Race and ethnicity in the US
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CHAPTER3systemsandindividuals.docxCHAPTER 3: SYSTEMS VS INDIVIDUALS
While U.S. citizens espouse the belief in the individual, we also have people who aren’t granted the full benefits of individuality. When we look at our society, any individual who belongs to those groups that are not dominant in society, we can see that we often treat these people, not as individuals, but as members of whatever group they belong to. The difference in the way we treat the individuals who are members of the non-dominant groups, is not always easily seen, but let’s start by thinking about the difference between dominant and subordinate groups in general, in our culture. This is exactly what the scholar, Peggy McIntosh did as she uncovered a concept that has been much talked about in recent years. https://nationalseedproject.org/images/documents/Knapsack_plus_Notes-Peggy_McIntosh.pdf
McIntosh, a feminist scholar at a prestigious college, was studying or rather creating the field of study now known as women’s studies when she accidently created the field of White Cultural Studies. Before women scholars of the 1960’s and 70’s there were very few sources that one could find about the ways that women have contributed to making our culture. This is one of the signs that males are dominant in our culture. Most all the heroes in our history books are/were men, most of the great artists whose works we learn about are men, most of the novels and poems taught in schools were/have been written by male authors. If you don’t believe me, try to name 5 famous women visual artists. How many can you name besides Georgia O’Keefe? Ms. McIntosh was struck by how difficult it was for women to not only find other women as role models in academia, but how difficult it was to find anything that ‘looked like herself,’ reflected in what she was learning. This idea of reflection is an important topic that we should take a minute to examine. The dominant groups in a culture are the groups that see themselves reflected everywhere.
Activate Your Sociological Imagination Now!
Imagine living your whole life and never being able to see your own reflection. What if when you looked in a mirror, or a pool of water, or a window, you saw someone else’s face instead of your own? How do you think that you would feel? Particularly if you knew that other people, who look different than you do always see their own reflection in the mirror. How do you think that would impact your life? Would everything remain the same as it is now? Does your race impact the way you answer this question?
People of color—non-white people—have a difficult time finding themselves when they look at the world today. Most of the people on US television are white; most of the people whose faces are on magazines are white. Most movies feature people who are white. It is particularly difficult for people of color to see themselves as positive-figures-in-history-who-made-our-country-great. All the myths of how our country was built are based in whiteness, ignoring all of the obvious contributions of people of color. People of color seem to be absent from the worlds of art and science, from any of the fields that are thought of as knowledge. There are two places in our culture where people of color are often found: sports and entertainment. And both these fields involve many people of color, using their bodies to entertain a largely white audience.
White people have a different racial experience than people of color, that many white people are not conscious of having. This is because white experiences are treated as ‘normal’, as the definition of what it means to ‘be American.’ Because this is the case, white people often have people who look, talk, act, think—who are like themselves—reflected to themselves when they look at the world. This leads white people to believe that all people have a similar experience when in fact, experiences often differ according to racial groups.
The Privilege of Being an Individual
People of color, like white people are individuals. This is clear. What is not so clear is that people of color are also aware that they are members of a group as well as individuals. Black people, Asian people, indigenous people, brown people are all aware that they belong to a racial group. This consciousness of racial group membership is often missing for white people. White people are often not conscious of being white. White people do not often think of themselves as being members of a group of ‘white people’. People of color have what W.E.B. DuBois called, a “double consciousness.” We are conscious of being a member of our race as well as being an individual. This is a complex issue.
Let me use myself as an example, so that you can begin to picture this double consciousness. When I am perceived of as an individual, I am assigned different qualities than I am assigned when I am perceived of as a member my race. As an individual I am intelligent; as a black person, I’m not supposed to be that smart. These two opposing views of me can be both be true at the same time; individually I am intelligent, yet as a member of my race, I am stereotypically perceived and treated by others as someone who is not very smart. I live in a world where these 2 opposing views of self are true, and as in individual I have no choice in the matter. Others see me through the filter of race, consequently, I also see myself this way, as a black person.
