Removing racism

PHILADELPHIA – In May 2005, comic Dave Chappelle shocked fans by walking off the set of his popular TV series, “Chappelle’s Show,” for no apparent reason.

Chappelle, whose show turned racial stereotypes on their heads, later explained that he was performing a skit in blackface when he noticed a white crew member laughing in a way that made him uncomfortable. Chappelle thought the white guy had missed the satire and was laughing for the wrong reason. Some pundits dismissed the performer as paranoid.

Was he?

Yes and no, says cultural anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr.

Jackson, an associate professor of anthropology and communications at the University of Pennsylvania, says African Americans live with the suspicion that they encounter racism constantly in their daily lives – though they can’t always prove it.

They see subtle signs of contempt in a simple look, a gesture, a remark, a nod of the head by white men and women who otherwise seem very friendly.

Chappelle’s case inspired Jackson, who had written three scholarly books on race issues, to begin work on his first non-academic book, “Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness” (Basic Civitas Books, $26), an incisive, thought-provoking work on race relations.

Jackson’s book is the latest entry in a sometimes heated debate over the state of race relations that is playing out against the backdrop of Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy.

Viewpoints diverge widely. While Jackson focuses on perceptions of prejudice, literary critic Walter Benn Michaels argues in his much-discussed polemic against identity politics, “The Trouble With Diversity,” published in 2006, that America needs to worry more about class differences than about race. Jackson says he and Michaels “stand at opposite ends of the discussion.” Closer to Jackson is Richard Thompson Ford, whose book “The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse,” dovetails nicely with Racial Paranoia, but where Jackson sees racism, Ford sees simple misperception.

Jackson insists that racial paranoia is more than a feeling or psychological state: It shapes the way people relate to each other across the racial divide.

“People aren’t just being hypersensitive,” he says. “Paranoia defines the organizing principle … of how racism functions in American culture today.”

Nor is racial paranoia limited to one race, Jackson adds.

“White folks also are constantly paranoid,” Jackson says. In their case, the paranoia is “about the accusation of being called racist.”

Jackson says racial paranoia has its roots in a very real – and subtle – variant form of racism. Unlike the overt prejudice of the past, it can’t be identified or defeated by the legal system.

Jackson first noticed the phenomenon while doing ethnographic research in Harlem for his first book, 2001’s “Harlemworld,” a study of how racial differences in a community play out in everyday life.

“A lot of folks I studied would tell me they couldn’t wait to get back to the South once they retired,” Jackson recalls. “They told me there, at least, you know who is racist and who is not. Of course it was tongue in cheek, but it said a lot about their suspicions.”

Ironically, the racial paranoia that Jackson describes is a byproduct of victories won by the civil rights movement. It’s “a crisis of success in a sense,” Ford said. “It’s what’s left over once overt racism has been largely eliminated.”

Politically correct talk once ensured that African Americans would be free of verbal intimidation, but now has managed to stifle “any honest discussions about race,” Jackson says.

“We have made amazing racial progress in this country, but we shouldn’t think that our endgame is simply to banish racist language,” Jackson said in a phone interview from his South Philadelphia home, where he lives with his wife, fellow Penn anthropologist Deborah Thomas, and their two children.

With everyone walking around on eggshells, worried about saying the wrong thing, fears and anxieties over racial difference are forced “underground, where they fester into resentment” – and eventually burst through in an ugly way.

Witness shock jock Don Imus’ offensive comments last year about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, or comic Michael Richards’ racist outburst during a stand-up routine, Jackson says.

And witness African-American rage over the federal government’s failure to respond adequately to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the predominantly black population of New Orleans.

Jackson wants to avoid this “racial angst.” His solution to racial paranoia is a no-brainer: People of different ethnicities, religions or races must be able to communicate their fears and suspicions to one another – in a safe environment.

That kind of communication will not happen unless Americans – as individuals and as families – establish truly multiracial social networks, Jackson says.

Those networks don’t now exist. “How many of us actually have friends from a different race?” he asks.

But can Jackson’s social networks become a reality? No legislature can make American families cross the racial line when buying houses or making friends.

And doesn’t Jackson’s program have more in common with therapy than social policy?

More often than not, situations Jackson calls racist are merely “misunderstandings … (which) … happen all the time, for lots of reasons,” says Ford, who, like Jackson, is African American. In “The Race Card,” published in January, Ford argues that some people make dubious charges of racism for their own advantage.

While he agrees that race relations are marred by a subtle form of paranoia, he’s not sure the damage it inflicts merits a sociopolitical response.

“There are still enough … problems (which require legal solutions) that I think it’s a mistake to focus on things that are so subtle and ambiguous,” concludes Ford.

Jackson says Ford “is right” when he argues that the law can’t do anything about racial paranoia. But that doesn’t mean Americans can afford to ignore it.

“We’re not off the hook,” he says. “Either we find a way to deal with these serious race-based skepticisms, or we create some strange never-never land of post-racial living by collective repression.”