Along with many others, I´ve been emotionally struck by the tragic death of George Floyd. A resounding chorus of protests against the killings of Floyd and other Black people by police recently has rightly associated those killings with deeply entrenched racism that continues to infect our country. As the cries and chants on the streets punctuated the pain and frustration that racism still yields, again another Black man, Rayshard Brooks, fell to the police in Atlanta.
When I was in the fifth grade, my teacher, calling out my indigenous heritage, glared at me while describing the first peoples of the country as “savages” that deserved to be conquered. Throughout my life, including recently, I’ve endured similar, although not always as blatantly racist, indignities because of characteristics owing to my indigenous and Chicano identity. With my experiences, I remain wary of immigration officers, who might single me out and be especially probing about my citizenship, or of the police in my own almost all-white neighborhood, who might be curious about the reasons for my being there.
In saying this, I am keenly aware of my position of privilege and power as the dean of a law school, and of not being nearly as vulnerable to racism’s indignities and tragedies as other Black or Brown people because of that. But I am also aware of how far racism reaches.
Racism is rooted in a pattern of thinking, and its effects are amplified by indifference or ignorance. Racism seizes upon difference and associates that difference with inferiority or undesirable traits. Looking to the past, this pattern of thinking generated the justifications for the theft of indigenous land and slavery to build the country, overtly discriminatory laws and practices, and more. Over time it gave rise to a national narrative of greatness largely to the exclusion of the experiences, struggles, and contributions of people of color, while projecting a national identity that defines them as others.
Indifference to or ignorance about historical and ongoing acts of racism allow their effects to be normalized in social arrangements and public institutions. The country’s educational and other institutions tend to uncritically embrace and replicate the historically incomplete national narrative, which begins with white pilgrims and carries a theme of white manifest destiny. The indifference and ignorance are entrenched, making dominant actors numb to the country’s actual past; blind to the link between that past and the disadvantages faced by Black and other people of color today; and unable to envision our institutions as truly reflecting a multiracial, multicultural America.
Today, the racism that sees Black people as inferior or flawed – including in the sense of seeing Black men as prone to be dangerous – is ignorant or indifferent to their realities, and can be lethal for them, as we’ve seen. But racism exists beyond police and overt brutality, resulting in Black and other people of color suffering indignities continually and being disproportionately at the lower rungs of social hierarchy and access to opportunity. Indifference and ignorance about racism, especially, are pervasive and can be seen at work daily, maintaining the structures of disadvantage and the otherness of people of color, and inflicting indignities on them by maintaining denigrating offensive patterns of social interaction and public symbols.
I was glad to read that Denver’s Stapleton neighborhood will change its name, a clear and overdue signal of distancing from the namesake’s Klan-laden racism. All symbols whose pedigree is bound to white supremacy should be similarly discarded. Educational institutions have a special role to not only eschew such symbols but to correct the national narrative to one of inclusion, an essential step to uproot racism.
The moment we are living calls our leaders, and all of us, to a heightened awareness of racism’s pervasiveness, and to a renewed commitment to the country’s founding promise of justice and equality, literally, for all.
S. James Anaya is dean of the University of Colorado Law School. He has taught and written extensively on international human rights and issues concerning indigenous peoples. From 2008 until 2014 he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
