is a Professor of Sociology at . is a Professor of Sociology at the .
Racism isn’t new and will not go away. What is new is the interest in its perpetrators through both mainstream and social media. Especially white racists. What explains the need to do this? And why do incidents go viral so quickly?
Take for instance the case of , a white teenager from Kentucky whose picture and video many will have now seen. In a video, Sandmann is standing across from Native American demonstrator, Nathan Phillips, who is holding a rawhide drum. Sandmann is smiling or smirking at Phillips. From the videos, .
What we do know is that Sandmann has been . Sandmann was wearing a Make America Great Again (MAGA) cap.
Maybe, as everyone seems loathe to do, instead of asking whether Sandmann is a racist or not, we might ask another question: Why is there so much interest in this story?
Why are so many people interested in pointing out and shaming individual white racists? There have been dozens of these events highlighted on social and mainstream media this year. Here are a few of the incidents that went viral and sparked outrage: a video of , another of a and .
Why are people less interested in calling out the .
Easy targets
We think the reason lies in the fact that by pointing out other individual racists, people can feel good about themselves without actually doing very much. In this way, individuals do not need to question how they must change their lives to create the more just society they say they want.
White people can feel good about themselves because, unlike what is claimed about Sandmann, they probably aren’t overtly racist.
These days most people are not overtly or publicly racist. And being labelled a racist can lead to social stigma. The individual (who may or may not be white) racist and their story, however, provides easy answers and easy targets.
and are not seen as the problem. It also allows people to ignore broader trends, such as the recent . Instead the focus is often on the spectacle of the incident and the problem is pinned on just one individual or a group of individuals.
In the Sandmann case, many see the problem as the individual racist, not .
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Ignored in the process of labelling people racists and shaming them is that the shaming fails to condemn actions. Instead, it focuses on a single person. Condemning people gives , grow or learn from their mistakes. Humility is needed on all sides.
The move to innocence
Pointing out and condemning individuals for their racism is popular because it exemplifies what scholars Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang would call a “.” Moves to innocence are the rhetorical moves that people use to distance themselves from genocide and colonization.
Those who have privilege and power can just tell themselves that they are one of the “good ones” because they aren’t racist like the people in the videos.
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In pointing out others as racist, people don’t then have to ask themselves difficult questions about their own privilege or do the work of fostering social humility. Those of the dominant society don’t have to think about the ways that they benefit from slavery, colonialism and land theft.
They don’t have to think about pipelines and stolen land. They don’t have to think. They can just point.
If we want to move forward, we need to stop taking an aggressive punitive approach to individual racism. This only divides the right and the left. No side is “innocent” when it comes to discrimination or colonization.
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