Study: ‘It’s a Black Thing’. Whites Don’t Understand.
According to a recent study, white folks don’t understand the Black experience.
The study, titled “The Cost of Being Black: White Americans’ Perceptions and the Question of Reparations,” was facilitated by a postdoctoral fellowship from Ohio State’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and appears in the fall 2006 issue of Harvard’s Du Bois Review, a journal on social science research on race. It was designed to gauge whites’ understanding of the hardships faced by Americans of African descent, and to examine their attitudes toward the idea of reparations for slavery.
During most discussions about the disadvantages that are faced by Blacks, many whites ignore the history and legacy of slavery, legal segregation and Jim Crow. They believe civil rights legislation has completely leveled the playing field, and that people like Oprah, Michael Jordan and Bill Cosby demonstrate proof that disadvantages no longer exist. The results of this study, however, show that when they are presented with hypothetical problems that mirror the real obstacles faced by Black Americans, whites relent, and believe that reparations are in order.
Often if white folks don’t see racism or discrimination with their own eyes, they don’t believe it exists. In many arenas, it doesn’t exist like it used to. However, the effects of 400 years of slavery and oppression are still evident.
“The costs of being Black in our society are very well documented,” says study co-author Philip Mazzocco. “Blacks have significantly lower income and wealth, higher levels of poverty and even shorter life spans, among many other disparities, compared to whites.
“When whites say they would need $1 million to give up TV, but less than $10,000 to become Black, that suggests they don’t really understand the extent to which African Americans, as a group, are disadvantaged,” says Mazzocco.
That’s right. The white people surveyed believe that it would be more of a hardship to give up television than to be Black. Obviously, they’ve been watching too much TV.
Yes, the caricatures of Blacks presented by mainstream media do not fully represent the breadth and depth of African culture. When most whites see Tiger Woods and Oprah Winfrey on one hand and 50 Cent and Lil’ Kim on the other, their perception of what most Black folks are in reality will be skewed.
Because they don’t understand these issues, most whites oppose reparations for slavery, however, when race and context are removed, the study’s respondents show how they would feel if forced to walk in Black shoes.
In [one] scenario, the references “white” and “America” were omitted, and participants were asked to select between being born a minority or majority in a fictional country called, “Atria.” They were warned of the disadvantages that the minority group faced — the same disparities faced by black Americans — and they said they should be paid an average of $1 million to be born a minority.
“When you take it out of the black-white context, white Americans seem to fully appreciate the costs associated with the kinds of disparities that African Americans actually face in the United States,” Mazzocco says.
“Our data suggest that such resistance is not because white Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt or ethically flawed,” adds Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji, a professor of social ethics at Harvard University. “White Americans suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a black American.”
Alternet.org: Whites Just Don’t Understand the Black Experience
