BY TARU TAYLOR

In print | Published November 6, 2003

I am a racist. Not a “reverse racist.” Nor do I engage in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “anti-racist racism.”

If anything, I engage in pro-racist racism. I’m a straight-up racist, no chaser. The British would say I’m a racialist.

Racism has a negative connotation. Indeed, Merriam-Webster and the venerable Oxford English Dictionary give it negative denotations. But they are wrong to do so, for racism is neither negative nor positive. It is neutral.

I am Negro. President Bush is Caucasian. These statements are neither positive nor negative, neither good nor bad. That I’m black and President Bush is white are statements of fact; no more, no less. Still, they are racist statements.

When I acknowledge my or anybody else’s race, I’m literally being racist, for “racism” is classifying people according to race. This isn’t some semantic game I’m playing for kicks. The notion that racism is negative and evil is problematic, because people thereby avoid discussions of race. The worst thing to be called, that which is most politically incorrect, is “racist.” Even more than politics and religion, people avoid the topic of race. How absurd that America’s most pressing problem, its subject most in need of dialogue, is taboo.

Racism permeates our historical narrative much like the Force permeates George Lucas’s science-fiction narrative. Like the Force, racism is neutral. Like the Force, racism has its heroes and villains. Like the Force, racism has its positive and negative. As the light side of the Force, Luke Skywalker is positive. As the dark side, Darth Vader is negative. Racism has similar poles, of black equity on the one axis, white supremacy on the other. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” epitomizes the former, Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” the latter. As someone once joked, it’s too bad Hitler gave racism a bad name. Alex Haley’s “Roots” and Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” share the same dialectic, as do Rev. Dr. King and J. Edgar Hoover, architect of the FBI, who swore to prevent the rise of a “Black Messiah.” Interestingly, his first assignment was Marcus Garvey.

America is a Venn diagram of overlapping races. Afrocentrism and Black studies are one circle. Eurocentrism and White studies are the other circle. When the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, named the black man “Original Man,” he put him back in the center of Afrocentrism. But W.E.B. DuBois’s civil rights movement thrust him along the margins of Eurocentrism as “Marginal Man.” The black separatist, like the white separatist (who should not necessarily be confused with the white segregationist), lives in his own circle. When he interacts with whites, he meets them halfway — in the space where the Venn circles overlap. As a rule, Americans are separatist, yet the black integrationist leaves his own circle, the brotherman for the otherman. He assimilates into whiteness.

Whites prefer blacks who play the role of Marginal Man, a token role which confuses equality and sameness. Marginal Man identifies with the White Man. Thus, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, DuBois’s Talented Tenth are most sincere. Tyranny enjoys flattery, so the white supremacist prefers DuBois to Garvey, King to Malcolm X.

But the white who would overcome white supremacy has to “decenter.” Jean Piaget’s term signifies imaginatively seeing the world from a foreign perspective, one that fundamentally challenges one’s own ethnocentrism. For starters, that means reading, and rereading, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Roots.” That means understanding how and why Garvey’s “Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World” is to black Pan-Africa what Jefferson’s “Declaration of (the Propertied White Man’s) Independence” is to white America.

As for the black, he should be himself, not an imitation white. But to be himself, he has to “recenter.” This term signifies overcoming white supremacy, that which systematically tyrannizes him into a marginal existence and an inferiority complex, so as to see the world from his own perspective. To recenter is to be central, not peripheral; Original Man, not Marginal Man. For what he should read, and reread, and understand, as points of departure for such a recentering, see the above paragraph. Decentering and recentering bring about positive racism, which is circumspect ethnocentrism. Negative racism is about myopic ethnocentrism, the proper term for which is chauvinism.

Taru Taylor is a senior. You can contact him at ttaylor1@swarthmore.edu.

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