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97   Personal Tolerance Futile
     Amid Institutional Racism
     The Washington Post  Saturday, May 11, 1968


     Racism, says Webster's means a "belief in the inherent 
superiority of a particular race and its right to domination 
over others."

     Few people in polite or liberal society will accept the epithet
"racist."  President Johnson and his associates, who have made 
unprecedented contributions to social reform, have rejected the Kerner 
Commission's condemnation of "white racism" as an oversimplified slogan.
The report said:

     "Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a 
destructive environment  totally unknown to most white Americans.  White
institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white
society condones it...White racism is essentially responsible..."

     Are my friends racists? No one I could call friend supports any
doctrine of inherent superiority of one skin color over another.  We
pride ourselves on the objectivity with which we deal with others as
individuals according to their own abilities, rather than any of the
stereotypes of race or color.  We are gratified at what appears to be
the Nation's growing sophistication; most of our fellow citizens would
deplore any overt discrimination based on color.

     One real merit of teaching as a profession is the chance to learn
from one's students.  For help in understanding the Kerner report, I 
must give credit to a thoughtful paper by a group of Stanford 
undergraduates, "A Primer on Institutional Racism in American Society,"
issued by the Mid-Peninsula Christian Ministry.  

     The statistics of racial injustice are too sordid for us to want
to see them again, and I will not repeat them in gory detail now. I
know little about black suffering, less about its attendant humiliation
and personal degradation, and this by reading of statistics in
human terms, not by any real personal experience.  Like most whites,
I am sorry.  I believe it is wrong.  I do not personally discriminate
as far as I am aware. Am I culpable.

     Being willing to look aside makes me have to answer "yes."  But
this is no remarkable human failing.  Being able to is the real sin;
not a personal one, but an institutional one, derived from a system
that whispers sporadic numbers about Negro mortality rates from disease
and shouts banner headlines about riots and individual acts of 
violence.

     The report of the 1967 President's Crime Commission indicates
that well under 1000 (10 per cent) of the U.S. homicides in one year
were assaults upon whites by Negroes, and of course only a handful of
these were in racial riots.  On the other hand, 60,000 Negroes died of
disease in 1985 who statistically would have lived had they been white.

     Who killed them?  Which problem should be the focus of the public's
and Congress's attention?  Which is today?

     The primer restates what we all know, that we live in a system of
institutions that rigidify and perpetuate historic wrongs while keeping
he coloration of individual tolerance.  What consolation is it to
the Negro that only a minority of whites cast aspersions on his children
while the rest  point to their own intellectual progress in racial
understanding;  while the Negro is still systematically excluded
from good housing, good education, good jobs; while the riots are 
exploited as excuses to turn our back on human needs?

     We are cautioned not to "reward" rioters with reforms in response
to violence.  What could possibly be more racistic than to incriminate
20 million people for the crimes of a few tens of thousands and to
deny them what is justice, not charity.  Or do we believe that one
race does have the right to that domination of another which is the
fact of American life today?

     The responsibility for institutional racism is too heavy for any
one individual to bear.  There are no easy ways to change it.  But 
the first step is honest awareness.  As long as we tolerate white
dominion, let us admit that we are white racists whatever the color of
our skin, the profession of our tolerance or the Gemuetlichkeit of our
commiseration.

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