Seeing racism for what it is

last updated 8 January 2015

John L. Jackson Jr.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Riley Cooper is a racist,” said John L. Jackson Jr.—but does that make him a bad guy? Some of Cooper’s black teammates on the Philadelphia Eagles have publicly forgiven the wide receiver for uttering the N-word during a videotaped rant. An embarrassed Cooper insists he’s no racist, and players like quarterback Michael Vick have backed him up. But Cooper’s case shows just how poorly he and most other Americans understand “what a racist is.” Many people think if you’re not “donning a white sheet and burning a cross on some black family’s lawn,” or hero-worshipping Hitler, then you’re not a racist. But that blatant version has never been racism’s exclusive form, even during the worst eras of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. In fact, “racists are never only racists. They are other things, too.” That’s one reason racism is so hard to eradicate. It tricks us into believing it isn’t there, and then sneaks up on us, “surprising us and those around us with what just came out of our mouths”—just as it did with Cooper. It does no good to be so “invested in the rhetoric of colorblindness” that we can’t acknowledge an outburst like Cooper’s as “a textbook case of racism.”