This is the question that's going around on a bunch of memes at the moment, and when a friend posted it on Facebook yesterday, I had a bit of a brainstorm as to why it is. It involves pop culture and cognitive dissonance, and the endless talent for self-justification that people have for their own bullshit.
Pop culture comes into it because Hollywood has taught us what racists look like. They're either old fat Southern men, who drawl epithets casually, or they're Germans. Racism in the movies is easy to spot because people are using the N-word and burning crosses and such. It becomes an easy - even lazy - way of showing how bad the villain is. After all, when Ron Perlman's character in Blade 2 asks Wesley Snipes if he can blush, that's like a reverse Save the Cat moment, where we learn all we need to about that character.
This isn't to take away from the fact that racism really is evil, of course. When you call someone a racial slur, for example, you're taking away all of the things that make them a unique individual, basically saying it doesn't matter what you've accomplished in life, you're just a... whatever. But this gets elided in pop culture, because pop culture can't convey nuance.
And that leads to the cognitive dissonance. We're so used to seeing racism depicted in a certain way on TV and in movies, we ignore when our words or behavior are racist, because we aren't Germans or policemen from the Deep South (most of us aren't, at any rate). We've built up this righteous anger on the behalf of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, but it makes us smug and blinds us to the ways we're casually or even overtly racist in real life.
The most spectacular way that this manifests, by the way, is in the far-right marchers in the UK who have responded to the threat of vandalism to statues of Winston Churchill by... giving Nazi salutes? F Scott Fitzgerald would have called this a sign of a first-rate mind: being able to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still being able to function.
That depiction of racism as being done exclusively by certain people is also class warfare, by the way (you know, just for good measure). We may say or do racist things, but we don't think of ourselves as racist because we feel superior to so-called "poor white trash". This serves to perpetuate splits between poor whites and poor minorities, and allows more well-off whites to justify why they don't mix with "those people".
Of course, the description above only refers to people who aren't "openly" racist. They might tell racist jokes at the pub or something, but aren't actively campaigning for race wars or sequestering African-Americans and Jews in special "homelands" in the South. It doesn't apply to those who actually do say out loud the stuff that for most people is only ingrained racism - and yet, the so-called alt-right benefits from the stereotypes I listed above. All these young, well-groomed men who like to flash Nazi salutes at alt-right karaoke nights know that we won't take their racism seriously precisely because they aren't sweaty old fat men with Southern drawls. This is, in fact, just how the New York Times has gotten hoodwinked into running a bunch of normalizing profiles of "the well-dressed racist next door".
So next time you wonder why people are counter-protesting against Black Lives Matter, remember that they (and we in general) are only playing out this narrative that racism only comes from certain people. And as long as we aren't "those people", we're in the clear... right...?
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