21 Trial Lawyer • Spring 2024 By Emery Wang OTLA Guardian Racism: the belief, held chiefly by racists, that members of one race are somehow naturally or culturally superior to those of another race. Racial bias: the primarily unconscious thoughts, preconceptions, or experiences that cause people to think and act in prejudiced ways.1 There is a fine line between racism and racial bias, if indeed there is one at all. In this article the terms will be used interchangeably. I believe racism and racial bias are endemic to the human condition. As humans we are most comfortable with and prefer those in our own group to those outside of it. For some it manifests as a mild bias. Others become obsessed and draw unwarranted conclusions from this difference. We have seen this play out in grotesque and tragic ways throughout history. Most people lie somewhere in between these extremes. Therefore, accusing each other of racism is like throwing rocks inside the glass house we all occupy. Perhaps that is why discussions about race often come crashing down. Instead of rock throwing, I propose an alternative. We should simply admit our racism so we can get on with addressing the problem, instead of fighting about whether there is a problem, and whose it is. But first, some anecdotes from my limited experience with racism. Minority privilege I worked as a graphic artist in the marketing section of the environmental department of the City of Austin, Texas, in the 1990s. One of my projects was to create diversity training posters and literature to disseminate to municipal employees. I remember attending my first diversity training class around that time. Although I don’t recall any outright bashing of white people, the strong implication I felt from the instructors was that the white participants in the room needed this “racial sensitivity” training, while we minorities did not. After a while I began thinking, “If I were white, I’d be kind of pissed.” It seemed as if the instructors believed that minorities, unlike white people, were above the fray. Somehow, we had managed to exist without Emery Wang the misplaced racial loyalties that tainted our white brethren. Unlike them, we didn’t get sucked into believing the racial stereotypes that we saw in the media. Unlike them, we were happy to accept racial norms different from our own. In short, we were deemed free of the racial biases that plagued everyone except us. My life experiences, however, did not match these presumptions. My sister and I both had interracial first marriages. Hers was to a black man from the Congo Republic named DeGomez, and mine was to a Hispanic woman from Texas named Olivia. The reaction to our spouses from our families was not all, shall I say, above the fray. Neither were all the reactions we received from other non-white people. For example, when my sister and DeGomez dated in China in the 1990s, they were sometimes refused service and spat at by the local Chinese. When they moved to America, an African-American man in Minneapolis wanted to know why DeGomez was “hanging with Snow White.” For me, various incidents with Olivia stick in my mind. Once we were at the Tejano Ranch, a Hispanic country & western bar in Austin. There I learned that someone at the bar wanted to kick my ass for being with a Mexican woman. However, my friend Gilberto intercepted him and somehow convinced the man that I possessed two black belts in karate Accept your racism so we can do something about it See Racism p 22
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