Tag Archives: racism

Dehumanizing People of Color

language in the classroom, media literacy, teaching cultural competencies, Uncategorized, ,

Well Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is at it again. He’s been criticized before, by the Mayor of Phoenix among others, for violating civil rights and for ignoring some 40,000 felony arrest warrants so he can focus on rounding up people with brown skin. “Immigrants” and “Criminals”, Sheriff Joe calls them, but he doesn’t seem to care what their legal status. To quote the Mayor:

American citizens and U.S. veterans who fought for our rights are seeing their own rights violated. Immigrants, who are here legally, with paperwork in hand, are being treated like criminals. Vendors, with valid visas and properly licensed equipment, are being detained.

Last week, Arpaio paraded 220 “immigrants”, all reportedly Mexican, from the Durango Jail to the Tent City, and sent out a Press Release to announce this, and be sure media were present. They were dressed in prison stripes, chained, and marched down the street (traffic was rerouted for them), with an enormous force of armed guards around and above them.

This from a Sheriff who has some 2,700 civil rights violations filed against him from 2004-2007 and who has apparently cost the County some $43 million in legal settlements over the jails during his tenure.

Unfortunately, too many in this country see this sort of public humiliation to be permissible for people of color. It’s really unfortunate that we are teaching youth that it’s okay to treat POC not only differently from white people, but it’s okay to humiliate POC publicly.

Two years ago, Tarleton State University, the second-largest school in the Texas A&M system, discovered that an annual MLK Jr-day party at one of their fraternities was predicated on white students dressing up like racist stereotypes of black people.

Last fall, there was the case of the white teacher who tied up two black girls and made them get under a desk to demonstrate how slave traders treated slaves as they were bringing them to this country.

Last week, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a predominantly black elementary school called off their “Cotton Picking Day” where students were encouraged to come to school dressed as slaves for the day as part of Black History Month.

Of course these events are offensive and of course they are racist, and there are lots of other events like them. And, you’ll note, they are happening in schools. Not Sheriff Arpaio’s event, of course, but all the local kids heard about that and/or saw it on the tv. So are we talking about these events in schools? Are we, as adults, merely ascribing them to ‘extremists’ and assuming that ‘that sort of thing wouldn’t happen here’, or are we looking, with our students, at the cultural forces that make the people who do these things think it’s a good idea?

What do you do when a student in your class uses a term like “that’s so gangster” or “that’s so ghetto”? Do you punish, or do you start a conversation with the class about what those terms actually mean?

One of the difficult aspects of being a teacher is the constant pressure to be a role model. Not just the I-say-please-and-thank-you variety, but the how-do-I-respond-to-hate variety, regardless of how ‘minor’ the infraction. It’s African-American Month, February is, so will we spend it with platitudes about how post-racial, post-civil-rights, post-slavery we are, casting furtive glances at the black student in the corner to see how he responds, or will we engage our students with actual conversation about real events that still take place and how we must respond to all forms of hate and prejudice, even when someone argues they’re ‘just joking’? Every time a teacher does not challenge these comments (or behaviors, like pulling eyes back to mimic Asians), that teacher has just taught the entire class that it’s not that big a deal to put down or humiliate people of color.

So, who are you?

politics of education, teaching cultural competencies, whites navigating racism, , , , , ,

We all develop a sense of who we are, and this process is a juggle of one’s sense of self and our culture’s sense of us. Even  as adults, we are constantly refining this sense of self and even working on several different versions of it. Much like having several different resumes that highlight our skills in different ways, we all have several different hats we wear, whether at work, with our children, or while pursuing a sport or hobby or other avocation. Right now I am a blogger, but I’m also a Dad, I’m straight, I’m white, I’m a researcher, I’m an employee, I’m a partner. And many things beyond that. As I approach 40, I am still struggling with what it means to be any number of these things, but for school aged youth, this struggle is often what their lives are consumed by.

Majka Burhardt has been blogging about a sense of understanding who she is, especially relating to what I understand is a very U.S.-centric question: “what do you do?” How do we articulate who we are in a one-sentence soundbite? And what if ‘what you do’ is not really fully how you understand yourself? Like Majka, I have climbed for all of my adult life, and this is a major way that I understand myself, even if I barely get out these days because of other responsibilities. So “what I do” is not necessarily who I am. This is also going to be true for many people of color, for women, for anyone who struggles against the culture. I’ve always struggled with the common dinner-party question Majka talks about: “what do you do?” and I’ve never come up with a really good alternative, but I’m certainly open to options. I usually ask something like “what do you do with your days” as a way to allow someone to answer outside of their job, but it still implies “what is your job?” to many people.

