Race Lesson 5: What Are We Racing For? Institutional and Individual Explicit Racism (Kendi's Stamped From the Beginning)

1.  Please brainstorm an answer to this question:

We have seen that race is a social construction, but why does that matter? In other words, why would Thind care enough to take a case to the Supreme Court?

Click here for the Google form for this lesson. 

As we saw in previous lessons, Omi and Winant documented how racial classification in each country is

based on that country's social, cultural, and political history.  At first this might seem like simply a classification system that is subjective to each country and though it is unscientific it is not necessarily harmful.  However, Ibram Kendi, a social historian published a detailed and thorough work documenting that race was used subjectively from the beginning to justify unequal power from the beginning of Europeans setting foot in North America.  

Ibram Kendi's book, Stamped From the Beginning is an extraordinary work that details the history of racism in the U.S. and Kendi explains,

Contrary to popular conceptions, racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era. These intellectuals used their brilliance to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and the nation’s racial disparities in everything from wealth to health.

Even though the biological idea of race is a social construction, it has very real consequences (Thomas Theorum).  Race is often used to justify and promote unequal social arrangements. The inequality might simply be promoting the idea that a person or a group of people do not belong because of their race or the inequality might be very tangible benefits like free land or free money.


Institutions in the U.S. have created opportunities based on race

Not only do people react to each other based on their perceived races, but institutions have been constructed around the idea of race. Yesterday we saw the ways that institutions construct the idea of race, and who is white. Today we look at what opportunities are created based on race, or more simply, why would anyone want so bad to be white, if it's just a faulty label?  In many instances, the advantages to being white is explicitly written into the law or institution.  Here is a list for starters about why being white mattered and still matters explicitly:

• 1705 a statute in Virginia required masters to give white indentured servants fifty acres of land, thirty shillings, ten bushels of corn and a musket.  
• 1705 House of Burgesses passed the Virginia Slave Codes.  Those laws locked in a brutal system of white supremacy by giving slave owners sweeping rights to control and even torture the African people they owned, and making it illegal for black people to employ white people.
• 1785 Land Ordinance Act provided a clearer system for putting formerly Native land into the hands of white settlers.  This was 640 acres at a dollar an acre.  And public education system was set aside in this act but it was designed to serve white children, not enslaved African children or Native Americans.
• 1790 Naturalization Act allows whites to become citizens.  This isn’t about anything except the color of your skin - not merit, not hard work, not meeting the criteria, just being white, the color of your skin.
• 1862 Homestead Act allowed people to claim land for free in the rapidly expanding United States, but excluded the vast majority of black people in the U.S., because you had to be a citizen to participate and enslaved people were not eligible for citizenship until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
• 1934 FHA created loan opportunities that by 1962, would loan over 120 billion dollars that over 98 percent went to white people.
• 1934 Social Security Administration was created to help aging Americans, but two-thirds of all African American workers were blocked from Social Security until the program was expanded in the 1950s.
• 1944 GI Bill of Rights Millions of mostly-white men got higher education through the GI Bill and became engineers, scientists, doctors, teachers. The GI Bill also sent people to trade schools and helped veterans find jobs. But here again, men of color were at a disadvantage because of the military’s racist practices back then in assigning jobs within the military.  So, when people came home and met with a job counselor, a local job counselor, their duties were to line up a civilian job that matched the skills you gained in the military.  White men came home and became builders and welders and mechanics, and men of color came home and became dishwashers and cooks. until 1971, the GI Bill spent ninety-five billion dollars on veterans, helping them buy homes, get vocational training, and start businesses.  
• Redlining practices that prevented Americans identified as Black from moving to neighborhoods that were mostly white and more affluent.  The Smithsonian explains the history here, but a more local example is Deerfield:
• NPR reports about Deerfield reckoning with redlining policies more than 50 years after it happened (2019) 
• This clip from PBS explains the redlining practice in Deerfield.
• This exhibit from the Deerfield Library explains the history.

For a detailed examination of more recent institutional racism, see Race, Law, and Inequality 50 Years after Civil Rights from Frank Munger and Carol Seron in the Journal of Law and Society (2017).

