The Racism Root Kit

My business partner and I created an experiential workshop called Bridges & Boundaries© which gives the participants an opportunity to look at race/racism/privilege and gender issues tied to race. It is partially didactic and has been a good learning laboratory for us to see the behavior of the culture up close and be able to de-construct it. What has been really enlightening has been the discovery and explication of what we call the Racism Root Kit. Essentially a root kit is a computer program that hides its existence from the operating system. In humans it would be be a set of behaviors that whites engage in when confronted with issues of race to avoid admission of complicity, participation or collusion. It operates to keep out of the consciousness the presence of racist thoughts, behaviors or beliefs. We have identified more than a dozen of these behaviors which we categorized as either offensive or defensive. There is also a similar set of behaviors that people of color engage in when forced to confront their internalized oppression. We are very clear with the participants that those behaviors, beliefs or thoughts do not make them bad people. We stress to them that good people can be burdened with the knapsack of privilege and this is simply about telling the truth about race/racism and privilege.

This concept is a really radical approach to looking at why race is such a difficult topic for Americans to confront. After submitting to several academic journals the article was rejected as not being empirical enough. There is no data set that can be statistically analyzed to prove the concept, which is ironic given it is a new theoretical concept. The real irony is that it is likely the Root Kit kicked in with the reviewers as at some level they were challenged to look at their racism or a more pernicious phenomenon, internalized oppression. So I decided that maybe a scientific approach might be better. That way, the empiricist reviewer would have data that would likely create more internal dissonance. I thought building on the work of a Princeton University psychologist Susan Fiske would be a good start. She conducted research on in-group/out-group recognition using a fMRI, (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) procedure to examine whether the part of the brain that recognizes human beings would light up when exposed to images of out-group members like homeless people or drug addicts. She found that the brain structure did in fact not light up when exposed to out-group members. This means that out-group members were not recognized as human beings according to the neuro-imaging. So how might that relate to race? Might whites not recognize people of color as human beings? If so, is there some physiological component to racism? After some discussions with a psychiatrist at Northwestern University who does research in brain imaging we discovered that race was considered a ‘nuisance’ variable in this type of research and it was unlikely that we could get any research funding to exam this phenomenon. So one of the burdens that I live with everyday in a society built on the premise of white supremacy is a nuisance variable in the minds of my fellow academics. Hmmmm. Then I see an episode of Nova scienceNow on public television where some researchers are trying to discover how human beings learn to speak by looking at the vocal patterns of song birds and to my surprise one researcher was able to get funding to use fMRI technology on song birds. Song birds???? It was then I knew that I was not cut out to be in the Academy much longer.

For all of its contributions to humanity, the Academy is probably the largest concentration of dissociated narcissists in the country. Race, the enduring pathology in our culture is a nuisance variable, and how song birds sing warrants the use of fMRI technology. I believe we will continue to do Bridges & Boundaries© and work with people on race, racism and privilege and not expect the ‘great minds’ of our era to understand, appreciate of even care about such nuisances.