If we take this sense of self one step back to a more basic sense of human identity, I am male. But that simple fact does not encompass who I am anymore than the fact that I am a climber. I am male, but I have struggled against culturally-force-fed stereotypes of gender my whole life, especially in classrooms. I like to take students’ comments about being one gender or another and start a bigger conversation about what gender means in our culture: “Wow, so do you really think you’ve got to be ‘tough’ like that to be a man? Can’t women be tough too?”, or, perhaps more commonly, “do you really think women are less valuable than men? Why do you say ‘don’t be a girl’ like it’s a bad thing? What are you actually trying to say then?” 7th graders ‘get it’ when they are encouraged to talk about it, because so much of these gender stereotypes are ‘received knowledge’ that they’ve heard but never questioned. Dollface is talking about these gender stereotypes on her blog and asking what we’re doing to reinforce or break these gender stereotypes. For me, I always enjoyed talking about how I like to sew and quilt and cook and parent and yet still climb and get dirty and use tools and fix things: I can be my own definition of man.

One issue with these cultural stereotypes is the idea of homophily, which the Guardian had a piece on last week. Homophily is “The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us.” One of the reasons I always tried, as a teacher, to talk about my own experiences and life (to a reasonable degree) is that I was different than many of my students. I felt that if I talked about this, they would see that the stereotypes (of whatever, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, class, rural/urban, etc. etc. etc.) are just false social constructions. If teachers allow themselves to be vulnerable in this way, students often respond to that with authentic thinking. Other students, especially (in my experience), the LQBTQI students, seem to feel a sense of relief in an adult being open to these conversations and in an adult who is willing to talk about these issues.

So do we surround ourselves with only people like us? Is that a good or bad thing? Don’t we want to have interactions with other viewpoints? To what degree is this line of questions white- or male- or hetero- or able-centric? Can members of any non-dominant group truly surround themselves with only like points of view in a culture so fiercely dominated by straight-white-male-able-culture?

I guess the bottom line to me is that we ought to be having these conversations with youth early on.

Beyond race in the U.S.? Yeah right….

language in the classroom, whites navigating racism,

So many in the punditry will have us believe that we now live in a post-racial America, but this is, of course, bunk. Ask nearly anyone of color (if you can’t see it yourself). There’s still lots of racism in this country.

Of course, the more, um, ‘subtle’ forms of racism (not a very good descriptor, granted) are the ones that many whites refuse to recognize, like being followed in a store, being questioned or pulled over by the police, or simply being scorned in public settings (“how do you know that’s about your skin color?!” some will ask). I’ve heard from many white people things like “I don’t see color”, which is intended to prove that they are not racist, while actually demonstrating that, at the very least, they are not seeing the whole person, and more likely that they are demonstrating racism in one way or another whether they want to think so or not. The things that whites agree are racist are ascribed to the extreme few (like the KKK and the Skinheads) and are therefore dismissed as being minor experiences for the greater public.

We believe we are, personally anyway, not racist anymore. We live in a post-civil rights country now, right?

Wrong.

Even if whites don’t ask anyone of color what their experience is (and let’s not forget that the vast majority of the punditry who are exclaiming this post-racial world are white people trying to define the experiences of people of color), we now have actual research to show for it.

Last week’s issue of Science Magazine has a piece of research that shows that white people think they’ll be really upset at an overt act of racism, but, when actually presented with it, they’re just not that upset and may not do or say anything about it. As CNN notes, these are some of the people involved in Project Implicit, based at Harvard, which has lots of tests people can take to see what their underlying prejudices are. (A warning from them is that if you are not prepared for learning what your underlying prejudices are, be wary of taking any of their tests.)

The upshot of all this is that, duh, racism is still rife throughout our culture. But if we talk about it and think about what it looks like and how it can manifest, we will be better prepared for those situations when we do encounter them. A white person who hears a racial slur has the privilege of ignoring it and walking away, and so it is incumbent on us to prepare ourselves for how we will respond when that happens (because it will happen).

These are conversations we need to have in school, in class, in groups of young people, starting at very young ages. Considering how much race- and ethnicity-based bullying there is in schools, we must help give youth the tools to use in those situations. If we do not, we will simply raise yet another generation of white people who will look the other way. It is the responsibility of white people to work to end racism.

h/t to Macon D over at Stuff White People Do on the CNN article.

Disney influences

teaching cultural competencies, , ,

An excellent post by Stuff White People Do about the influence Disney has on children’s perspectives. It’s not only scary to have that much ingrained racism, sexism and other oppressive perspectives being foisted on children, but it’s also deeply troubling that so many parents are so uncritical of Disney’s products and movies without any real thought to what they are teaching their children.

So how do the rest of us navigate school when our children will be influenced by their children?

BTW, the Media Education Foundation, the creators of the first clip on the SWPD post, is fantastic, and I recommend their films. They tend to be expensive, but find them at the local library and check ’em out….