Monday, November 20, 2006

expert on race = oxymoron

The other day I was out with a group of women and one of them said of Hispanics: “Those people just don’t value education.”

Whoa. Seriously? Everyone in the room was white. No one was saying anything. I am a professor, and I study and teach about race in the US. I spent years developing expertise on the causes and the effects of racism and working on ways to counter racism in this country.

When I spoke up and said that such comments were not OK, a very disturbing thing happened. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that because I spent so much time learning about race, I was likely overly sensitive in my perceptions of racism, both in this situation and in general. My education makes me an unreliable witness.

That is like telling an oncologist that, because she spent so much time learning about cancer, her interpretations of diagnostic tests are likely overly sensitive. Her education makes her an unreliable diagnostician.

The difference is that going to school and spending six years learning about cancer has the effect of making you a reliable expert, but going to school and spending six years learning about race makes you an unreliable radical.

It is good to be someone who knows about cancer, and it is bad to be someone who knows about race.

What happens when the very act of knowing something stops people from treating you as trustworthy and reliable? The more that you know the less people are willing to treat you as knowledgeable. This means that, as a culture, there are some things that we simply can't know because the people who do know them, by their very act of acquiring the knowledge, become suspect in our eyes.

This is a way for whites to pretend that racism doesn’t exist, which means they can pretend that they are not complicit with it and bear no moral responsibility for getting rid of it.

The horrifying thing is that it does exist, they are complicit, and they bear responsibility.

I thought integrity was something that Americans valued.

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