Subconscious Racism

Subconscious Racism

            In the movie “A Time to Kill”, a black man named Carl Lee Hailey is on trial in a small town in Mississippi for the murder of the two white men who raped his ten year old daughter. A white attorney named Jake Brigance represents him. At one point Hailey explains why he chose Brigance as his attorney.

            “Well you are white and I am black. See Jake, you think just like them, that’s why I picked you; you are one of them don’t you see?...The fact is, you are just like the rest of them. When you look at me, you don’t see a man, you see a black man… It’s how you was raised. Nigger, negro, black, African American, no matter how you see me, you see me different.”

Perhaps that is the essence of race relations today: subconscious racism. Obviously it is not accurate to say that racism doesn’t exist or even to say that voluntary conscious racism does not exist, but the United States has taken strides in the past few decades. The form of racism has dramatically changed but it is not entirely gone. Perhaps it is something as simple and profound as qualifying a person’s being with “black” or “white”. We see each other as different based on nothing more than race. Even if a person does not have a particular bias against black people or think poorly of people of a different race, isn’t just the mire concept of finding a person of color different from us a type of subtle racism? As if being black puts a person in a different category, an impermeable cast. Likewise, does identifying oneself by race only serve to perpetuate this divide or does it create a sense of uniqueness and belonging as if race is one group from which a person could never be expelled.

Is it actually racism to see a person as not just a man but a black man? Why is it that in 2011, this is still a common “problem”? Even just when telling stories, often times people of opposing race are described as that race rather than by their other qualities. (i.e. A white person might say, “I saw Oscar, that tall, black guy in our class, at the Middle Ground today.” But they are unlikely to say, “… James, that tall white boy.”)  Why do we feel the need to qualify a person by their race instead of just seeing them as  a fellow human being?