American freedom is deeply related to American slavery, as Edmund Morgan famously noted almost fifty years ago to white people (though African-Americans were well aware of this, long before that).  And Barbara Jeanne Fields made a point several decades ago of illuminating the shape that racial ideology continues to play in the most intimate of ways in reaffirming a racial hierarchy in the US that structures everything but that white people cannot find a way of talking about without exhibiting classic symptoms of "white fragility".  This is why the writing of thinkers like DuBois and Baldwin remains classifiable in the "current events" part of your local bookstore. Faulkner was right.

Typically we white people think we confront race by not talking about it.  That's why it is so good to see pieces, even as predictable as this one is, by white people talking about race in their family.  What is fascinating--and what resonates with me--is the degree of unknowing that must be actively engaged in, in order for us not to see what is in front of our face.  

This obliviousness to the obvious is also a matter of sequestering the problem at the individual level of the "heart."  The problem is a deep one, of confusing individual psychology with social structure.  We think the changes that must happen are granular: soul by soul.  But in fact the granular changes won't matter unless there are changes at a far vaster level of scale.  Jim Crow didn't end because people's hearts were changed; it wasn't even their behavior that was changed; it was the law that was changed.  Their children retained deep racial resentments and unjustified racial saliences and still act on them today.  We need to focus on structural changes, not continue to squat in the neighborhood subdivisional cul-de-sac lemonade stand of "changing hearts."  Racial bias won't be eliminated in this generation, nor will it be in the next one, and it is silly to think that that should be our direct and immediate aim.  What should be our aim is equity, giving everyone a decent opportunity.  That doesn't involve changing my inner views so much as it involves changing social structures and networks.

All of this makes me think of our most recent fracas here in Virginia about race--our Governor's disastrous performance in denying he was in blackface in a med school yearbook picture.  I have my views on this, but this line from Faust's essay stuck with me too, on the way that we rest content in stigmatizing people rather than working beyond that:

"We have, thankfully, moved beyond the giddy and unfounded assumption that we are postracial. But I worry that we are still avoiding the most fundamental work. The media frequently report accusations that one or another public figure is a racist, and usually the circumstances or actions described are deeply concerning and worthy of condemnation. It is good that we are noticing. But name-calling and shaming seem to me too often expressions of a certain smugness and self-righteousness on the part of the accuser, acts that too often simply seek to separate us into saved and damned, sheep and goats. And, of course, accusations supply endless gotcha moments to generate clicks and feed social media.

This pattern is also dangerous. It situates the issue of race in individuals and their personal morality or choices, rather than focusing on the broader, structural, historical forces that perpetuate inequality and injustice in the United States—inequality and injustice for which we all, sheep and goats alike, bear responsibility. These are, as King emphasized long ago, “evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.” Ralph Northam is the product of four centuries of Virginia’s—and America’s—contradictions and blindnesses, and the complex, discriminatory racial order they have created."

What's interesting about Northam -- and it's something I didn't expect -- is the way that he seems to have taken to heart the idea that he needs to act in real ways to increase racial equity.  That gives me something more to ponder.