ever mindful that no quantity of nails will lay it to rest for good. For, like eighteenth-century body snatchers who made handsome profits stealing corpses from graves, opportunistic ideologues like Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein will always be prowling the cemeteries of science for the noisome remains of discredited scientific theories with which to foul the marketplace of ideas.
The Black Tax
Consider what I will call the Black Tax. The Black Tax is the price Black people pay in their encounters with Whites (and some Blacks) because of Black stereotypes. The concept of a “tax” captures several key characteristics of these stereotype-laden encounters: like a tax, racial discrimination is persistent, pervasive, must be dealt with, cannot be avoided, and is not generally resisted. Taxes are commonly regarded as ineluctable facts of human existence, as in the old saw, “Nothing in life is certain save death and taxes.” Racism, too, is regarded by many Black observers as inexorable, as reflected in Derrick Bell’s “permanence of racism” thesis. And just as the state stands behind the collection of the general taxes, Blacks often have good cause to view state representatives such as police and judicial officers as IRS agents for the Black Tax.
The Black Tax has little to do with the Mark Fuhrman-style racism that led to the false imprisonment of my dad, however. The injuries inflicted on Blacks by avowedly virulent racists are grievous and still widespread, but as I suggested earlier, most Americans today are not Mark Fuhrmans, and thus most racial discrimination today is not rooted in conscious animus. Instead, most of it stems either from unconscious mental reflexes or from a belief that Blacks commit a disproportionate number of crimes and therefore statistically pose a greater threat than non-Blacks. It is unconscious discrimination on the one hand and ostensibly rational discrimination on the other that impose the lion’s share of the Black Tax today.
The Black Tax comes in many varieties. Reports abound of Blacks being stopped and interrogated by police for walking or jogging through “White” neighborhoods. Police are often responding to calls from concerned neighbors. Although Fuhrman-style racism may lie behind such calls and stops, it is quite possible that these watchful callers and dutiful officers see themselves as responding reasonably to a person who seems to be “out of place”—nothing personal.
Likewise, it’s “nothing personal” when store security personnel shadow Blacks in department stores, “nothing personal” when clerks refuse to buzz Blacks into jewelry stores and glitzy Manhattan boutiques, and when White women balk at getting on empty elevators with Black (but not White) men. Nothing personal, moreover, in profile stops of Blacks by drug enforcement officers, nothing personal in the redlining of Black neighborhoods by everything from banks to pizza delivery services, and positively nothing personal in the mountain of empirical evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of justice. Without a doubt, the shibboleth of today’s apologists for the Black Tax is “nothing personal.”
A serendipitous illustration of the attitude of many Whites toward the Black Tax emerged from my mailbox just as I was writing this Introduction.