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From: Jasper
Date: 7/8/03
Time: 11:48:11 AM
Remote Name: 68.73.195.223
Jean,
Great analysis. Very insightful.
The problem with trying to ascribe “racial” thought patters to large groups of people is that race itself has many meanings. The Ancient Egyptians, who were black, white, brown and red, dividend human-kind into five categories; black, white, brown, red and Egyptian. Most of us were taught in school that there were thee racial groups, Caucasians, Negroes and Mongoloids. Commons sense tells us that notion is ridiculous. How do you classify an Australian aborigine or the people native to South America?
On a genetic level you can’t cut the human race up into separate categories. There is only one human race, which is so close to apes that you wouldn’t be wrong in describing us as a slightly different kind of ape. On an anthropological level race once had some usefulness in describing people in terms of physical appearance because with those differences in appearance you also got uniform differences in geography, language, culture, religion, custom, diet, dress, education, etc. But since the invention of anthropological race in the 1700s the historical migration of people and the advancement in communication technology has muddled most of those distinctions considerably. Somebody who looks Japanese may speak only Oxford English and practice Catholicism. Some people who look European have never set foot outside of sub-Saharan Africa.
The history of race-based practices in the United States has produced artificial clusters of “racially” similar people in certain communities, occupations and economic classes. Common experience in one group, which includes their encounters with police, is rare in another. So even most assumptions about racism in modern America are wrong. White Americans are no more racist than black ones; there are simply more of them with historical advantages they don’t see and shared experiences with blacks that they don’t have.
When I was doing radio interviews, white people who called in to express their doubts about O.J.’s guilt had all followed the case closely and were disproportionately conservative Republicans, members of the health care profession, the criminal justice system and the military. One guy who stands out in my mind was a life-long athlete. He could not believe that any former athlete would be less conscious than he was of his shoes. He just couldn’t see O.J. dress in a sweat suit and NOT wear running shoes.
For the most part, people are intellectually lazy. They look for big things that make sense to them and ignore little things that don’t. Race is such an easy way of explaining behavior that as soon as you try to use it that way it’s easy to get sidetracked. That’s what happened in O.J.’s civil trial. The civil jury was convinced that O.J.’s acquittal was the result of a cynical appeal to past racial injustices, rather than the relevant evidence. Their collective experience did not tell them that cops sometimes lie so they didn’t even bother to consider the “little thing” that didn’t add up.
Yes, Jean, you hit it right on the head. Race was not the fundamental problem in the civil trial. It was the narrowness of common experience. –Jasper