A recent Comment article by Vincent Bacote argues that racism still exists in America. His basis for this assertion seems to be that many upscale neighborhoods have few if any blacks living in them and many Christian schools have few black faculty.
Now it may be true that racism is still a problem in American culture - though I'd argue that white racism is no longer a significant barrier to black progress and much of the overt racism that persists in our culture is to be found among blacks - but how Bacote's argument supports this claim is far from clear. The absence of blacks from parts of our socio-economic culture is no more evidence of racism than the dearth of white NCAA basketball players is evidence of racism.
In order to persuade me that racism is behind the lack of black children in the backyards of our toniest communities and the scant numbers of black faces in the faculty yearbook pictures at evangelical schools, I would need to have shown to me evidence that black families who had the means to live in the exclusive neighborhoods were denied that opportunity and that blacks with adequate credentials were denied faculty appointments despite having applied for job openings. Mr. Bacote doesn't do this. He simply points to the absence of blacks and infers that racism must be the cause.
The closest he comes to making a case is when he writes:
If you have many minority friends, I doubt you can question whether racism is still an ongoing challenge for some of them, from experiences of personal prejudice to subtle manifestations of corporate and structural injustice. Although laws prevent people from being excluded from opportunities for success, why do many minorities remain on the outside or ignorant of the "normal" patterns for wealth creation?
I'm afraid that I have long ago grown suspicious of what we might call the argument from personal perception. A man is denied a loan by a bank, say, and he simply assumes that it's because of his race when in fact race may have had not nearly as much to do with it as did his financial history. Another black man is stopped in a white neighborhood by the police. He assumes that his crime is "Driving While Black" and that the cops are racist when in fact they've been told to look for a black man who is reported to have assaulted someone in that neighborhood. These two individuals both perceive themselves to be the "victims" of white racism when actually neither of them were. They then extrapolate from their experience to the conclusion that racism is pervasive when indeed there is no warrant in their experience for such a conclusion. No doubt some people have experienced genuine racism at the hands of both whites and blacks, but I'd like to hear the facts of the case and not just be expected to take it on trust that the episode in question really was motivated by racial animosity.
The question why minorities "remain on the outside" is an important one to answer if that tragic circumstance is ever going to change, but we'll never arrive at a helpful answer to it until we get over the reflexive tendency to blame white racism first.