These different views of me have great impact as I teach students and interact with colleagues. I have been teaching on the college level for over 30 years, and have experience teaching as the single teacher in a classroom, and as a member of a teaching group. Group teaching experiences have been quite an interesting for me, and are often starkly different than teaching by myself, in terms of how I am treated and reacted to by students; yet there are some reactions that are common in both settings. Students often question my credentials, and my skills. When I give lectures and ‘profess,’ as my title calls for, students will ask me to produce proof of what I say, not because they want to know more about the subject matter, but because when I talk about concepts that they have not hear before, they doubt the truth of my words. It is my strong belief that my being black contributes heavily to this reaction, rather my ‘not being white’ when teaching and whiteness are more socially acceptable. This conclusion is based on my having observed many white instructors, and having taught with white instructors, who will say the exact same things to our students as I say, and never have the truthfulness of their statements questioned. The only factor that is different between the other teacher and myself is race. Our societal beliefs about black people do not include space for intelligence, higher levels of education, and being able to articulate clearly and logically. And when I act in ways that students connect to qualities of whiteness, my students of all colors feel entitled to question and challenge my authority. On many occasions I will say something to the class, and the room erupts into anger, distrust and disbelief. When a white teaching partner says the same thing to the same group of students, the remarks are treated as fact, and the lessons continue without incident. What these students were reacting to was not the outrageousness of my pronouncements, but the blackness of their instructor. Incidentally, I am an extremely light-skinned woman, with naturally red or auburn hair and freckles, so one does not have to be dark-skinned to have such a reaction from the people around them. It must also be added that it is not only white students who have difficulties with a teacher of color; some students of color react in similar ways. We are all conditioned to believe that educated status is a quality of whiteness, and we react accordingly. My white teaching partners have often expressed surprise at how much impact the race of an instructor can have in the classroom.
Group Membership Has Its Privileges
If we go back to Peggy McIntosh, we can see how she came to an unexpected understanding of race as she delved deeper into feminist studies. As a White woman she could easily see that men had advantages that women just don’t have. Men make more money than women for the same job; boys are shown through history books that men made our country great. The impact of male privilege is something that Ms. McIntosh could plainly see, and she often tells the following story. One day she read several articles written by Black women scholars who were not complaining just about male privilege, but about a privilege that White women seemed to have over Black women. The Black women said that White women were hard to work with, and Ms. McIntosh said that she had two reactions. First, she was offended that anyone would talk about a group of people that she belonged to in this manner; secondly, she said that she disagreed with what these Black women were saying. McIntosh thought, that White women were nice, especially if they worked with Black women. It was at this point that a whole new area of study came to light.
McIntosh and her term: White Privilege
Let’s take a moment and define how we will use the term privilege in this text:
Privilege: Privilege exists when one group has something of value that is denies to others simple because of the groups they belong to, rather than because of anything they have done. It is unearned entitlements that only some people have access to because of their social group memberships (dominants). Because hierarchies of privilege exist, even within the same group, people who are part of the group in power, (white people with respect to people of color, men with respect to women, binary and opposed to non-binary peoples in terms of gender, adults with respect to children, and rich people with respect to poor people) often deny people in the dominant groups deny having privilege, even when evidence of a differential benefit is obvious.
McIntosh put the concept of White Privilege into words that white people could begin to understand on a large-scale basis for the first time. Most White people who grow up in the US are, from birth, given the privilege of being thought of not as a member of a group (in terms of race), but as an individual. This is not the experience that people of color in the US usually have. While people of color know that they have an individual existence, we are also always aware that we belong to a group that is not accorded the same privilege as the dominant group in our society, just as women are aware that men and boys are given different treatment because of their gender. People of color are always aware that while they may have lots of individual qualities, they (POCs) and are judged by the qualities that the dominant society bestows upon which ever racial group they belong to. Again, we can see that privilege comes with dominant group membership, and that the members of those dominant groups are often blind to this impact. Invisibility of privilege to group members is one of the ways that dominance is kept. This is the idea that McIntosh established in her ground-breaking article.
Most members of dominant groups are not aware of their dominance, and do not see themselves as practitioners of dominance. Students who question my authority in the classroom are not conscious of the racial basis in the dynamics that happen between us; they just know that they are bothered by something that I said, often because it makes them question their own thoughts and actions. McIntosh accounts for this, when she says that her perception of self is different than the perception of the black women who’s articles she was reading. It is only when society’s mirror shows us a reflection of self that we are uncomfortable with that, we begin to question the self we see. If we are comfortable with our reflection, we think of that view of ourselves as ‘normal,’ as how things always are. But if that reflection is at odds with how we are ‘used to seeing ourselves, at odds with what we think of as ‘normal,’ then we have two options. The first is to question the reflection, to decide that there is something wrong with the mirror in a way that makes us uncomfortable. The second response is to look at ourselves and to decide if there is truth to the difference between this reflection of our selves, and our ‘imagined sense of what is normal.’ When people make the decision that the problem is in the reflection that others are showing us, we do not make changes in ourselves, and dominance continues. When people make the decision to examine themselves to see if there is any truth to the uncomfortable reflection, that is when change is possible. When we are comfortable with ourselves, there is no change. Change comes from discomfort. The process of changing our racial behaviors can only happen if we become uncomfortable with who we see ourselves to be.
SEEING OURSELVES AS ‘RACIALIZED BEINGS’: OUR NATION IS WHITE
Almost everywhere one looks throughout the U.S., we can see the changing demographics of our nation. The year 2015 was the first in our national history when more people of color born in the U.S. than white people. This is significant. For most of our history, being white was ‘normal.’ There has always been a majority of white people in the U.S. and not many ever questioned the ‘rightness’ of this. And because whiteness is seen as normal, white people are also, ‘just normal.’ It is anyone who isn’t white who is considered ‘different.’ White ways of acting, and moving, and thinking, and talking, dressing and just being, became what was associated with what it means to ‘be American,’ and has been imposed on all members of this nation.
But ‘whiteness as normal’ did not happen accidently. Remember that we have always been a multicultural, multiracial nation from the beginning, despite our myths about ourselves. The indigenous people of this land are red/brown people and they were here before the white people came, bring black people with them, and importing yellow people for more labor. And as the nation became a formal entity, our founding fathers thought seriously about the future generations that would populate this land. Knowing that we would need to have others who would come and join this nation, they took up the question of immigration and thought about who should be allowed to become American, and who should not. Benjamin Franklin, in his 1751 “Observations Concerning the Increase of Man,” argued as follows:
That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy (dark)Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.
As one can see, it was in the minds of our founding fathers that it would be best if The United States of America were a white nation, while taking land that was red/brown, and using enslaved black labor to build a nation based in freedom for whites.
By 1790, when the first law on immigration was enacted, there were two simple qualifications that one had to meet to become an American citizen. First, one had to be free. Second, one had to be white. A quick look through the history of the petitions of people longing for U.S. citizenship that was taken up by the courts will find it full of people of color petitioning the courts to see them as white, and will find the courts almost always unwilling to do so. Indeed, each new arrival of white ethnic groups spent time struggling and fighting to be recognized as white.
This history of the normalization of whiteness in the U.S. contributes to the difficulty that people who see themselves as white have when it comes to them also seeing themselves as members of a racial group. For most of us, including people of color, race is something that ‘other people’ have, it does not belong to white people. Indeed, it is often difficult for white people to speak about their whiteness as part of their identity. If one asks a person of color, ‘what does it mean to be black, brown, red, Asian,’ (and Asian is used because yellow is still a racial slur), they can talk for hours. But if one asks a white person, ‘what does it mean to be white,’ often a puzzled look comes over their faces, and through glazed eyes, they ask, ‘what do you mean, what does it mean to be white?’ Being white is not something that many white people have had to think about. They have simply just existed as, normal. And this is one of the many privileges that comes with being white—being ‘normal.’
MORE TERMS: PREJUDICE VS RACISM
Prejudice. Discrimination. Racism. These words that we use when we talk about race relations often seem to mean the same thing, in fact many of us use these words interchangeably. But there are differences in the meaning of these words, and by taking the time to talk about these terms and to come to a common understanding of how to use these terms, at least as we continue through this text, will help us to avoid talking past each other, which so often happens as we try to talk about issues of race. Let’s examine these terms one by one.
Prejudice is a pre-judgment or unjustifiable, and usually negative, attitude of one type of individual or groups toward another group and its members. Such negative attitudes are typically based on unsupported generalizations (or stereotypes) that deny the right of individual members of certain groups to be recognized and treated as individuals with individual characteristics. The important thing to remember about prejudice is that everyone can and does have them. And prejudice does not just cover race. One can be prejudiced towards anyone or anything for that matter, without cause of reason. One can have a prejudice against eggplant. One can also have a prejudice towards something, such as chocolate cake, or one’s favorite sports team. Prejudices give us a bias, whether conscious or unconscious, towards one group or another. Prejudices are attitudes, thoughts or beliefs that can be applied to individuals or groups, or people, places or things.
Discrimination as a verb is the act of denying opportunities, resource or access to a person because of his or her group affiliation. As a noun, the unequal treatment of people based on their group membership. And while discrimination happens to people because of their group membership, it can happen on both a group basis (an entire group can experience this action against the group), and it can also happen to an individual because of the individual’s membership in a group. Discrimination is different from prejudice in that it is an action that is done to a person or a group.
Racism. This is the most difficult of the three to talk about because so many people want to associate the concept of racism with the idea of hatred, or dislike. But hatred is really prejudice, a strong dislike is really prejudice. Racism, at least as we will use it throughout this text is something altogether different, and at first the definition may seem to have nothing to do with how you have always thought about the meaning of the word. But as we define racism, think back to how the concept of race was born in terms of its purpose. Race was born as a justification for the use of the unpaid labor of one group, and genocide of another that made another group benefit.
In his work, Portraits of White Racism, sociologist David T. Wellman defines racism as follows:
…racism extends considerably beyond prejudiced beliefs. The essential feature of racism is not hostility or misperception, but rather the defense of a system from which advantage is derived on the basis of race. The manner in which the defense is articulated - either with hostility or subtlety - is not nearly as important as the fact that it insures the continuation of a privileged relationship. Thus it is necessary to broaden the definition of racism beyond prejudice to include sentiments that in their consequence, if not in their intent, support the racial status quo.
When Wellman studied whites in America and beyond, he found that so very many of them actually did not harbor ill-will or hatred towards people of color, either on an individual or group basis. But they participated in a thinking that ‘justified’ the treatment of people of color that resulted in benefit towards their own racial group. What does this mean? It means that you don’t have to hate black people to believe that they don’t work as hard as white people, or that they aren’t as smart. Or it could be a belief that black people can’t appreciate the finer things in life. One does not have to ‘hate’ or even dislike all blacks to believe that these ideas are true. And if these ideas are true, then white people are justified in receiving more pay, having managerial positions and surrounding themselves with the finer things in life. If these things are true, then white people are justified in their superior behavior towards blacks without having to be ‘bad people who hate others.’ *(For the purposes of this argument, when I use the term “black people” it will mean anyone who is not white, as our fore fathers originally intended.) Accordingly, for the purposes of this class we will use the following definition of the term, racism:
Racism is privilege and power granted to one group over others based in race.
The distinction between prejudice—bad feelings or hatred—and racism is a significant one. If we define racism as hatred, then while it takes in to account the obvious group status of those ‘on the receiving end’ of the hatred and discrimination that most think of as racism (people of color, non-dominant groups), it does not take in to account the benefits and power that come from being a member of those at the other end of racism (white people, dominant group).
Racism functions much as a see-saw; when one group is up, the other is down, and while we spend tons of time examining, studying, talking about the groups on the bottom, we rarely look at those people at the top. We often talk about groups of people being ‘denied benefits,’ but we almost never talk about the group that receive the benefits. While we talk about the groups who are disempowered, we almost never study the group that has received the power. As we continue through our journey to help us become more acquainted with themselves as people who ‘live lives of race,’ we will take a closer look at those who benefit from the privilege and power that are accorded to them because of their race. While history, anthropology and sociology books talk directly about what it means to be a member of the ‘disadvantaged’ groups, this book will also help those who are members of the privileged and empowered groups to take a look at what it means to be a member of their racial groups.
