COLOR-BLIND RACISM
How One Reporter's Denial Triggered a Discussion About Racism in 1998
Let's take a quick jog down memory lane
Denial is a shield in defiance of the truth, a way of holding onto preconceived notions no matter how many facts come flying your way. At least, that's how it feels watching White people deny the harmful impact of racist laws, policies, and beliefs throughout the history of this country. Take David Marcus, a Fox News columnist, for instance, a White man who recently claimed that Gex X, those born between 1965 and 1980, "did it, on the race thing," that in 1998, "everyone was fine," and the problem was "fixed." However, the responses from Black Gex X showed how far removed Marcus' analysis is from the truth.
As Michelle B Young suggested, the racism of that era could be seen in the cultural tension between White Gen X, who longed for black culture, "but not Black people," citing MTV, an American television channel's reluctance to play music by Black artists. Even White artists acknowledged this at the time. In a 1983 interview with MTV, David Bowie, an English singer and songwriter, asked, "Why are there practically no blacks on the network?" The early 90s saw a shift, with the inclusion of some Black artists sprinkled in like mise en place, but this in itself didn't fix the problem of racism or ensure Black artists received equal airtime and compensation.
Indeed, in the year Marcus cited, 1998, three White men participated in a brutal lynching, tying James Byrd, a 39-year old Black man "by his ankles to the back of a pickup truck," dragging him down a country road in Texas, "decapitating him in the process." Twenty-six years ago, as a nine-year-old child moving from Texas back to New Orleans with my mom, I remember hearing this gruesome story of trying to understand how anyone could hate someone because of the color of their skin. While Marcus claimed that back in the late 90s, no one cared about race anymore, you can't pick a time in American history when Black Americans weren't targeted because of their racial identity. In that same year, Riverside, California, police officers shot and killed 19-year-old Tyisha Miller, a Black woman who fell asleep in her car with it on idle. Miller's death, like Byrd's, sparked widespread outrage from the black community.
One Black man, who goes by the nickname "Huey P's Student" online, responded by saying, "I'm a Gen-Xer who grew up in the Bay Area.” That when" he "was a young man, the cops would pull" them "over with no just cause if there" were "more than two Black men in a car," adding that "sometimes they would handcuff us while they illegally searched the car." Frankly, every generation of Black Americans can tell you stories like this of facing racial profiling from police. Just look at what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his 1963, I Have a Dream speech, "We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality." And yet, years later, we're still grappling with this public crisis. Research using data from 2013 to 2024 indicates that Black people are 2.9x more likely to be killed by police than White people in the country.
"What I'm getting from this post is that you all lived in a bubble, didn't really have black friends, and what you are really saying is how dare those people start talking about their actual lived experience," Saundra Williamson, a White woman told Marcus, practically eating him up in the comments. Surely, any White person who believes that racism was suspended during the 90s is out of touch with reality, for exactly the reason Saundra proposed: they don't have close relationships with Black people and, as a result, have no interest, or even, awareness of their experiences. So, when confronted with the discomfort, White people like David Marcus pour up a tall glass of denial.
And Michah Bowers chimed in to say, "Before social media," and "you just thought it was fixed because you didn't know what was going on around the country." This is an interesting bit of social commentary. Gex X and older Millennials remember the version of America without social media, where you received most of your news from television or the ever-popular Sunday Paper. While it's impossible for David to miss some of these stories involving racism, such as the lynching of James Byrd in 1998, it's true that discussions about events were much more confined to small groups of friends, colleagues, and family members back then, contributing to this bubble color-blind racists find themselves in.
Claiming that "everyone was fine" when Black people were enduring acts of violent racism and deprived of equitable opportunities in the 90s shows the dangers of embracing color-blind ideology. If you endorse this idea that race doesn't or didn't matter, then you're ignoring the constant drumbeat of Black Americans telling you the exact opposite, as well as the evidence they have to back up their lived experiences. Whenever a White person claims to be color-blind, I'm always left questioning whether they're serious or simply trolling us. Is it possible that color-blind racists are truly this uneducated about acts of racial violence and longstanding disparities, or are they simply weaponizing their alleged incompetence?
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