Thursday, April 28, 2022

Race Lesson 8: Racism and Colorism

Google Doc is Here

Our last lesson was about how racism can be implicit, or subconscious.  That racism shows up in both institutions and in individual interactions.  But because we all live in the same society, we are all socialized to think similarly about what types of people we should trust or not trust.  This means that even non-whites are socialized to have a pro-white bias.  This results in lighter skin being seen as more trustworthy and more desirable.  That is called colorism.


A Girl Like Me

The implicit bias throughout American society affects all Americans living here including the minorities who are most negatively affected by the bias.  Watch the following video and look for the ways that kids are affected by subconscious bias.  https://youtu.be/YWyI77Yh1Gg



1.  Where is the explicit racism in the video?  

2.  Where is the implicit racism in the video?


DiAngelo's What Does It Mean to Be White?



Sociologist Robin DiAngelo's book, What Does It Mean to Be White?  is a terrific book for anyone wanting to be more racially literate.  Racism and Specific Racial GroupsChapter 17 of her book,  is all about the different histories and discriminations against specific racial groups.  She does a great job of succinctly explaining the social, historical and political contexts that affect each group.  While I teach much of what she explains in her book, it is a valuable resource and I recommend it.  We will examine an excerpt below.




Additionally, for more info about racial terms and the changing nature of what terms are acceptable,  UW Madison professor Pamela Oliver's website is really helpful.  Dr. Oliver has made a list of terms that explains the history and nature of racially-based terminology.  Her post is continually updated here, but she also posted a PDF version of this essay on SocArXiv.

Read a brief excerpt from sociologist Robin DiAngelo's book, What Does It Mean to Be White?  Please click on Racism and Specific Racial Groups to read the section called "White Racism and African Heritage People" (skip ahead to read ONLY pages 315-319)

3.  Based on the excerpt above, what is colorism and why does it matter?

4.  If you are not black, what was interesting from the reading?  If you are black, what else would you include that the author did not mention? 


The Police Officer's Dilemma from the University of Colorado at Boulder 


If minorities themselves can be socialized to see their own race as something less desirable then obviously it can apply to everyone in the U.S.  That means teachers, doctors and yes, police officers too (more on how implicit bias affects black Americans black in all of these areas in tomorrow's lesson.  But because police officers are authorized to use deadly force, the impact of implicit bias has much more serious consequences when it come to policing.   The University of Chicago's Joshua Corell has research showing that unconscious bias results in split-second differences in all people (not just police) who are confronted by either a white person or a black person.  Soc Images explains it here.  

The study's home page is here, but you can try an online version of the First-Person Shooter Task here.  Below are the basic findings from the study:



In short, the findings are that we live in a society that teaches us all to have implicit bias.   This includes police and even includes other minorities.  



5. Can you understand how implicit bias might result in police shooting more black men than other groups?  (And that acknowledging that is not being anti-police, it is just being realistic about race in America)



Finally, this video called Slip of the Tongue uses slam poetry to explore how one girl stands strong to embrace her identity without giving in to popular pressure to change who she is.  Lyrics available here.

 

The poem is also highlighted at Critical Media website here.


  

1 comment:

  1. Q: I personally don’t agree that America was founded off of slavery. I think America was founded off of independence from England (Boston tea party, and the revolution). And I say this because there were plenty of founding fathers who did not agree with the terms and conditions of slavery (Alexander Hamilton to name one). And if America was founded off of slavery then wouldn’t the whole country own slaves? Nevertheless, Americans were not the ones purchasing slaves from Africa, that was the English monarchy. So was America really founded off of slavery?

    A: The excerpt only mentions the founding of the US and the connection to slavery as part of the introduction to understanding racism towards Americans with African heritage. Slaves were brought to this land by 1619 and they were a large part of the economic vitality of the English colonies. This History Channel link explains that
    If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the start of the Civil War. The slave economy had been very good to American prosperity. By the start of the war, the South was producing 75 percent of the world’s cotton and creating more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation.

    and the Gilder Lehrman institute explains,
    ...slavery was indispensable to European development of the New World. It is inconceivable that European colonists could have settled and developed North and South America and the Caribbean without slave labor. Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco.
    In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development. One crop, slave-grown cotton, provided over half of all US export earnings. By 1840, the South grew 60 percent of the world's cotton and provided some 70 percent of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.

    But if you fast forward to when the US became a country, slaves were actually written into the constitution. In that sense, slavery was quite literally a part of the founding document of the country. But that is not the focus of the reading that I assigned. The focus is more how discrimination has persisted after those 200+ years that slavery existed.

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