National racial discourse functions as cathartic theater that leaves habits intact

Evidence

How can we not see racial habits in action? It’s largely because we don’t have an effective method of dealing with race that engages our racial habits. Because racial habits are hidden in plain sight, most of us deal openly with race only when some ugliness bubbles up. A cop kills a twelve-year-old kid or a madman kills nine black people in a church. Protests erupt in a city because of it. We mistakenly think that the resolution of our race problems occurs in these moments, but it doesn’t, largely because the way we deal with them as a society is more theater than substance. Like a classic tragedy, this theater serves a function, releasing pent-up energies caused by whatever racial incident sparked the conversation in the first place. Some politician or television personality announces that we need to have a serious conversation about race. They say it will be difficult. On television, the usual pundits, especially the black ones, show up to tell us what is really going on. And then they will go away. Nothing fundamentally changes. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 177

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• SEED: The ‘racial theater’ metaphor — national conversations about race as Aristotelian catharsis — is a strong essay angle on why every ‘serious conversation about race’ produces nothing.
• XREF: Echoes the tragedy/catharsis framework Glaude inherits from classical political thought; connects to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s critique of ‘good white soul-searching.‘

Related

• National race dialogue after incidents is theatrical catharsis, not real change (similarity 0.89)
• Racial theater substitutes performance for change while habits stay intact (similarity 0.82)
• Racial habits conceal racial inequality in plain sight until a spectacle forces reckoning (similarity 0.79)