Simply put, racism today is not necessarily apparent. According to observation and analysis, twenty-first-century racism masks itself behind laws, policies, practices, and language which claim to be “race-neutral.” Nevertheless, racism influences our relationships, institutions, and our world. It will not simply fade out of existence if we turn a blind eye towards it. The United States has always been a nation that has placed an apparent dominant value on whiteness. In this essay, I will be focusing on Brittney Cooper’s TEDTalk, “The racial politics of time.”
The concept of multiculturalism in America standing alone is too vague to be supported or opposed. The United States is founded on its own sort of multiculturalism, which has usually (though not always) stood us in a relatively good ranking. But what does it mean to be multicultural? Is America really a melting pot of cultures or do our differences keep us apart? This talk briefly displays a history that speaks the awful truth surrounding the discrimination and horrors that several ethnic groups have gone through to make America the greatest country on Earth, as it is unfortunately still the case today. Society, culture, ethnicity, and prejudice are all complicated subjects but intertwined and woven together, they explain our differences to provide some common ground.
During its early stages, American democracy prided itself on liberty and freedom from oppression–however, it did not take under consideration towards those people who were not white. Hierarchies were therefore established–also within the white race. Landowning native Anglo-Saxons were at the top of these hierarchies, while impoverished new immigrants were demoted and pushed to the bottom. All these transformative changes took place within the time period of Jim Crow segregation. This racial segregation solidified a culture of whiteness throughout America. Because new immigrants were not subjected to the similar processes of segregation as nonwhites, they had the ability to take advantage of the benefits. In other words, to escape racial persecution, new immigrants would join the persecutors and broaden the definition of whiteness and further strengthen the might of white supremacy.
As Brittney Cooper states, when Barack Obama became President of the US in 2008, several Americans declared that the United States was post-racial. In modern times, we consider ourselves to be postmodern, post-structural, post-feminist. "Post" has become a simple prefix that we apply to a range of terms to mark the way we as a country were. However, prefixes alone do not possess the power to make race and racism a thing of the past. The US was never a "pre-race," so to claim that we're post-race when we have yet to grapple with the impact of race on black people, Latinos or the indigenous is disingenuous.
In this complex world, understanding race does not simply mean memorizing certain terms, statistics, and/or historical events. It means breaking with common sense comprehensions of the world, apprehending society with a sophisticated mindset. This mindset takes economic, political, cultural, and social forces into account. It means approaching the world both skeptically and critically, rejecting overly simplified explanations, and reevaluating the nature of things with a new perspective.
We treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn't have a political history bound up with the plunder of indigenous lands, the genocide of indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland. So if we're really ready to talk about the future, perhaps we should begin by admitting that we're out of time. Time does not belong to us–our lives are lives of perpetual urgency. Time is used to displace us, or conversely, we are urged into complacency through endless calls to just be patient. But if past is prologue, let us seize upon the ways in which we're always out of time to demand freedom with urgency.