John L. Jackson, Jr.: Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright

The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated May 16, 2008

Racial Paranoia and Jeremiah Wright
By JOHN L. JACKSON JR.

In the 1950s and 1960s, "consensus historians" such as Richard Hofstadter argued that large swaths of the American public displayed a "paranoid style" of political analysis that made them incapable of fully participating in rational debate. That "sick" style was concerned with "the way in which ideas are believed and advocated rather than with the truth or falsity of their content." Half a century later, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s claim that the AIDS epidemic is a scourge inflicted on the African-American community by the U.S. government exemplifies the extent to which paranoia —racial paranoia, in particular — continues to play a powerful role in our politics.

The civil-rights movement succeeded in outlawing legal discrimination and driving explicit racism to the margins of society. But in many respects, racism has simply gone underground. Today it is usually subtle, making it more difficult to identify. Of course, recent studies demonstrate that black people still have a harder time than white people (even with identical credentials) when it comes to buying new homes or cars or landing lucrative jobs. According to some social scientists, those differences aren't just about white prejudice. They are also related to institutional and structural realities like housing patterns and the reliance on market forces in hiring that perpetuate racial differences as a byproduct of seemingly colorblind social policies.

When racism was explicit and legal, there was less need for African-Americans to be paranoid about it. For the most part, what they saw was what they got. Racists could be unabashed about their feelings, and politicians could blatantly vow, like George Wallace, to fight for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."

With the social advances of the 1960s, African-Americans have become increasingly secure in their legal citizenship, but they are less confident about determining when they are being victimized by silent and undeclared racism. Racial paranoia characterizes the post-civil-rights generation of "affirmative-action babies." They are young black people for whom legal segregation is a glimpse at black-and-white images in a PBS documentary. But they also have a sneaking suspicion that somehow the smallest slights and the most trivial of gestures may be a telltale sign of what has been called "two-faced racism" — hidden racial animus dressed up to look politically correct. Such uncertainty gives rise to paranoia, especially if we stubbornly fail to discuss racism's newfangled subtleties.

What do I mean by racial paranoia? It describes the suspicions black people have whenever, say, an idle white salesperson at their local drugstore sees them beckoning with a question but ignores them anyway. Or when that salesperson takes a few seconds longer than needed to sigh himself into an unenthusiastic response. Insignificant, I know — petty, even. More hollow bourgeois angst. But when talking about race and racism, we shouldn't underestimate the potential significance of seemingly inconsequential acts.

Read the Full Essay

***

John L. Jackson Jr. is an associate professor of communication and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His latest book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, was published this spring by Basic Civitas. He blogs as Anthroman