Invisible Men

The Washington Post is doing a series on the lives of black men in America. This first article reports poll results of how black men who were surveyed see themselves, or at least what they tell strangers who call them and ask them how they see themselves. I found the following two graphs very interesting:

Among blacks with college degrees and household incomes of $75,000 a year or more, six in 10 said someone close to them had been murdered and six in 10 said a family member or close friend had been in jail or prison -- similar to the reports of working-class, less-educated black men. Three in 10 have been physically threatened or attacked in their lives because of their race, again no different from less-advantaged black men.

If anything, the survey suggests that better-educated black men experience more direct racism than those with fewer resources. For example, 63 percent of educated, upper-middle-class black men said they have been unfairly stopped by police, compared with 47 percent of less-advantaged black men.

I always read articles like this because I am a member of a poor, mostly dark skinned family with African bloodlines in Brooklyn (well, poor by NY standards anyway, we’d be pretty wealthy out yonder) and my son will undoubtedly share many experiences with the survey respondents.
We are not in any way stereotypical. No one close to us has been murdered or gone to prison. Most of the African men in the family are very successful in both their professions and their family lives. My son, who is only seven, has no conception of racism and his friends with African bloodlines come from families just as successful as his white, Jewish, Chinese, Persian, and friends from other ethnic backgrounds. But still, the cops, gang members, conservatives, and others who are itching to use violence on people they perceive as different or threatening will not know anything about him, and I worry.

But what bothers me about the Post article is the use of the word “race” which, I argue, makes the article racist per se. Presumably, the editors at the Post know that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that there is no such thing as race, that we are all simply humans and our differences mostly limited to superficialities such as the way we look. For the most part people use “race” when they are talking about culture.

As a writer, I know it’s difficult to get around using the word “race.” It’s clunky to say something like people with African or European or Asian bloodlines instead of the black, white, or yellow race, but it would be much better for us all if news organizations would prize accuracy over ease of sentence construction. Perception is not everything, but it does count for a lot.