The Sixth Sense: I See Racist People

If you’ve seen The Sixth Sense, you know Bruce Willis was a dead man who spent nearly the entire movie thinking he was alive while trying to help a kid who claimed to see dead people. Bruce Willis was blind to the other dead people including himself insofar as he couldn’t tell that he was dead.

Imagine if the kid in The Sixth Sense tried telling Bruce Willis’s character straight up that he was really dead the whole time. Bruce Willis would have looked at himself and said “Of course I’m not dead! I’m not rotting. I feel alive. If I was dead, I would be a rotting corpse! That’s what dead things look like!”

That’s all I could think about while I was reading an article arguing that Trump is not a racist or white supremacist. The article itself rested on shaky ground, but the kicker came at the end. After giving a few anecdotes of some children of illegal immigrants in California being jerks about the American flag, the author said, “Their illegal parents are not teaching them to respect America – the very country that is giving them so many privileges like DACA and lets them pay less tuition than our own American parents must pay.”

Nothing about that particular statement applied very narrowly to the students in the anecdotes is problematic, but why did the author include it? Presumably, it was so the reader would make a generalization about at least some other illegal immigrants and their children. If that were not the case, then the anecdotes would be pointless. Instead of, “Donald Trump isn’t racist, AND the people he’s supposedly racist for accusing all lend themselves to valid accusations,” the article would be, “Donald Trump isn’t racist and here is a random story about kids who are incidentally children of illegal immigrants being jerks.” The rational reader will say, “So what? Every demographic has jerks.” A reader prone to racial prejudices will read her commentary and say, “Damn right! Dadgum immigrants can’t respect the flag!”

In the process of defending Trump from accusations of racism, the author said something that is, if not racist, something just about as bad. It carries with it an assumption that because some people of a particular genetic heritage acted in a certain way, others of the same genetic heritage will act the same way.

Of course, this would be met with indignation and confusion. “I’m not a racist! I’m not in the KKK! I even volunteer to help immigrant children, I donate to charities that benefit them! etc. etc.”

This sort of response is the same as Bruce Willis’s confusion at realizing he was dead. He was not the grotesque zombie-like apparition he would have expected to be as a dead man, but nevertheless he was not alive.

The fact that someone is an otherwise decent human-being who volunteers, donates, and is a generally positive influence does not inoculate them against racial prejudices – and those racial prejudices are like a pernicious virus that lies obscured in a lot more people than we would like to think.

The attitude in addressing it should be one of humility as we uproot it from ourselves, and grace as we help others see it – at least as long as they are the sort of person who would be repulsed by the true nature of the things once they truly understand it.

And that brings me to the last point. I’ve heard a lot of good and decent people say that people are just too thin-skinned and they shouldn’t be offended by relatively subtle racial prejudices. But the reality is that while every individual does need to have thick skin in dealing with a world full of imperfect people, that does not give license to us as imperfect people to ignore or revel in our imperfection.

We are all human. We are all valuable, and we are all flawed. Some of us need to see more of the intrinsic value in others and more of the flaws in ourselves.