Oppression and Color-Blindness, Second Reply to Goldstein

Contemporary Racial Oppression. There are two questions that come up in relation to the current racial situation. Can the current race relations be characterized as racial oppression and what role does color-blind rhetoric play in relation to contemporary race relations?

Segregation was many things, including the denial of political rights to African-Americans, the attempted restriction of African-Americans to menial employment, the segregation of amenities, poorly funded schooling, routine personal humiliation, and a system of legal and extra-legal violence to enforce all those things. While many of these things are not part of the current system of race relations, racial oppression seems to have been shifted rather than eliminated.
Blacks can vote and hold office, but African-Americans find that the Republicans play on white racism to win votes and that the Democrats fail to represent black views and interests because of the Democrats' fear of racial backlash. African-Americans are just as much a third-rail of American politics as social security.

Blacks** are still subject to police shootings and beatings, stop and frisk campaigns targeted on young black men, racial profiling in traffic stops, and differential sentencing. For poor black men and young black men in general, police abuse is a pervasive part of life. For middle-class and professional blacks, the abuse seems more sporadic but still represents an extremely aggravating denial of equal dignity with whites in their positions. Blacks are allowed into hotels, restaurants, and retail establishments as customers, but are subject to slow and negligent service, various kinds of racial maliciousness, find themselves followed by security in retail establishments, and have to pay higher interest rates on various kinds of loans. Even though African-Americans can get into the door as customers, they can't expect to be treated as welcomed and valued, in other words as human beings in the full sense of the word.

Needless to say, blacks are also subject to relentless stereotyping in the news media and entertainment outlets. The standard treatment of the stereotyping of black women is Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought. Spike Lee's Bamboozled is a brilliant representation of the ways in which black professionals feel they have to accept the insulting comments connected with stereotyping as a price of holding their positions and maintaining their income. On a lower level of the economic scale, the black guys I worked with at a restaurant in Philadelphia felt constrained to listen to all the racist jokes told by the cops who stopped by for free food. They didn't like it, but they also didn't feel free to express as much outrage and disgust as I did. To be black is to be subject to arbitrary and capricious white authority, forced to pay a higher price for housing and other amenities to white owned institutions, and vulnerable to both big and small humiliations perpetrated by white people. It adds up to oppression and there are a large number of African-American writers who portray blacks as an oppressed or persecuted group.

In his efforts to be really cool, Goldstein refers to this as the "trope" of oppression and conveys a sense of boredom with it all. Of course, an affected boredom has always been a part of being a really cool guy. So there's no surprise there. But racial oppression is not just a literary figure (although it is that), it's a significant part of life on both sides of the racial divide.