The song makes the point that its better to admit to our racist faults than to try and hide them. Acknowledgement is the first step to getting past some of our problems. It also demonstrates how deeply entrenched certain types of racial thought our embedded in our ways of thinking. Even when we try our best to not be racist, we often fail.
An assumption that a lot of people, including myself, have had for a long time is that racism is a problem we can solve. Racism is taught to children by their parents. If we can just break that, then we would cure racism. Don't teach people to be racists, and racism will go away.
This logic is similar to the reality of how we wiped out smallpox. Vaccines prevent people from becoming sick with smallpox, and prevents it from spreading from person to person. With an aggressive vaccination program, smallpox was driven to extinction.
This approach doesn't work against every disease. The flu is a viral infection, similar to smallpox. The flu, however, is not so easily eradicated. The flu comes in hundreds of variations, and is constantly evolving new ways of infecting and attacking people. Almost everyone has had several types of flu. Most people recover quickly, but the flu's sheer ubiquity makes it a major killer even today, particularly in the young, the old, and the otherwise infirm.
Racism seems to share a lot more in common with the flu than with smallpox. There are hundreds of different flavors of racism. That's one of the points in the Avenue Q song. Racism isn't usually terribly harmful. It is the moral equivalent of having the flu. You are definitely unwell, but it isn't serious. Just like the flu though, when racism finds vulnerable people, it can make terrible things happen.
Racism also has a way of coming back time and again. We eliminated slavery, but Jim Crow laws and exploitative sharecropping arrangements kept black people in effective slavery. We desegregate schools, yet somehow schools remain heavily segregated today, despite the laws saying schools cannot be officially segregated. The law prevents anyone from being officially disenfranchised based on race, yet minority heavy neighborhoods always have the longest lines on Election Day.
It may not even be true that racism is something that has to be taught. A lot of work in psychology has shown that people are powerfully imprinted by the appearance of their immediate family as infants. People throughout their life have a tendency to associate with people who look like their parents.
On a broader note, we judge each other on physical appearance in all sorts of ways. These judgments are sometimes learned culturally, but other times seem innate. For instance, all people find symmetrical faces more attractive than asymmetrical faces. Is it any surprise that racial stereotypes are formed easily, and are difficult to dispel?
If racism is more like the flu, then our goal should not be to cure it, but instead to manage it. We do not attempt to vaccinate every single person every flu season. Instead, we make a judgement as to which strains are the most dangerous that year, and then make an effort to vaccinate those who are most vulnerable, or are liable to transmit to the vulnerable, such as health service workers. We also do all this with the full knowledge we will do it all again next year, and the year after that, potentially forever.
A management approach to racism would force us to reconsider some of our policy. For instance, affirmative action programs tend to operate on the assumption that they are a temporary system designed to right a historic wrong. A management approach requires us to seriously consider the idea that affirmative action needs to be a long lasting program. We might not be able to assume that inequality will eventually end. We also need to ask ourselves if we are seriously prepared as a society to accept reverse discrimination as a necessary tool in the constant fight against racism.
It might also mean we should seriously consider deliberate, systematic desegregation. We cannot assume schools will naturally desegregate themselves if we let people choose where to go. White parents don't want their kids in school with black kids, and often black parents share the sentiment. Deliberate, forced desegregation might be the only way to combat racism in our children. This solution tramples the rights of parents in many ways. Is it worth it? I think it might be.
Some people might want to simply give up, and say we should just all live off in our own parts of the world, among people who look like us. I don't think this is a good solution. Racism is just as bad in international politics as it is in domestic affairs. Look at America's far greater willingness to bomb non-white people than white people. Consider also how European colonialism has made all the whitest countries very wealthy, while seriously wrecking all the less white countries. And look at America's history of slavery, which began as a complete disregard for the people of a different skin color who lived somewhere far away.
Living with people of another race has the potential to make us all better people. Racism is an evil thing, and we become stronger in overcoming it. Diversity makes us better than we were before. Ignoring the bad part of our nature is not a reasonable solution. Better, I think, is to acknowledge the bad parts within us, then work as a society to fight them. We have made real progress on issues of race. Things are still bad, but not as bad as they once were. We might all be a little bit racist, but maybe we can be little less racist next year.
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