Getting Smart about Race: An American Conversation

217 Pages·2021·5.797 MB·English

by  Margaret Andersen

Praise for GettinG Smart about race
“In Getting Smart about Race, Margaret Andersen provides a lucid and
sensitive meditation on racial inequality, analyzing both the origins
of American racism as well our current social and political conflicts.
Based on rigorous sociological research, this volume is written in an
accessible narrative style and will provoke meaningful conversations
about our nation’s future.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University
“Getting Smart about Race promotes social understanding, drawing
our attention to the peculiarly structural nature of systemic racism,
while revealing some of its unlikely victims: white people. Gracefully
written, accessible, and deeply illuminating—a reflexive work of sin-
gular importance that should be read and digested by everyone.”
—Elijah Anderson, author of The Cosmopolitan Canopy
“Margaret Andersen’s Getting Smart about Race is a road map for the
substantive and constructive conversation about race we say we need to
have. With the first sentence and one thoughtful question, she unset-
tles the racial landscape. . . . But she doesn’t just discuss the problem,
she offers a way for us to discover the shared humanity which must
be the foundation for racial healing in the United States of America.”
—Jeffrey Blount, Emmy Award–winning television director and
author of The Emancipation of Evan Walls
“In a clear, elegant, and thorough way, Margaret Andersen makes us
all ‘smart about race.’ She tells us what race, racism, and prejudice are,
their effects in society, and what we can do to change the racial order
of things. Getting Smart about Race will help advance our national
dialogue about the continuing significance of race.”
—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Duke University;
author of Racism without Racists
“Like the cartoon fish who wonders what water is, white Americans
are often oblivious to racism. This book is a necessary and timely
corrective. Margaret Andersen has written an important examina-
tion of the ‘water’ that continues to stubbornly define and divide us.
I strongly recommend it.”
—Mark Bowden, journalist and author of
Black Hawk Down and The Last Stone
“Dr. Andersen’s approach to conversations around racism is acces-
sible to people of all backgrounds and provides a useful point of
entry to discussions of race in a modern context. This book makes an
important contribution to modern-day efforts to dismantle racism
across the country.”
—Kristen Clarke, president and executive director,
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
“Margaret Andersen’s clear, empathetic, evenhanded, and engaged
writing can change the awareness of white readers who decide to
face ‘all of this talk about race.’ Andersen makes their effort both
worthwhile and rewarding. She lets readers know they matter and
that what they think and do matters to the racial climate of this
country—even the world. She shows us it is not too late to get
smarter and outgrow what she calls the ‘commonsense racism’ of our
childhood environments and educations. The humane tone of this
book is a gift to all who are making efforts toward social justice in
the United States.”
—Peggy McIntosh, author of Privilege, Fraudulence,
and Teaching As Learning and founder of National
SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum
(Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity)
Getting Smart
about Race
An American Conversation
UPDATED EDITION
Margaret L. Andersen
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
First updated paperback edition 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress
as follows:
Names: Andersen, Margaret L., author.
Title: Getting Smart about Race : An American Conversation / Margaret L. Andersen.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2020] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019042353 (print) | LCCN 2019042354 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Race relations. | Race discrimination—United States.
| Equality—United States.
Classification: LCC E185.615 .A6793 2020 (print) | LCC E185.615 (ebook) | DDC
305.800973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042353
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019042354
ISBN: 9781538129494 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 9781538156353 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 9781538159835 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Prologue: Race in the Age of a Pandemic vii
Acknowledgments xxv
Introduction xxix
Chapter 1: Race: A Thoroughly Social Idea 1
Chapter 2: Feeling Race in Everyday Life 23
Chapter 3: Who, Me? I’m Not a Racist, But . . . 47
Chapter 4: What Did You Say? Contesting
Commonsense Racism 69
Chapter 5: But That Was Then—I Didn’t Have
Anything to Do with It 95
Chapter 6: Getting Smart about Race, Then Doing
Something about It 121
Appendix A: F inding Common Ground:
Questions for Conversation 141
Appendix B: Further Resources 145
Notes 153
Index 165
About the Author 175
v

