While I found Touré’s commentary “Inside the Racist Mind” intriguing, I find myself increasingly frustrated with our focus on individual-level racism while making a passing reference to the origins of racist ideology. What we really need to focus on is institutional racism and the colorblind ideology. I’d recommend you read George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness or Eduard Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists. They offer very cogent arguments exploring why racial inequality persists. Their work helps to explain why Trayvon Martin incidents continue to happen in the 21st century. We were and still are a racist society. Trayvon would not have been suspicious if the legacy and persistence of segregated neighborhoods didn’t exist; if the criminalization of males of color in our schools didn’t exist; if the media didn’t disproportionately present men of color as criminals, drug dealers or social deviants; or if our local and national news sources didn’t disproportionately cultivate a culture of fear. We’d be aware of and be able to openly address our racist ways if we told K–12 students about slavery’s impact on whites, like we talk about its impact on African Americans. We’d be more aware of our biases if we talked about how whites have used laws and policies to distance themselves from people of color, and how people in positions of power have fomented those tensions so as to preserve their own privileges. We need to talk about the ideas we assume we practice — universalism, individualism, competition and meliorism — that foster institutional and ideological racism.
Isabel Araiza, Corpus Christi, TX