Popular Press
America’s Most Consequential Racial Divide
Anthropology News
(2017)
Abstract
In the 2016 vice-presidential debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, moderator Elaine Quijano brought up the “issue of law enforcement and race relations.” Only a few weeks earlier, Keith Lamont Scott had been killed in North Carolina, becoming yet another African American man to lose his life at the hands of police. The exchange that followed represents one of the most consequential racial divisions in US society: the disparate understandings of what the very concept of racism means. The exchange illustrates how our society’s guiding narratives about race preserve a woefully inadequate and overly narrow understanding of racism—as evidenced by the umbrage taken by Pence to the notion “that there’s implicit bias in everyone in the United States.” That narrow understanding of racism serves to maintain a social system where both white privilege and racial inequities remain largely invisible or at least easily ignored by many white Americans.
Keywords
- race,
- racism,
- white privilege,
- power,
- Black Lives Matter,
- systemic racism,
- meaning of racism,
- Mike Pence,
- implicit bias,
- white ignorance
Disciplines
- Social and Behavioral Sciences,
- Anthropology,
- Linguistic Anthropology,
- Communication,
- Critical and Cultural Studies,
- Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication,
- Linguistics,
- Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics,
- Applied Linguistics,
- Discourse and Text Linguistics,
- Social Psychology,
- Sociology and
- Race and Ethnicity
Publication Date
July 3, 2017
DOI
10.1111/AN.453
Publisher Statement
Copyright 2017 American Anthropological Association
Citation Information
Adam Hodges. "America’s Most Consequential Racial Divide" Anthropology News Vol. 58 Iss. 4 (2017) p. e278 - e281 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/adamhodges/74/