Prologue:
Race in the Age of a Pandemic
When this book was first published in February 2020, I could not
have imagined the events that would unfold quite soon thereafter.
The reality of racism was laid bare by the global COVID-19 pan-
demic and the brutal murder of George Floyd by police. Although
the coronavirus was a global phenomenon, in the United States
daily reports of the greater likelihood of sickness and death from
the virus among African Americans, Native Americans, and Lati-
nos peppered the earliest news accounts.
After Floyd’s brutal suffocation under the knee of police offi-
cer Derek Chauvin in May 2020, even while many parts of the
nation were under “stay at home” orders, millions risked exposure
to the virus by marching against the systemic racism that Floyd’s
murder signified. Protests across the nation in major cities, as well
as in small towns and rural communities, reflected people’s pent-
up anger at repeated police killings of Black and Latino men and
women. Support for the Black Lives Matter movement swelled as
people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and from dif-
ferent age generations took to the streets. Together, the COVID-
19 virus and the protests put our nation’s racial injustice in sharp
view—twin pandemics—that is, the pandemic of the COVID-19
virus and the pandemic of racism.
In the midst of these devastating events, there were signs
that perhaps the nation was finally ready for a racial reckoning.
As the racial protests flared, symbolic changes were swift. People
vii
Prologue: Race in the Age of a Pandemic
demanded the removal of Confederate monuments, and many
monuments and other symbols were removed. The Aunt Jemima
image was deleted from pancake mix, and the image of a Native
American woman was taken off butter packages. Schools and mil-
itary bases dropped names that had valorized Confederate army
generals. Even the venerable Washington, DC, football team, after
years of refusing to do so, dropped their racist name, becoming
simply the Washington Football Team.
Then, in a historic move, then presidential candidate Joe
Biden named Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running
mate. Kamala Harris is a Black, multiracial woman, the daughter
of immigrant parents from Jamaica and India, and the first Black
woman on a major presidential ticket.* With the Biden/Harris vic-
tory, Harris is now the first Black and Asian woman—and the first
woman—to sit in the second-highest office of the land. Further,
Biden’s cabinet is the most diverse in our nation’s history. We have
the first African American Secretary of Defense (Lloyd Austin);
the first Native American Secretary of the Interior (Debra Haa-
land); the first Latino Secretary of Education (Miguel Cardona);
the first Latino Secretary of Health and Human Services (Xavier
Becerra); the first African American Secretary of Housing and
Urban Development (Marcia Fudge); the first Latino Homeland
Security Chief (Alejandro Mayorkas); and the first known to be
gay member of a presidential cabinet, Pete Buttigieg (as Secretary
of Transportation).
Is the nation entering a new dawn of racial reconciliation?
After years when some believed, however wrongly, that we were
living in a post-racial moment of the nation’s history, the reality of
racism has become glaringly apparent. It is not that racism was not
*Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1968, was the
first African American candidate to run for president in a major party (1972). Geraldine
Ferraro (White) was the first woman to run on a major party ticket as vice president (1984).
Hillary Clinton was the first woman nominated to run for president by a major political
party (2016).
viii
Prologue: Race in the Age of a Pandemic
here before, as the research in this book clearly shows, but there
seems to be a new awakening to the reality of racial inequality,
made more transparent now by the pandemic and racial protests.
Is this the moment when we will finally get smarter about
race? In the months following George Floyd’s death, vast swaths
of the American public were talking about, reading about, and
thinking about racism. Conversations in living rooms, churches,
and community organizations have been exploring the history
and present reality of race in America. Books about racism and
anti-racism have filled the best-seller lists. Social media and
other communication networks have exploded with documenta-
ries, films, and videos exploring race in the United States. More
people of color appeared as news anchors and commentators, and
advertisements seem to have featured more diverse images than
ever before.
Still, the question remains, will the nation have the will to
make the changes necessary to uproot hundreds of years of racial
oppression? What will the coronavirus, the protests against the
police, and the election of Kamala Harris teach us about racial
justice in America? And, will we develop a more inclusive under-
standing of racism that takes into account the Black American
experience, as well as the experiences of Latinos, Asian Americans,
and indigenous people? That is, will we move beyond the Black/
White model that has typically characterized an understanding
of racism in the United States? It will take time before we can
answer these questions, and it would be preposterous to think that
a single book could answer such multidimensional and complex
questions. But, what can this book tell us about race in the age of
a pandemic?
This book emphasizes that race is a social construction—that is,
the meaning of race lies not in some physical reality but in how it
is created by human actions and how that construction perpetu-
ates racial injustice. Although socially constructed, race and rac-
ism have vast consequences in society. This book shows that racism
ix