A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

The author explains that popular understandings of racism cast it as “violent” and “aggressively personalized” (84)—easily detectable and blatant acts committed by individuals against other individuals. In fact, racism is systemic and perpetrated by society at large in overt and covert ways. This chapter focuses on “polite racism,” behaviors that surreptitiously uphold white supremacy. The previous examples—like New York’s zoning and articulating a “busing crisis” instead of a crisis surrounding desegregation—are examples of polite racism.

Polite racism also comes from bystanders who observe racial injustice but do not intervene: “While many White Americans supported segregation with their actions, others supported it through their inaction—their unwillingness to see how their home, neighborhood, school, or desire for police protection derived from disparity” (85). Indifference can be as effective as hate in perpetuating racism; the author contends that this fact goes largely unacknowledged because it makes many people uncomfortable to think about playing a crucial role in a destructive system through their complacency (86).

The author revisits the examples from the previous two chapters to illustrate how “colorblind” discourse emerged in the North as a “cloak” under which white Northerners could