{"id":3109,"date":"2007-01-15T09:51:15","date_gmt":"2007-01-15T16:51:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2007\/01\/15\/teaching-about-racism-my-mlk-day-essay-originally-posted-11506\/"},"modified":"2007-01-15T09:51:15","modified_gmt":"2007-01-15T16:51:15","slug":"teaching-about-racism-my-mlk-day-essay-originally-posted-11506","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=3109","title":{"rendered":"Teaching About Racism: My MLK Day Essay (Originally Posted 1\/15\/06)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jan 15, 2006 Teaching About Racism: My MLK Day Essay<\/strong><\/p>\n

My early college years really marked a shift in my thinking about race. After teaching college students for the past several years I realize that I am certainly not alone. For many young people this is the first time they are really forced to confront racism and actually engage in conversations across race. I had purposely chosen to attend a college that was racially mixed and was in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and I thought that I would be able to learn and put much of the racism behind me. Of course, I was 18, and I was wrong. However, most young adults are different from me. My experience is that they would prefer to go on living a largely segregated life just as long as there is no one else there to remind them of it. This is the difficulty teaching about racism in the colorblind era. Many students believe racism is over, or they believe that it is confined to Neo-Nazis, the KKK, or “Hicks.” I would say the vast majority of my White students and at least half of my students of color think racism is not a problem, and it is something they have no experience with. One of the reasons they think this way is because they do not have an understanding of institutionalized racism.<\/p>\n

One of the problems is that prior to college, students learn almost nothing about racism. Many students learn about diversity and multiculturalism, but not racism. This distinction is significant because the terms diversity and multiculturalism, have become synonymous with the notion that “we are all a little different, but we should all like each other.” The problem with this way of teaching is that it ignores the fact that racism is not about how different we are or who we “love or hate.” The primary manifestation of racism is structural, which means that our social and economic opportunities are profoundly connected to race. If we all love each other and know that we are different, we will still have racism. People can love people and truly be racist towards them; moreover, racism isn’t just something located in individuals. Some times the rules themselves and their outcomes are racist. Take the education system as an example. Even the most nonracist teacher must contend with the fact that school districts are generally drawn based on town lines, and towns are often racially segregated. Certainly, racial attitudes shape neighborhood segregation, but these institutional arrangements take on a life of their own. Many of my students will say they don’t have many friends from different backgrounds because there were no people from different background in their neighborhoods. When I say that racism causes this, the immediate reaction is “I’m not racist. I just didn’t have the opportunity to meet people from other races.” Whether that individual person is racist or not doesn’t matter from my way of thinking. Racism has an impact because of the structure, and the individual person doesn’t much matter regardless of whether or not he or she is racist. I know this sounds defeatist, but it doesn’t have to be.<\/p>\n

In my own experience the hardest thing to teach students about racism is that it exists in individuals, groups, and institutions. At the individual level, racism is about a particular persons attitudes and behaviors. At the group level racism is about collective attitudes and behaviors, and at the structural level racism is about the fundamental organization of society. One very good example of structural racism would be the electoral college. Superficially, the electoral college is a raceless policy, but in the end Whites’ votes for president count more because of it (not to mention the wholesale disenfranchisement of predominantly Black Washington, DC.). Bob Wing<\/a>, former editor of Colorlines magazine details a few of the ways this works. He says:<\/p>\n

The good news is that the influence of liberal and progressive voters of color is increasingly being felt in certain states. They have become decisive in the most populous states, all of which went to Gore except Ohio, Texas, and (maybe?) Florida. In California an optimist might even envision a rebirth of Democratic liberalism a couple of elections down the road, based largely on votes of people of color.
\nThe bad news is that the two-party, winner-take-all, Electoral College system of this country ensures, even requires, that voters of color be marginalized or totally ignored.<\/p>\n

“The two-party, Electoral College system ensures that almost half of voters of color are marginalized or totally ignored.”<\/p>\n

The Electoral College negates the votes of almost half of all people of color. For example, 53 percent of all blacks live in the Southern states, where this year, as usual, they voted over 90 percent Democratic. However, white Republicans out-voted them in every Southern state (and every border state except Maryland). As a result, every single Southern Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush. While nationally, whites voted 54-42 for Bush, Southern whites, as usual, gave over 70 percent of their votes to him. They thus completely erased the massive Southern black (and Latino and Native American) vote for Gore in that region.
\nSince Electoral College votes go entirely to whichever candidate wins the plurality in each state, whether that plurality be by one vote or one million votes, the result was the same as if blacks and other people of color in the South had not voted at all. Similarly negated were the votes of the millions of Native Americans and Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana, and Texas. The tyranny of the white majority prevails.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wing goes on to detail how racism shaped the development of the electoral college,<\/p>\n

The Constitution provided that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person (but given no citizenship rights) for purposes of determining how many members each state would be granted in the House of Representatives. This provision vastly increased the representation of the slave states in Congress.
\nAt the demand of James Madison and other Virginia slaveholders, this pro-slavery allocation of Congresspersons also became the basis for allocation of votes in the Electoral College. It is a dirty little secret that the Electoral College was rigged up for the express purpose of translating the disproportionate Congressional power of the slaveholders into undue influence over the election of the presidency. Virginia slaveholders proceeded to hold the presidency for 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years.<\/p>\n

Since slavery was abolished, the new justification for the Electoral College is that it allows smaller states to retain some impact on elections. And so it does–to the benefit of conservative white Republican states. As Harvard law professor Lani Guinier reports, in Wyoming, one Electoral College vote corresponds to 71,000 voters, while in large-population states (where the votes of people of color are more numerous) the ratio is one electoral vote to over 200,000 voters. So much for one person, one vote.<\/p>\n

This year the Electoral College will apparently enable the winner of the conservative white states to prevail over the winner of the national popular vote–a tyranny of the minority.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This election system continues until today, in spite of how open minded modern politicians, political parties, or racial groups may or may not be.<\/p>\n

To some extent when people learn about institutional racism, it can be very defeating because institutional racism is much more difficult to challenge. But there are also advantages. One major advantage is that it removes some of the guilt students (especially White students) have about racism. Once young people realize racism is less about blaming individuals (not that there isn’t some blame to go around) and more about strucutral organization; their defensiveness goes down a little. However, discussions of structural racism must also include examples of how strucutral racism can be challenged. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950-1960s provides such an example.<\/p>\n

Because racism is pervasive and institutional, it needs to be attacked at the individual, group, and structural levels. I think this is highly relevant when we discuss the legacy of Martin Luther King because Dr. King always understood the institutional nature of racism, particularly at the end of his career. People often forget that when he was assassinated in Memphis, he was trying to help low income predominantly African American workers organize. Certainly, we can work on changes our individual attitudes, but in order to challenge racism today we cannot forget the important of social movements as a means of changing the social structure. A movement to end the electoral college, DC disenfranchisement, and the structure of the criminal justice system would be a few areas where we can begin a modern Civil Rights Movement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jan 15, 2006 Teaching About Racism: My MLK Day Essay My early college years really marked a shift in my thinking about race. After teaching college students for the past several years I realize that I am certainly not alone. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}