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| Michael Brown. |
I’ve witnessed the cruelty of racism up close in recent
months as it’s been played out in my apartment building. The most discouraging
aspect of the ugliness has been the obliviousness to the problem among both
whites and blacks. I’ve almost had to grab a neighbor by the shoulders and
shake him to get him to see what has been going on.
Meanwhile, yet another young black man has been shot and
killed by a white policeman, and the reverberations are still being felt across
America.
Prompted by the Ferguson episode, New York Times columnist Nick
Kristoff suggests that we’re all “a little bit racist.”
Kristoff writes:
Let’s start with what we don’t know: the
precise circumstances under which a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., shot
dead an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown.
But here’s what evidence does strongly
suggest: Young black men in America suffer from widespread racism and
stereotyping, by all society — including African-Americans themselves.
Research in the last couple of decades
suggests that the problem is not so much overt racists. Rather, the larger
problem is a broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who
intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who
harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and
behavior.
