Unlearn Your Racism, Part 3: Look Around You

Look at your city, then look inside your city.

I live in Columbia Missouri. A town of 108,500 people, according to the 2010 Census. Wikipedia describes my city using 2000 census data, and claims that the "racial makeup of the city was 81.54% White, 10.85% Black or African American, 0.39% Native American, 4.30% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 0.81% from other races, and 2.07% from two or more races. 2.05% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race." Yet, when I used the NY Times Mapping Race Tool (which uses updated 2009 data) to look in a little more detail at my community I found some interesting things. The racial distribution of Census Tract 12 (where I live) is 88% White, 3% Black, 1% Hispanic, 4% Asian, 4% Other Groups. Other tracts are even more white and there is in fact only one that approaches white/black parity, a single tract on the North Central side of the city, where Whites make up 45% of the population and Black/African Americans (sic) represent 44%. When you click on the "View Other Maps" icon and consider the distribution of wealth and the educational attainment data, you get a more complete picture. I also had a google map open that showed me the P-12 schools in each census tract, and I already know how they fare on various educational indicators. In many ways, it's a little micro-map of the United States. In fact, the demographics aren't far off those for the country, which you can take a look at here.

But here's the bottom line--it's a segregated city, and these are only looking at race as phenotype, they only hint at the cultural segregation in the town.

Look at the people around you, then look inside the people around you.

I forgot where it was, but a few years ago I read that you should stop, look around and take note of your environment several times a day. As someone who's constantly sprinting from meeting to meeting and from one of my kids' engagements to another, if I wasn't intentional about this, I would likely only do it once or twice a week. As it is, I do it about 6 times a day, but always in meeting rooms, when walking across campus and when I'm in a restaurant or other service industry business. I'm serious, I just stop and look to the left, look to the right as far as I can scan and see with whom I'm sharing space.

I am struck by how many times everyone around me is White. I'm a coffee shop guy, and it's like that in the coffee shops I frequent, it's like that when I go to most faculty meetings, it's like that when I'm eating my lunch, it's like that when I'm teaching, and it's like that when I'm at the grocery store. That isn't the case when I'm playing soccer, my other great passion beyond education. More on that in future posts.

My point is that it is important to pay attention to the company you keep, but it is equally important that you don't make judgements about them until you come to know them more intimately than Payam the midfielder or Zakaria the playmaker. People are not defined by the way they look--that's essentialism, defining someone by only one characteristic--and it is an incredibly ignorant way to look at the world. Ask people around you what they think about life, about love, about people, about policy, about education, about leadership, about schools, about human rights...and they will tell you what they think about race, if and when they (and you) are ready to speak and listen.

What's the point? The people around you are not having the same experience as you with racism. In my town, the color of your skin goes a long way to determining the kind of social experiences you will have, where you will live, and how much money you will make.

Some white people are allies and some are evil; some black people are allies and some are evil. Of course I'm even oversimplifying things by setting up that dichotomy. But still, all can unlearn their racism, but some want to and some don't.

Look at the ideas around you.

What books are on your shelf, and when did you last open them? Was it last week or twenty years ago? If you haven't opened them yet, why not? What was the last thing you read about racism? A lot of people I know still talk about Cornel West's Race Matters, which is a great book, but was published in 1994. A few things related to race have happened since then. Likewise, Tim Wise's White Like Me (though updated a few times) isn't the last word on white privilege. There are incredible books coming out nearly every week, there are brilliant blogs, research and journalism flying through cyberspace, yet we often rely on a dated foundation to inform our understanding. What happens to foundations over time? They crumble. Keep seeking, challenging yourself and creating your new understanding by challenging what you knew, with new information. Being a dynamic learner--of your own life, and maybe others--is the only way to unlearn racism. In a previous post I asserted that I believe learning is a process. I mean it--it doesn't end, and that should inspire us all.

Look in the mirror.


None of this matters if we don't reflect on our assumptions and knowledge, challenge them and create a new knowledge. This begins with long, hard looks in the mirror and reflections on who we are, who we aspire to become--what good works we do and what good works we hope to create. What do you know, and what do you not know? When are you silent when you should speak? When do you speak when you should be silent? How will you answer the mirror's questions?

Unlearn Your Racism, Part 2: What to Read and Where to Find It

So, you say that you'd like to learn more about unlearning your racism, but you're not sure where to start. I'm not pretending to post any kind of exhaustive list of resources here, but I will offer some that I have found helpful. It would be great if any of you want to comment on this post with additional resources. I find that every time I share resources with folks on this I learn about several more. At the moment, I'm not desegregating this list by the race/ethnicity of the author, or by subject.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I want to note that it is an unfortunate trend that white scholars such as myself have tended to legitimize the work of other white scholars rather than properly cite the origin of many ideas about race and racism, which were first advanced by scholars of color. This is particularly egregious among scholars who explore white privilege, many of whom are white and cite predominantly other white scholars...when in fact, scholars of color advanced nearly identical (and even more innovative) ideas for many generations, but called it something else or published the works in non-white journals and with non-white publishing houses. Also, race and racism is not only a black/white phenomenon and unfortunately it isn't restricted to the United States, so, as I do in my scholarly work I urge you all to consider race as a glocal phenomenon, one that is most obviously local and community-specific, but also inextricably influenced by and influencing regional, national, international and global dynamics.

