Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism

One Fourth of July, so-called data storms that transmit information about racism directly into the minds of white people in the United States start happening. The data storms included data about economic inequality and other impacts of racial inequality. These storms also included the psychological reality of what it feels like to be oppressed by racism and lectures from important figures like Frederick Douglass. White people find this mental reality so intolerable they use massive strikes to force the federal and state governments to pass reforms, and the storms begin to lighten almost immediately. The government discovers three African American scientists are responsible, but they escape to outer space. The movement for reform has already gathered too much momentum to be stopped, however.

In dialogue, Geneva asks the law professor if he thinks forcing white people to understand the reality of racism as in the story will end racial oppression. He argues that it will not because lack of education about racism is not the problem. White people already know that they benefit from racism. In fact, having an African American outgroup is what binds white people with seemingly opposing political interests together. The professor quotes Toni Morrison’s account of how a peer, the child of immigrants, did not fully become American until he learned to label her with a racial slur.