Like Animals

Scott Hardie | November 9, 2016
Warning: Racist language ahead.

Slate recently published some survey results indicating that Trump supporters consider black people to be "less evolved" or "savage" or "barbaric." I wish that Slate had not made it about Trump, because the difference between Trump supporters and Clinton supporters, or conservatives and liberals, or rich or poor, is negligible compared to the real story here, that a vast number of white people (thirty eight percent overall!) consider black people to be less evolved. It's immensely discomforting and enough to make you feel sick.

Maybe it's because I grew up in the hyper-PC nineties or in some kind of bubble of tolerance, or maybe it's because I'm white and haven't really felt the sting of nasty racism, but I cannot fathom the notion that black people are "animalistic" or that they "lack intelligence and morals" or "lack self-restraint." I have known some unintelligent and hot-headed black people, but I have also known plenty who are compassionate, brilliant, and patient people, college professors and software engineers and corporate vice presidents. I have met roughly the same proportion of good and bad black people as I have people of any other race, and in no case (black or white or anything else) has it occurred to me that the person's race had anything to do with their personality or capability.

And yet, apparently a lot of white people feel differently. Two in five do. Obviously there are racists anywhere, but such a large number, even in a country with sickening racist undertones in so much of its culture, is still a shock to me. Sociologists say that we all have at least a little bit of subconscious racial bias, but apparently for vast numbers of us, it's conscious. And these are just the people who admitted to it in a survey! Certainly there must be more people who kept quiet about such feelings even in an anonymous survey. This outcome is probably not striking to someone more cynical about American race relations, or to someone of color who has the experience being judged by white people than I don't, but to me it's still a huge disappointment.

Anyway, I don't want to talk about how revolting the slurs are, or how unsettling the numbers are. What really troubles me is that we never talk about this, any of this. We have surface-level talks about race, like Colin Kaepernick kneeling or the Confederate flag flying or "taco trucks on every corner." But we don't really dig into these prejudices, and where they come from, and whether they have merit, and how we overcome them together. After so many police shootings of African Americans this summer, I heard a black cop say in an interview that we were never really going to solve the problem until we talked about the true cause, the perception by some white people that black people are violent or dangerous. He hit the nail on the head, but to date he's the only person I've heard say that, in countless articles online and minutes of air time spent on the subject. Why don't we talk about it? Because it's embarrassing or impolite? Because poltiical correctness has made it taboo? Or because we consider these opinions wrong, even though we still feel that way as a nation? I want to know how we can talk about it. I want to know how we can do something about it.