America is not “an extraordinarily racist country”

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Obviously, the Americas is an extraordinarily racist country. So says Gary Lineker, a successful football player in the 1980s who became a $2million-a-year BBC sports presenter. That’s not a bad salary considering the BBC is taxpayer funded. He made his remarks in the context of saying that regardless of Qatar’s human rights record, the United States, as the next World Cup host, had its own problems.

Lineker articulates most of the standard liberal biases that sustain the BBC: good for the EU, bad Tories, yada, yada. Had he voiced his opinions privately, he would have remained extremely popular. He was an excellent footballer and his commentary combines sharp insight with laid-back friendliness. But like so many broadcasters, he was fatally tempted by Twitter’s political commentary, a process that almost always sends people into a downward spiral of increasingly outrageous statements.

The shocking thing here is obviously. In the circles in which Lineker moves, the idea that the United States is particularly racist, almost as bad as Great Britain, goes without saying.

But is it really so obvious? I would say that racism in America is by no means extraordinary. In most countries, some people are more or less wary of people who don’t look like them. Although it is difficult to measure the phenomenon across borders, there are some standard questions that apply in different countries about how people would feel if someone of a different race moved next door, for example. By such measures, the United States generally comes in the middle of the table, behind the Swedes and the Swiss, but ahead of the Serbs and the Saudis.

The United States has certainly had its shameful moments, but so have many countries. When I think back to my childhood in Peru in the 1970s, I shudder at the unspoken assumptions about how certain positions were actually off limits to the indigenous majority, the occasional use of racial slurs by otherwise respectable people. Peru has come a long way in half a century. But so does America.

One of the quirks of public discourse in the United States is the inverse correlation between the country’s racist character and people’s concern about it. In every way, from the end of lynchings to the rise of intermarriage, racism in the United States has declined sharply and visibly. In the 1950s, 40% of white Americans said they would move out if a black family bought the house next door, 55% approved of separate schools, and more than 90% opposed interracial marriage. All of these attitudes are now probing in the low single digits.

The problem is that no one is interested in perspective. We are not looking at other times or, in fact, other countries. Or if we do, we try to blame their problems on the West. Internal slavery in Africa? A consequence of the Atlantic trade. Religious tensions in India? Must somehow have been introduced by the British.

There are two things wrong with only white people being racist. First of all, it is patently false. The West did not introduce the notion of categorizing entire peoples. On the contrary, it introduces the notion of the sovereign individual into a hitherto tribal world. The reason we have a word for racism, the reason we recognize it is unfair, is that a combination of Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment traditions teaches us to see the world that way.

Second, the whole debate, especially since the Great Awakening of 2015, is aimed at guilty white people. Ethnic minorities are treated as secondary actors in someone else’s drama, without agency. Little attention is paid to the effect this has on young people in minority communities who are constantly told that indeed nothing they do can change the fact that society is rigged against them. That’s pretty much the opposite message that educators try to give in other settings. If our goal was to induce anxiety and depression in a group of children, telling them that they are destined for victimization is a very good way to go about it.

The truly extraordinary thing about America is that, pretty much solely, it was founded in the name of individualism (or freedom and property, as the expression was at the time). All other nations were, at least to some extent, defined by location and race.

Yes, America has not achieved its ideals, but it has finally achieved them. When we talk about telling American history, warts and all, we shouldn’t forget everything from the Civil War to the defeat of Nazism. To reduce this story to a morality tale about evil white people that isn’t so much extraordinary as it is downright deranged.

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