BOOKS
Sorry I'm not enabling all these as hyperlinks, but these books are all fairly easy to find.

John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
Thomas Kochman, Black and White Styles in Conflict
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Martin Luther King, Jr, Stride Toward Freedom and A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
Joe Feagin, Racist America and Systemic Racism
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought
Richard Delgado, Critical Race Theory
Race and Racism: An Introduction, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban
Cornel West, Race Matters
Richard Wright, The Library Card
bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism
Andrew Hacker, Two Nations
Beverly Tatum, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity
Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children and The Skin that We Speak
Tim Wise, White Like Me
Dalton Conley, Honky
Sonya Douglass Horsford, Learning in a Burning House
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Roots
Ntzoke Shange, For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf
Mica Pollock, Everyday Anti-Racism
Studs Terkel, Race: The American Obsession
Gary Orfield, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown V. Board of Education
Henry Louis Gates, Colored People: A Memoir
Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well

BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Those of you interested in comprehensive resources can look through the Working Against Racism Bibliography, the Anti-Racism Reference List at Radical Reference, Paul Kivel's Bibliography on Racism, Joe Feagin's Basic Bibliography, APA has a fine Annotated Bibliography of Psychology and Racism, and there are many other fine resources of this kind out there. This is, of course, the kind of activity that scholars love, as it makes life a little easier to have a central location from which to find resources. My only caution is that these are not usually interdisciplinary and many are not international/global, so I would urge you to draw from these, but also explore others that warehouse a variety of sources.


WEB SITES
I love the American Anthropological Association's Understanding Race Project web site. It is multi-media, interactive, and includes everything from teaching resources to scholarly position papers. Race: The Power of an Illusion is also a great resource, and its main points are summarized here. This section of the Global Issues web site is a little thin, but decent site to raise your awareness of racism as a global phenomenon.


BLOGS
Stuff White People Like
Racism Review
Resist Racism
Context of White Supremacy


FILMS
Hollywood Shuffle (satire)
I'm Gonna Get You Sucka (satire)
Eye of the Storm & A Class Divided (Documentary)
Eyes on the Prize (Documetary Series)
List of Racism-Related Films
List of Documentary Films about Racism

This is a start! Please add comments and resources, and I will update this post.

Unlearn Your Racism, Part 1: A Few Basics

Over the past five years, I've begun to study racism as one of my core personal and professional activities. I conducted a large study of an urban high school where race, racism, and race relations heavily influenced decisions throughout the school, often overriding decisions that should have also been informed by sound pedagogy, nuanced educational data, human rights and the law. If interested, you can read about it in a forthcoming book, Racism and Educational (Mis)leadership, which should come out from Teachers College Press in late 2011 or early 2012. I've also written a few articles based on preliminary findings from the study, but enough about my research...I give that only as a means of communicating a bit about my background.

Let's talk about unlearning racism.

To be sure, the first question anyone should ask--the question I ask--is "can you unlearn racism?" You can reflect and answer that as you like, but since this is my blog I'm going to first give you my answer and then explain a few reasons behind my thinking. 

My answer is, "yes," but it's a qualified yes. I need to unpack a few basic points about the phenomena that undergird my understanding of learning, race, racism, and race relations. 

First, I believe that learning is a process. As such, anyone can certainly begin the process of unlearning racism. I am not as certain that it is possible for anyone who was raised in the United States to completely expunge all racist assumptions, thoughts and behaviors. Racism takes many covert and overt forms. There is in-your-face racism, subtle racism, implicit racism, and a racism that lies deep in our assumptions about people and society. Good people with good intentions (that judgement of course being relative) have racist thoughts and (un)intentionally behave in a racist manner at times. Given this, I do believe that it is possible to educate ourselves toward a more enlightened understanding of the way racism shapes our worldview, compels us to behave in a particular manner, and make sense of what other people are thinking and doing.

Second, I believe that educated people interrogate their assumptions, increase their knowledge and change their behavior. People who take it upon themselves to learn and grow must reflect on their assumptions, thoughts and behavior. They are critical of what they "know," how they "know what they know" and how their ideas about what constitutes legitimate knowledge is shaped by racism. Educated people are skeptical--constantly challenging their ideas and other's ideas. They scrutinize not only the message, but the messenger. To be sure, when I say educated people, I do not mean "schooled" people. Schools and universities can (and do) teach and unteach racism in a variety of ways, but since they seldom do that in an intentional manner, much of our education about racism takes place outside of formal institutional settings. We learn (and unlearn) much of what we know about racism in non-school settings.