(EXTRA) For more on these ways that whiteness helped whites checkout the Seeing White series from Scene on Radio Podcast, episode 13 or listen below:

 

2.  In the examples above, what is one of the ways that being white resulted in advantages for that ingroup?  How might these advantages affect the Americans considered white in the long term?


What is racism?

The examples above are all ways that people who were seen as white had access to institutional power.  The ways that race has played a role in helping certain groups gain or maintain power is what sociologists call "racism."  Since these examples above are about institutions creating and maintaining power, it is an example of institutional racism.  An important distinction here is that racism is perpetrated against people who do not have power.  This is why people sometimes hear the idea that racism can't be perpetrated against the majority race, whites.  Racism is about maintaining power in favor of the racial group that holds power.  Another important distinction is that racism is an action, so people's actions can be racist, and in a society with as much racism as the United States, all of us are likely to have racist actions (even Ibram Kendi, an African American scholar and racism historian defines his own actions as having been racist), but that does not define us as people.  Instead of labeling individuals as racist, we should identify racist actions and language.  Otherwise, allowing the status quo to continue allows the racist power dynamic to continue.  So, Kendi makes that case in his book, How to Be an Anti-Racist.   So it is through this lens of language and actions that allow and promote racial disparities to exist that we will discuss "racism".  However, racism should not be confused with these other related terms:

• bigotry - intolerance for a group of people
• prejudice/bias - holding an over-generalized attitude that prevents objective consideration of an individual or group of people
• discrimination - the unequal treatment of an individual or group because of their status in a group 
• individual racism - individual ideas or actions that justify and perpetuate a minority individual from gaining or accessing power 

This sociological understanding is a more specific view of racism than what often gets labeled as "racism" in everyday language.

3.  How is the sociological definition of racism related to power? Is this different than how you have used the term racism in the past?


Below is more evidence about how race matters explicitly.   But explicit racism is not only institutional, it can also be individual racism.  Individual racism is when individuals use race to gain or maintain power  against minorities.  As you explore the examples think about how these situations use race to get or maintain power.  Also, think about whether these are individual acts of racism or institutional.

Miss America 2013 was Nina Davluri.  She was born in Syracuse New York and grew up in Oklahoma and Michigan.  Her parents grew up in India where her grandma still lives.  After winning the crown, she came to SHS. But when she won the pageant, there was a flurry of tweets about her race.

Open this post about tweets from the 2013 Miss America pageant.
Is this racism?
Is this prejudice?
Is this discrimination?

For more about racism (esp. with women from Indian descent) and beauty pageants, see this post based on Asha Rangappa.

4.  How do the tweets in the link above try to prevent Nina Davluri from gaining power?



5.  Do you see how racism is related to power?



Racism in College

Fraternities and sororities hold racial-themed parties that display very directly the racialized stereotypes that persist in the United States.   (Here is an older version of the post)  Does this surprise you?  How would you feel/react to a party like this when you go to college?
Here is a post about why dressing up in this way is not okay.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education has an ongoing list of racist incidents.

Here is a post about a 2013 racist incident at a liberal college in a liberal state.

6.  What is one example from any of the three links above that shows how racism is used to make minorities feel uncomfortable at college?  


Racism in Sports

In 2018, Racism at Wrigley in the bleachers.

The stakes of the moment are made clear by a Latino female fan who security rescues from physical and verbal harm. She stands on the bleachers and points at each member of the white security team.
“You and you and you will never know what it’s like,” she says.
A few seconds later, a Latino fan involved in the altercation accuses security of “taking the white people’s side.” The fight appears to be ending when the non-Latino fan bellows the same slurs, putting his hands on either side of his mouth to amplify his voice and ensure he’s heard. It’s only then that he realizes he’s being recorded. (If you feel the need to fully absorb these words, you can watch the videos here.)
It’s a telling moment. He feels safe enough to shout those words next to security personnel. But when he realizes his actions might be seen outside of the stadium, he accosts the person recording the fight. Security also instructs the videographer to “put your phone away” and says “you’re on private property, you don’t have permission to videotape anyone.”  But, security never turns to the man yelling racist epithets and tells him to be quiet.  Then there is an extremely passionate revelation from one of the spectators who points to the security and says, "You and you and you will never understand what it feels like!"

