Refusal to acknowledge racism is "the new racism," a renowned anthropologist who directed the scientific research of New York City's African Burial Ground told a packed room at the Science Museum of Virginia, which recently unveiled an exhibit on race.
Michael L. Blakey, a professor at the College of William and Mary, spoke at the museum as part of a series of community conversations about race in Richmond associated with the exhibit.
"It has become illegitimate to talk about racism," Blakey said.
Blakey said during initial discussions about putting together the exhibit, "Race: Are We So Different?," some of those involved suggested the word "racism" could not appear in the exhibit materials.
He said he questioned how a discussion on race and racism could happen if nowhere in the exhibit does the term racism appear, but he understands the sentiment. "People run from the word," he said.
The exhibit, unveiled last weekend, challenges the concept of race and explores it from biological, cultural and historical points of view. The exhibit debunks the concept of a scientific component to race. It does, in fact, include the word racism.
Blakey traced the roots of the concept of race back to slavery. He said enslaved people were deemed to be "something less than fully human."
Race, he said, "became a means of justifying the unjustifiable," he said.
Later, it was a way to justify Jim Crow laws, immigration restrictions, the eugenics movement and other forms of white privilege.
Blakey said though blacks achieved freedom from slavery, the basis for equality was not there. The effects are still being felt today, in everything from income disparity to blacks' abilities to get good jobs.
"White privilege persists," Blakey said. "How does one justify white privilege in an officially anti-racist society?"
He said there is no scientific difference between people of different races.
"We know people do look different from one another, but we will find that this variation is really very small, very superficial," he said.
Ram Bhagat, a teacher at Richmond's Open High School who attended the talk with his young daughter, said he liked how Blakey reframed "where we are." He said it's important to have discussions on the heart of the legacy of racism.
"We can't keep dancing around it," Bhagat said. "It doesn't really get to the core issues."
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