Third, to unlearn racism you must be critical of everything, all the time. We have all been acculturated, assimilated and indoctrinated into US society (though to be sure we have each experienced said society in a discrete manner) and as such have been taught racism since we were young. Racism is individual, institutional and historical. It is manifest in social, economic, political and cultural ways that permeate all aspects of US culture, from television programming, to the food we eat, the way we speak, the way we dress, the way we think about time, spirituality, sexuality, etc. What's more, racism is intersectional, meaning that it is in constant reciprocal influence with all these things and more--it does not exist as an isolated or controlled factor--rather, it is constantly interacting with myriad personal, interpersonal, institutional and societal dynamics. Racism is not monolithic--it is dynamic, and if we want to unlearn it, our learning must be equally dynamic.

Fourth, we must increase our knowledge to unlearn racism. While I take full responsibility for my shortcomings, I have learned a great deal from insightful scholars, artists, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who have both taught and challenged me. We must seek out and critically evaluate books, blogs, films, programs, podcasts, research reports, articles, speeches, plays, novels, and music that offer fresh insights on issues of race. We must constantly evaluate this new affective and cognitive information and compare it to our extant assumptions, knowledge, beliefs and behaviors and allow ourselves to evolve and grow. Vulnerably sharing our ideas with others who respect and care for us is part, but only part of this process--it is ultimately up to EACH of us to take charge of our education--importantly, it is NOT the responsibility of people of color to educate others, particularly white people, on issues of race. This is a persistent and widespread mistake, which I will explore more fully in subsequent posts about white privilege.

More later in Part 2, but this is a beginning...

The Unbearable Lightness of Organizations: Some thoughts about One Mizzou

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a book that is many things to many people. To me, it is an exploration of how much our lives weigh. Do we, as Nietzsche suggested, come back again and again through eternity? Or, as Kundera asks in his novel, do we only live once and that's it? Both are compelling propositions, but the latter gives us a lot to think about--if we only live once, do our feelings, thoughts, works, and relationships have tremendous importance because we will only happen once, or do they have practically no importance at all, since in the grand scheme of things we won't be here for long?

Certainly, this gives me something to think about as a friend, husband, community member and father...but it also makes me think about who I am as a colleague, both to those I work with on a day-to-day basis and those with whom I collaborate and learn from throughout the world.

I wonder the same thing about the work we do in organizations. In my case this means the University of Missouri, where students and now faculty are trying to stand against hatred and intolerance by making our individual and collective commitments more visible. You can read a little more about One Mizzou here: http://www.themaneater.com/stories/2011/3/22/one-mizzou-set-begin-april-7/. The tag line for One Mizzou is "ONE MIZZOU. A culture of respect and responsibility. Many communities. One family. One Mizzou," and while such a statement in various forms has been in university documents for some time this is a more focused response to the racist crimes that have taken place here over the past two years.

I'm on board with this effort. I recently signed a statement avowing my commitment to these values that will be published in a few places and put up on the Internet (I believe). A few hundred of my fellow faculty members have done the same--several in my department and college, I'm proud to say. But... though it feels like it could be the beginning of an important social movement, I wonder...

What is the weight of my (and our) actions--are they light or are they heavy?

How do we make a cultural change in an organization that is, by it's very nature, transient? Students come and go, faculty come and go, administrators come and go, initiatives come and go--so by what means and to what end do we do the work shifting a culture?

I have two thoughts on that. First, I know there is value is visibly and consistently standing up for what I believe is right, when what I believe is right is in part a counter-culture. Mizzou, like many predominantly white-serving institutions, has come a long way but has not done enough to identify and interrogate institutional racism. Of course, there are other oppressed peoples and groups in such an institution, and the place has work to do in terms of sexual orientation, gender equity, ethnic discrimination, ageism, graduate student rights and many others. As a white man, as an ally, I feel it is important that I go beyond being "sensitive" to "their" issues and instead walk visibly in solidarity, supporting quietly and loudly when required (and I'm still learning what that means). Second, I believe that proximity and redundancy matter. By proximity, I mean that there may be only a few of us doing this kind of work in the College of Education, but like concentric circles rippling from a raindrop splash on a pond, we will influence our students, who will then influence others, and so on. By redundancy, I mean that maybe signing a One Mizzou petition feels in itself like a small thing, but when I saw over a hundred names it gave me heart--I was looking at a potential social network of people who want to, in the words of Ella Baker, "become the change they wish to see."

Mizzou One is a seed, it's up to the rest of us to care for that seed if it is to become a tree, and then a forest.

Back to the concept that I introduced at the beginning of this post, are my actions heavy or light? I think they are both--heaviest to those closest to me, and lighter to those further away. I'm not a tree, I'm not a forest...I'm a raindrop, splashing into the pond of the people in my life and into the organizations in which I work.