In a piece that begins with a reflection on the statements of the Manhattan deli employee who accused actor Forest Whitaker of shoplifting, Ta-Nehesi Coates writes in a piece for the New York Times that racism doesn't just come from those who are "uniquely villainous and morally deformed."
Calling out its perpetuation by people who would call themselves "good," he says he's had about all the "good" people he can take. It's worth a read. Here's an excerpt:
Since the Whitaker affair, I've read and listened to interviews with the owner of the establishment. He is apologetic to a fault and is sincerely mortified. He says that it was a "sincere mistake" made by a "decent man" who was "just doing his job." I believe him. And yet for weeks now I have walked up Broadway, glancing through its windows with a mood somewhere between Marvin Gaye's "Distant Lover" and Al Green's "For the Good Times."
In modern America we believe racism to be the property of the uniquely villainous and morally deformed, the ideology of trolls, gorgons and orcs. We believe this even when we are actually being racist. In 1957, neighbors in Levittown, Pa., uniting under the flag of segregation, wrote: "As moral, religious and law-abiding citizens, we feel that we are unprejudiced and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community a closed community."
A half-century later little had changed. The comedian Michael Richards (Kramer on "Seinfeld") once yelled at a black heckler from the stage: "He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger!" Confronted about this, Richards apologized and then said, "I'm not a racist," and called the claim "insane."
Read more at the New York Times.