If you're looking to understand why discussions between blacks and whites about racism are often so difficult in this country, you need only know this: when the subject is race and racism, whites and blacks are often not talking about the same thing. To white folks, racism is seen mostly as individual and interpersonal - as with the uttering of a prejudicial remark or bigoted slur. For blacks, it is that too, but typically more: namely, it is the pattern and practice of policies and social institutions, which have the effect of perpetuating deeply embedded structural inequalities between people on the basis of race. To blacks, and most folks of color, racism is systemic. To whites, it is purely personal.
These differences in perception make sense, of course. After all, whites have not been the targets of systemic racism in this country, so it is much easier for us to view the matter in personal terms. If we have ever been targeted for our race, it has been only on that individual, albeit regrettable, level. But for people of color, racism has long been experienced as an institutional phenomenon. It is the experience of systematized discrimination in housing, employment, schools or the justice system. It is the knowledge that one's entire group is under suspicion, at risk of being treated negatively because of stereotypes held by persons with the power to act on the basis of those beliefs (and the incentive to do so, as a way to retain their own disproportionate share of that power and authority).
The differences in white and black perceptions of the issue were on full display recently, when whites accused New Orleans' Mayor Ray Nagin of racism for saying that New Orleans should be and would be a "chocolate city" again, after blacks dislocated by Katrina had a chance to return. To one commentator after the other - most of them white, but a few blacks as well - the remark was by definition racist, since it seemed to imply that whites weren't wanted, or at least not if it meant changing the demographics of the city from mostly African American (which it was before the storm) to mostly white, which it is now, pending the return of black folks. To prove how racist the comment was, critics offered an analogy. What would we call it, they asked, if a white politician announced that their town would or should be a "vanilla" city, meaning that it was going to retain its white majority? Since we would most certainly call such a remark racist in the case of the white pol, consistency requires that we call Nagin's remark racist as well.
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Before dealing with the white politician/vanilla city analogy, let's quickly examine a few simple reasons why Nagin's remarks fail the test of racism. First, there is nothing to suggest that his comment about New Orleans retaining its black majority portended a dislike of whites, let alone plans to keep them out. In fact, if we simply examine Nagin's own personal history - which has been obscured by many on the right since Katrina who have tried to charge him with being a liberal black Democrat - we would immediately recognize the absurdity of the charge. Nagin owes his political career not to New Orleans' blacks, but New Orleans' white folks. It was whites who voted for him, at a rate of nearly ninety percent, while blacks only supported him at a rate of forty-two percent, preferring instead the city's chief of police (which itself says something: black folks in a city with a history of police brutality preferring the cop to this guy). Nagin has always been, in the eyes of most black New Orleanians, pretty vanilla: he was a corporate vice-president, a supporter of President Bush, and a lifelong Republican prior to changing parties right before the Mayoral race.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/169/169_think_wise_ray_nagin.html
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