In 2017, Fans at Fenway made news numerous times over their racist taunts of opposing teams'  players.

In 2017, Yu Darvish was taunted and mocked for looking Asian.

In 2012, Joel Ward, a black NHL player scored the winning goal in the NHL playoffs and he became the target of racial slurs.


Racism in the Marketplace
This article from the NY Post details how,  "a college student from Queens got more than he bargained for when he splurged on a $350 designer belt at Barneys — when a clerk had him cuffed apparently thinking the black teen couldn’t afford the pricey purchase, even though he had paid for it, a new lawsuit alleges.
“His only crime was being a young black man,” his attorney, Michael Palillo, told The Post."

This Guardian story explains what it is like to be black and shopping while being racially profiled.

Shopping While Black, a 2020 book by Shaun L. Gabbidon and George E. Higgins,

...lays out the results of nearly two decades of research on racial profiling in retail settings.
Gabbidon and Higgins address the generally neglected racial profiling that occurs in retail settings. Although there is no existing national database on shoplifting or consumer racial profiling (CRP) from which to study the problem, they survey relevant legal cases and available data sources. This problem clearly affects a large number of racial/ethnic minorities, and causes real harm to the victims, such as the emotional trauma attached to being excessively monitored in stores and, in the worst-case scenarios, falsely accused of shoplifting. Their analysis is informed by their own experience: one co-author is a former security executive for a large retailer, and both are Black men who understand firsthand the sting of being profiled because of their color. After providing an overview of the history of CRP and the official and unofficial data sources and criminological literature on this topic, they address public opinion polls, as well as the extent and impact of victimization. They also provide a review of CRP litigation, provide recommendations for retailers to reduce racial profiling, and also chart some directions for future research.

 
Racism in Politics

During the Healthcare debate in 2009, Representative David Scott of Georgia had a 4foot swastika painted over his office sign.

The Southern Poverty Law Center identifies hate groups in America. This link will show you a map of all the hate groups in the United States.   Is this surprising?  Is this concerning?

This article from the Daily Mail, a British online newspaper, details the rise in threats during Obama's presidency,

And with Mr Obama reportedly receiving more death threats than any other American president - 400 per cent more than those against his predecessor George Bush, according to a new book...A black U.S. Congressman had a swastika painted over his office sign after he yelled at allegedly racist protesters at a Southern town hall meeting, it emerged today.

Michael Tesler's 2016 book Post Racial or Most Racial documents the tremendous amount of racism that President Obama faced during his presidency, including ongoing claims that he was not American.  Is this any different than the flurry of racism that Ms. Nina Davluri faced after becoming Miss America?

"Tesler shows how, in the years that followed the 2008 election—a presidential election more polarized by racial attitudes than any other in modern times—racial considerations have come increasingly to influence many aspects of political decision making."

Racism in the Media

Jeremy Lin is an example of the racial stereotypes in sports and how stereotypes can be more or less permissible for different groups within a society.  Here is a post explaining that dynamic from the society pages.   Here is a clip of the skit from the daily beast.  Have you seen or heard any explicit racism in your own life?

And this post from Soc Images shows how different media make their consumers more or less aware of systemic inequality.  In other words, some media helps it's viewers understand the structural problems that create inequality while other media ignore these factors.  By ignoring the factors it promotes the current structure which has created an unequal distribution of power.

7.  Choose one area from the above examples (sports, the marketplace, politics or the media) and explain how that area exemplifies or sustains the balance of power against racial minorities.



Explicit Racism Backstage

Sociologists Leslie Picca and Joe Feagin explain in their book Two-faced Racism that racism can be explicit even if it is not always shared publicly.  Read an excerpt here.  Watch a video of Leslie Picca here:

SOCHE Talks: Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage from SOCHE on Vimeo.