What Is the Human Cost of Racism?
by Carmen Van Kerckhove, originally published at TPMCafe on April 3, 2008
As I follow the discussion we’re having here at TPMCafe, I keep thinking about The Mother Teresa Effect, a concept based on her quote: “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
Jae Ran Kim explains:
In 2004, Carnegie Mellon University conducted an experiment to see if this quote held true in real life. They gave participants five $1 bills to participate in a fictional survey, then presented half of the participants with a fact sheet about starving children in Africa along with an envelope for a donation. The other half of the participants received the same envelope, but instead of a fact sheet, they were given a photo of a young girl named Rokia and a paragraph about how her life would benefit from the participant’s donation.
As you might expect, those with the picture of Rokia gave more than twice as much as those with just the fact sheet.
The researchers tried the experiment again, this time giving one group the fact sheet and the story about Rokia and the other group just the story about Rokia. Again, those with just the story of Rokia donated more than the group with both the story and the facts.
In other words, not only are we more likely to do something to help an individual than an abstract problem, the inclusion of factual evidence actually reduces our ability to empathize and take action.
Am I advocating that we throw all our facts and statistics out the window? No, of course not. What I’m arguing is that there is power in the specificity of the personal narrative and we should make use of it in our anti-racist efforts.
When I think back on how my own views about race have evolved over my lifetime, I realize that some of the most profound shifts in my thinking resulted not from reading theoretical treatises, but from learning about specific individuals’ experiences.
Before I read Jonathan Kozol’s book Amazing Grace: Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, for example, I was a staunch believer in rugged individualism. It was Kozol’s unflinchingly vivid portraits of the day-to-day experiences of black and Latino children in Mott Haven that made me realize just how self-righteous and privileged I was to believe we were all on a level playing field.
We can (and should) talk all day long about employment discrimination, racial disparities in sentencing, redlining, disproportionate healthcare, voter suppression, segregation in public schools, the prison-industrial complex, and more.
But by solely discussing racism in such aggregate and abstract terms, I worry that we will lose sight of the real reason all of this matters. Racism is a problem not merely because it represents some abstract sense of societal injustice. It’s a problem because of the hurt, pain, anger, and suffering it causes to individual human beings.
When I think about discrimination in the workplace, I think about a Pakistani-American man I know whose colleagues at an internet start-up told him they didn’t want to leave him in the office alone in case he blew up the building.
When I think about the impact of racist stereotypes in the media, I think about the black children in Kiri Davis’s short film A Girl Like Me, and how 15 out of 21 of them chose the white doll over the black doll in her recreation of Kenneth B. Clark’s doll test.
When I think about Eurocentrism in our education system, I think of an Afro-Latino man I know whose third-grade teacher told him that Africans lived like monkeys until the white man brought them to America and saved them from their own wretchedness.
If we want to mobilize people to take action against racism, facts and statistics are not enough. We need to put a human face on these issues.
© 2004-2009 New Demographic.
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Carmen Van Kerckhove, president of the diversity education firm New Demographic, specializes in working with corporations to facilitate relaxed, authentic, and productive conversations about race. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and has visited as a guest lecturer at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia, among many other colleges and universities across the country. If you want to learn how to boost your career by mastering the changing dynamics of race in today’s workplace, get your FREE TIPS now at www.NewDemographic.com
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Elton Said,
June 23, 2009 @ 2:02 am
I agree that we must talk about racism in real, personal terms in addition to social, political, and economic abstract concepts. How do we avoid falling prey to “me too” racism deniers and reverse racism accusers who think racism is nothing more than anecdotes about people being mean to them? They tend to hijack real-life discussions by claiming they, too, have been discriminated against and “everyone experiences racism equally.” Ironically, these discussions, intended to create dialogue on racism in the hopes of combating it, instead become events where racism is actually made more overt.
Talking about how you, your family, and your people have been hurt by racism makes you sound like a whiner and complainer who should just get over it. The majority doesn’t think racism is such a big deal; why should they sympathize with you? Isn’t the very notion of sympathy, especially when coupled with the intellectual side of anti-racism concerned with abstract social concepts, anti-macho? This is especially difficult for Asian males because we are emasculated as well as seen as a model minority so we tend to be slammed as whiners when we talk about our personal experiences as victims of racism, further contributing to our own stereotypes.
Goodness in the blogosphere… | What My World's Like Said,
June 25, 2009 @ 1:06 pm
[...] What is the human cost of racism? [...]
Marcy Webb Said,
June 26, 2009 @ 8:08 am
You’re spot-on, Carmen. One can talk the issue to death, and never move beyond talk to substantive action. You need to come to my place of employ. No joke.
Liz Butler Said,
July 3, 2009 @ 9:57 am
One problem with using ‘children in Africa’ as an experimental abstract is the fact that there are many charities concerning them, and, in fact, ‘the starving children in Africa’ have been talked about for long enough that most of us can remember the phrase being used to cajole us into eating all our vegetables.
This does not make them any less deserving, but it does make them more abstract, and people will tend to either think of their plight as a problem that they can do nothing about – their donation will make no difference, or be stolen by crooked aid distributors – or they will think that since everyone knows about the children in Africa, there’s plenty of people to help them.
There might have been different results with a different charity group. There is, sadly, no shortage.