Pubdate: Tue, 03 Sep 2002 Source: Amarillo Globe-News (TX) Section: Opinion Copyright: 2002 Amarillo Globe-News Contact: http://amarillonet.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/13 Author: Greg Sagan Referenced: "Defending His City" http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n1616/a11.html Other Opinion SELF-PERCEPTION CLOUDS RACIAL REALITY IN TULIA I read the article in last Thursday's Globe-News in which Swisher County Sheriff Larry Stewart asserted that Tulia is not a racist community, despite the fact that the now infamous "Tulia Drug Bust" would suggest otherwise. After reading this piece, I found myself wondering what Sheriff Stewart would have said if Tulia really was a racist community. A generation ago, the U.S. Army, Navy and Air Force found themselves in a similar position. With America's armed forces facing the transition from the draft-oriented Vietnam era to the post-Vietnam all-volunteer force, the perceptions of minority service members took on significance for the first time. The perceptions these men and women held about America's military leaders displaying racial preference were explored and analyzed, and guess what we discovered. Many leaders, both officer and enlisted, behaved as racists even though they denied it. The conclusion? A denial of one's racist attitude isn't persuasive, isn't even evidence. Even blatant racists will assert they are not if accepting that label denies them career advancement. Well, before this development in the U.S. military, I was a junior officer on the staff of the admiral who was commander of U.S. Naval Forces in the Philippines. While I served on that staff, there were episodes of race riots aboard Navy ships, the most significant being aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk. Blacks in the military, you may recall, carried a disproportionate share of the burden in the Vietnam War. That was bad enough, but in doing so they were subjected to all kinds of bigotry, from racial insults to official oppression. This was a mess that simply had to be cleaned up before we could expect blacks to volunteer for military service. As it happened, I participated in this cleanup. As a lieutenant commander, I was trained to be an internal consultant to the Navy, working with admirals and senior captains in charge of large shore commands to improve their handling of all the people they led. Part of this work involved confronting these officers on their attitudes toward blacks. But before I could do this work, I first had to confront my own attitudes toward blacks, women, and those older and younger than I. I was raised in a socially liberal atmosphere. My father was a career Air Force officer, a man who insisted that we take other people one at a time. We were never permitted to utter racial slurs at home, never allowed to generalize about the races or genders. We were taught that at the level of individuals, we could meet worthy and unworthy blacks, just as we could meet worthy and unworthy whites. Even so, I discovered that my own behavior fell into racist patterns. These patterns involved where I chose to live, whom I chose to socialize with, the kinds of jokes I found to be funny, a difference in performance expectations between blacks and whites. In short, I was part of an overall military culture in which there were individuals who were not racist but in which racism was "institutionalized." To get along you had to go along. Boat rockers found themselves isolated and left behind in the competition for advancement. The prevailing attitude was that we needed blacks, but not for the important stuff. So I understand denial. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt, paid the price. In fact, being in denial of one's own racist attitudes is a key element in sustaining racial prejudice. By consistently asserting that I am not a racist, I look for evidence to refute the charge and ignore the evidence that the charge is true. I might even, as Sheriff Stewart did, speak to times and circumstances in which I did something that was clearly not racist, maybe something in the distant past with no relevance to contemporary reality. This is known in behavioral circles as a "fig leaf" - the tiny thing that makes me technically "dressed" from one vantage point even as it leaves me naked from all others. But a fig leaf doesn't get me admitted to a restaurant that requires a coat and tie, and it would be foolish to demand that others look at me only from the front to decide whether I am dressed at all. If we are to establish whether an individual or a community is racist, we must look past self-perception. Our perceptions of ourselves can be delusional. We must look instead to behavior and the products of behavior. An action that isn't racially motivated but which produces a good outcome for whites who deserve less and a bad outcome for blacks who deserve more is racist. And there is evidence that this is what happened in Tulia. So maybe the good sheriff is in error about both himself and his community. Maybe these "outsiders" who don't know Tulia as well as Sheriff Stewart nevertheless see the bald spot the community cannot see for itself. So I offer a different approach, a piece of advice my mother has given me since my earliest childhood. When three people tell you you're drunk, lie down. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth