I played Ultimate (frisbee) tonight. Our team had white shirts, and the other black shirts. Ultimate is a pretty loose sport, where there are no ref’s (calls are made by players, and negotiated), and tonight they forgot to even time the first half. We took our best guess.
When it came time to choose our team names for the evening, the one black player on our team suggested “the KKK”. The captain chimed in and decided on White Power. The black team (who won, by the way, by 1 point) was the MLK, Jr.s, which they changed to Team X, after Malcolm.
Now, had he had the slightest sense that any of us was racist, this name would have bothered him, but he didn’t (I presume). It seems to me that individuals, interacting with one another, tend over time, out of common decency, to reach accomodations with one another. It is possible to demonize people you don’t know, but quite hard to hate people you do know.
Social change of this sort is gradual, as people feel one another out, slowly realize that the other group is not evil incarnate, then realize they have all the same fears, problems, and hopes that everyone else does. This is the attribute of social movement that I consider to be a type of “self organizing system”.
There is no way to rush this process. It seems to me that the Civil War and Reconstruction set the cause of black equality back several generations. Clearly, EVERYONE, pretty much, in the nation was racist back then. Lincoln was racist. Many abolitionists were racist. Northerners and Southerners were both racist.
For their part, Southerners looked (in theory, which of course did not apply when horny slave owners were sneaking into slave quarters, as Jefferson apparently did; or when cruel men used their power to inflict pain on their slaves simply because they could) to their slaves as parents do their children. They feared their slaves–likely for good reason–but also did often express, in apparently sincere terms, affection for them. It seems to me that–given ideological and economic justification–they could have found their way to integrating their blacks much sooner than the 1960’s.
It is of course impossible to say what would have happened had, say, the Crittendon Compromise been adopted–or the conflict confined to the secession of South Carolina–and the Civil War averted, but it is quite clear that–in losing–the honor of Southern men was deeply offended. Since they were raised from birth to value honor above all else, this created a culture of resentment, anger, and vindictiveness. I was not alive back then, and have not read extensively in the literature, so this is based solely on psychology, but it seems not unlikely that the KKK was born of something like the impulse men at the bottom of a social hierarchy feel when they come home and kick their dogs, or beat their wives. Shit flows downhill, as the saying goes. They lost their honor–they were overrun by carpetbaggers and Yankees–but since they were at least still superior to the blacks, the maintenance of that hierarchy became for them something like a religious and sacred act. Outwardly, it was justified as such, but I think hatred and anger were the real motivations, which I do not think they always were.
You cannot mandate feelings. You can enact psychologically inept laws, which are then resented; conversely, you can create situations in which the natural tendency of human beings to recognize our collective plight–as perishable beings struggling for survival here, and salvation in the hereafter–is fostered and supported.
Affirmative Action is based on the idea that since we can’t know when racism affected a hiring or promotion decision, that we will discriminate proactively. The effect of it is to create a system which can be gamed, which is understood by everyone. It does nothing to further racial harmony, and no doubt quite often sparks latent hostility and lingering racism which is unnecessary.
There is nothing positive about racism. As Jefferson (admittedly hypocritically; he was apparently making a confession of some sort) argued, slavery is not just unfair to the slaves, but morally corrupting to the slave-holders. In precisely the same way, the systematic assignment of a uniform group of negative traits to a heterogeneous group of people is a type of violence not just to Truth, but to your capacity for common decency. As such, it is awful, and to be shunned.
Always, always, always, though, the question is: how can we reach our goals most quickly and most harmoniously? Slow tactics, that don’t work well are not to be favored over slow tactics that DO work well, or fast tactics that make things worse, even if our emotions demand it. Improving the world requires wisdom, and the capacity for patience, when that is the trait that will best help you achieve your long term aim.