Epilogue: The Future of Race and Ethnic Relations HERNÁN VERA AND JOE R. FEAGIN For several decades now, sociologists have made a clear distinction between prejudice or discrimination as an individual phenomenon and institutional racism as societal practice. At least since the 1960s, North American social scientists have demonstrated that racism involves at its heart an institutionalized social practice. Thus, racism constitutes a way of acting, feeling, and thinking that is sanctioned by society and made legitimate through numerous ideological devices. Today, calling racism—the deliberate exclusion of racialized others from the resources and opportunities that a society offers those of its members considered of European origin—just intolerance, hatred, prejudice, or similar terms tends to euphemistic obfuscation and hides the deliberate and structural character of this exclusion. What people call “race” is a set of (real or imagined) physical traits—such as skin color, facial form, or hair type—thought to be indicative of intellectual ability, as well as moral and spiritual caliber. For nearly 20 years of teaching, the first editor of this volume generated some classroom data on racial stereotypes. He asked his classes, “What do we know about spics?” as he wrote and underlined the abusive epithet on the blackboard. Before students had recovered their breath, he would say, “Everyone knows we are great lovers!” and when the relieved laughter subsided, he would write, “oversexed” under the underlined term of abuse, usually provoking another explosion of laughter. Little by little students would venture into well-known abusive characterizations: “They stick to their families,” “they are lazy,” “they are dumb,” “they have rhythm, they are a musical people,” “they talk funny,” “they eat spicy foods,” “they deal drugs,” “they are criminal,” “they cannot control their emotions,” and so forth. When the list was exhausted, the instructor would say “let’s do ‘nigas’ ” now as he wrote and underlined this abusive epithet on the blackboard and took time to explain what these terms of abuse are and how they are related to stereotypes. He would explain that he was using the abusive terms to make the point that the traits being contributed made no reference to real people, but to mental and social constructions. Then he would ask a class, “Are ‘nigas’ oversexed?” “Are they HERNÁN VERA AND JOE R. FEAGIN • The University of Florida and Texas A&M University 467 468 Hernán Vera and Joe R. Feagin musical, familistic?” “Are they lazy?” and down the typically racist list, making checkmarks by each of the traits listed. With minor variations, the two groups, African Americans and Latinos, turned out to be closely identical in typical societal stereotyping. When the list was complete, the instructor would do the same with other epithets and other groups: “wops,” “micks,” “polacks,” and then “kikes” and “chinks.” In all cases, with the exception of the last two, the targeted groups ended up having the same traits initially attributed to spics assigned to them by the students. Why the “kike” (a term of abuse for Jews) and “chink” (a term of abuse for Asians) categories were viewed by the students as “model minorities” and were often assigned other stereotyped traits—such as diligence, intelligence, lack of musicality, and emotional control—is of great interest and worth analyzing elsewhere, here we only have space to emphasize that in 20 years of teaching he found a strong consensus: Most U.S. “racial” groups are viewed in similar terms in the hoary, conventional white racial framing. In the class exercise students were asked to think through this list and search for explanations. The classes were lively, but over the years many students mentioned how “tired” and “depressed” they were after the exercise that they would never forget. Often numerous students would insist that there had to be a kernel of truth in the abusive characterizations or they would not exist. In this epilogue we cannot reproduce the richness of the conceptual and emotional discoveries that students made with this important exercise. In the essays in which they wrote their reflections on the exercise, the consensual and socially constructed nature of the traits and images that emerged was surprising to most students. “I cannot believe, that up to this day, I had never questioned the truth of these stereotypes,” wrote a student that captured the central comment that his peers had also made in these essays. “That blackboard will haunt me,” wrote another student, “because that thinking has shaped all of my life to this point.” In this epilogue, we will only note that the similarity in undesirable traits among groups so different in heritage and culture stems from the fact that they are expressions of fears of the same hegemonic white mind and its long-term racist framing of society. It is also necessary to recognize that abused members of groups of color often find themselves adopting the same stereotypes and images from this white racial framing to characterize themselves and other groups. This is so because they too are constantly bombarded, from cradle to grave, with this white racial framing—from parents, peers, teachers, and the media. The blackboard, with its consistent and provocative data, accents the consensual nature of “race” in society, and how it is a taken-for-granted and obligatory way of thinking. For over 400 years now, European Americans have developed a racialized way of acting, feeling, and thinking that has created and legitimized numerous white privileges and powers exerted over peoples that contemporary European Americans and their ancestors have systematically conquered and imposed on others. How else can anyone compel servitude and long-term suffering over other peoples if not by establishing an unbridgeable difference between themselves and those being oppressed? Note too that in human history only whites have developed such an extensive racist ideology accenting “racial” differences to justify exploitation and oppression. Among the concepts that are most promising to the sociology of racism none is bolder and more important than that of “systemic racism.” This label may seem a bit surprising given the close association of the concept of “system” with the rather abstract theories of thinkers like Talcott Parsons, who defined a social system as a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the “optimization of gratification” and whose relation to their situation, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols. (Parsons 1951:5–6) Epilogue: The Future of Race and Ethnic Relations 469 Parsons’ social system emphasized the status-role as a component of the social system, which was often diagrammed into just four system components that Parsons thought were key features of society. Through this definition and others of its kind, such an abstract style of social theorizing tends to close off the analytical considerations honed in regard to the societal fields to which it is applied. Once this abstract definition has been imposed, the contours of our knowledge about social reality have been more or less pre-established. This is one of the features that make Parsons’ system-functionalist (less accurately called structural- functionalist) analyses satisfactory to many. In Parsons’ project the ideal condition, “scientifically speaking,” is that “where most actual operational hypotheses of empirical research are directly derived from a general system of theory” (Parsons 1954:354). However, this abstract establishment of (in effect, influential or official) social truths about society tends to operate uncritically to support and justify the status quo. Significant changes within a societal system are envisaged, but not the dramatically remaking or replacement of the social system itself. In our work over the last decade or so, we have pressed to look at the U.S. system of racism, termed “systemic racism” in writings of the second editor, from a new foundational and totalizing perspective. Systemic racism is a reinvigorated social concept that should guide much research on racial matters. In his work Feagin has stepped back and offered an analysis of U.S. racial matters from a perspective that contextualizes and accents the complex whole and foundational character of systemic racism in the United States (Feagin 2000, 2006). He has carefully examined how this racist social system was initially constructed, how it has functioned as a political-economic and symbolic-ideological societal foundation for centuries, and who constantly profits and loses from it. Drawing here on Feagin’s work, we use the term “systemic” as a synonym for “ubiquitous,” “total,” and “foundational.” Systemic racism is that which “penetrates every nook and cranny” of the society we live in. “Racist relations—are not in, but rather of this society” (Feagin 2000:17). Concepts such as systemic racism have come, not out of pre-established theorizing, but out of extensive field research—from examining many of the lives, experiences, and interpretations of those “organic intellectuals” who have had to “live this society” for decades. By contrast to Parsons’ style of theorizing, this concept of systemic racism is designed to open, not close, the analytical assessments of the social fields to which they are applied. When we use the concept of systemic racism, we do not seek to establish one truth about things societal, but rather encourage people to look at this and other societies in a much more critical and contextualized fashion, from a perspective that questions official truths and “established knowledge.” We recognize the need for flexibility as we dig deeper into the foundational realities of U.S. racism. Feagin (1973:4) put this matter of flexibility thus in introducing his influential anthology, The Urban Scene: “The selections will provide divergent and provocative interpretations which one may or may not be able to synthesize into a whole.