Racism is Often the Lowest Common Denominator
Sometimes when you eliminate everything else, it's the only thing left.
If anything good has come out of the Trump era, it is the confirmation that what Black people have said about systemic racism for decades was pretty much on the nose.
When I write about the subtleties of anti-Black racism in everyday life, more than one of my former readers describes it as “selling race,” as though profit is my only motivation. Ironically, my white naysayers will probably be surprised to learn that, for me, writing about how this phenomenon touches me is a whole lot cheaper than therapy.
Most white people don’t understand the hoops we Black folks jump through to navigate a world where whiteness is the default. Most will never grasp the number of mental tricks we use to navigate life, things non-Black people would never suspect. They will never know the feeling of being the only person who looks like them in a room or the lift that comes with something as simple as seeing an emoji of the same color.
I’ve written about how my parents tried to protect my brothers and me from racism when I was a kid. They also equipped us with the tools to deal with the micro-aggressions they knew we’d deal with in adulthood.
Since our family is biracial, my wife and I spend a good deal of time discussing these issues with our kids. Aside from having “the talk” regarding police, we also talk about recognizing when a negative experience is not because of racism. My wife and I taught them a system of racism detection we’ve used for years to accomplish this. We refer to the practice as “the lowest common denominator.”
In math, the lowest common denominator is the lowest common multiple of the denominators of a set of fractions. It’s a way to simplify adding and subtracting fractions. For us, the term has a different meaning. When we have an experience we suspect is racism in action, we consider all the possibilities, reducing the event to the most logical explanation, that is to say, the lowest common denominator.