Greater Boston Today with George Knight: Prof. Copeland Discusses Racism in Light of Buffalo Terrorist Attack
Racial justice expert Prof. Phillipe Copeland discusses the racist motives of the white terrorist who murdered 10 and injured 3 in Buffalo, New York in a recent interview on Greater Boston Today with George Knight. The interview covered the history of racism in the United States, including the nature of racism as a problem, contemporary racist manifestations, and what people can do about racism.
Excerpt from an interview on “Greater Boston Today with George Knight,” originally aired on May 29, 2022:
I think of the analogy of a fish in the water. Sometimes we think about racism as the fish. ‘There’s something wrong with the fish.’ Another way to think about it is that there’s something wrong with the conditions in which the fish is living. When you live under toxic conditions, you get toxic behaviors. That’s what happens to human beings. This isn’t just racism, we see this in many aspects of life. When you subject human beings to toxic conditions, you get toxic behavior, toxic attitudes, you get all kinds of inequities, you get violence. It isn’t really a surprise that we see these kinds of things happening in society because we all continue to live under these conditions. Racism is the water, it’s not the fish. If we want to do something about this problem, we have to fix the water.
One of the things that happens with racism is that you have to convince people that racism is rational. That it makes sense to be racist. There are people who call themselves ‘race realists’ right now who try to claim, ‘Look, it’s just science. Some people are inferior and some people are superior. We’re not being bigots, we’re being realistic.’ There was a time when so-called scientific racism had been discredited, but there’s been a resurgence of it in the past few years. A person can go to academic intellectual settings and listen to people explain that it’s a fact that black people are inferior with complete confidence and sincerity. In the manifesto of the Buffalo massacre terrorist, there was citation of a lot of these ideas. ‘Hey, these are just the facts. These people are not like us.’ So trying to integrate them into society, allowing them to have power, allowing them to live next to you, allowing them to marry your daughter, that this is not only irrational, but suicidal. That it puts so-called western civilization at risk. That these inferior people at best need to be controlled and managed, and at worst need to be exterminated.
One of the ways you spread racist ideas is through storytelling, such as racial stereotypes. Most of us can recite those stereotypes from memory even if we don’t believe them, because we’ve grown up with those stories about ‘those people.’ ‘Those people’ do this, ‘those people’ do that. Many of us were told these stories by people we love, by people that we respect. We learn them from popular culture, by the television shows we watch, by the children’s books we read. We’ve been swimming in that water for quite awhile.”