A diverse group of national leaders gathered on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday to establish a new direction and tone for a more relevant dialogue on race in the U.S. The symposium was set to identify trends and determinants of racial disparities, develop consensus on policy needs and chart a racial agenda for 2010 and beyond.
Today’s post-civil rights conversation about race is critical and significantly different from the past, said a panel during “The State of Race in 2010: Defining a New Dialogue” session. They pointed to the election of President Barack Obama as igniting new discussions as ethnicity, color and religion were prominent factors in the election.
Panelists, who included policymakers, scholars, media experts and nonprofit and corporate leaders, noted that racism today is more complex. In the past, groups rallied around issues like segregation that they opposed. Now, the discussion about racism is being reshaped and extends further to changing mindsets as well as legislation.
“People have had the wrong definition of racism, which has resulted in people feeling that if I don’t hold it in my heart, then I don’t have to do anything,” said Rinku Sen, president and executive director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and publisher of ColorLines magazine. “We have to focus on the impact of laws more than the intentions.”
Others addressed the difference between being racially privileged and being a racist. “Every approach to talking about racism based on the past will come up short,” said Dr. John Jackson Jr., an associate professor of communications and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Much of what we learned about racism is almost irrelevant,” Jackson said. “You can be considered a racist for calling someone else a racist. Race is lived through class, ethnic differences, color, and sexuality. It is always complicated and in mutual relationship with other things. Race is in people’s souls and guts. The real honest conversation will include gnashing of teeth.”
Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington Bureau and senior vice president for advocacy and policy, noted the everyday realities of discrimination that African-Americans live with through legislative outcomes or economic deprivation – high unemployment, foreclosures due to subprime lending practices that targeted Blacks, “high drop-out rate due to high stakes testing and a criminal justice system that includes racial profiling with 40 percent of the prison population being African-American.”
