Podcast #19 Equity Implicit bias

Definitions:

Racism

Systemic Racism

Implicit bias –

Microaggressions

Intersectionality

White Fragility

White Privilege

Achievement Gap

institutional racism

Discriminatory housing practices, redlining neighborhoods, underfunded education, lack of access to healthcare, racial profiling, police brutality and mass incarceration are just a few examples of cage wires that all together contribute to structural racism.— Sylvia Luetmer

Our nation faces a fork in the road and a decision to either continue down the same path of systemic racism or to confront our past honestly.— Bree Newsome

“People of color, low-income people, and Indigenous peoples have been made especially vulnerable through decades of environmental racism: policies that intentionally concentrate pollution and toxic hazards in our communities.”— Michele Roberts

Definition of racism

1: a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

also : behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief : racial discrimination or prejudice

From racist graffiti in schools to daily microaggressions and police profiling, rally testimonials highlighted that issues surrounding racism are still very much local issues.— Ryan J. Degan

The War on Drugs, cloaked in race-neutral language, offered whites opposed to racial reform a unique opportunity to express their hostility toward blacks and black progress, without being exposed to the charge of racism.— Michelle Alexander

2a: the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of anotherspecifically : 2

institutional racism

Our nation faces a fork in the road and a decision to either continue down the same path of systemic racism or to confront our past honestly.— Bree Newsome

b: a political or social system founded on racism and designed to execute its principles

In 1913 the Natives Land Act reserved 90% of the country for whites, who then made up 21% of the population. Under the formalised racism of apartheid 3.5m blacks were forcibly moved to isolated reservations called “homelands.”— The Economist

“Because white people have always been dominant in society, they have not had to confront the consequences or even the existence of their enormous privileges.” Most importantly, our systems and assumptions determine who controls institutions and, therefore, wields power—this is what is meant by institutional racism. This, in turn, leads to inequitable outcomes for people of color relative to white people

White Deniability

White people are able to deny the presence of racism precisely because they treat it as specific behaviors committed by specific people, rather than the structural phenomenon that it actually is. In this wrong conception of racism, racism functions like an act of criminality. The possibility of it always exists, but it has to be consciously and knowingly “committed” by someone.

Thus, if one refrains from certain actions (like the use of certain racial slurs) one cannot be racist. Racism thus gets watered down to something that only “bad” people do. This is at the root of white fragility—white people will furiously deny their racially problematic behaviors and patterns of thought because they view any discussion of them as an assault on their character.

This is fundamentally not how racism works. Racism is a force woven deeply and permanently into every institution of American life. The intentions or moral positions of individual white people are irrelevant here. Racism is a system that we all participate in, that we cannot escape from, and that imposes real costs on people of color (and real benefits for white people).

It is seen in:

The poverty rates for people of color (there is a large and persistent wealth and income gap between white and black Americans);
The quality of the education they receive (majority-black schools receive fewer funding resources and African-Americans are less likely to receive a higher education degree);
Health outcomes (African-Americans have shorter life expectancies than whites); and
The alarming frequency with which black people are harassed, incarcerated, and even killed by the criminal justice system (African-Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of whites).

Being able to set the terms of discussion, and define what is and is not acceptable, is itself a powerful manifestation of white privilege. White fragility demands that people of color as a means of social, emotional, economic, and even physical survival walk a constant tightrope around their white colleagues and neighbors. The cumulative effect of white fragility is to discourage people of color from challenging white supremacy by dramatically raising the emotional costs of doing so.

White Tears

One common expression of white fragility, especially on the part of white women, is crying. Author DiAngelo documents several instances during her career as an anti-racist educator in which white women sobbed and broke down upon hearing stories from people of color about their experiences with racism, or hearing about their own culpability for racist outcomes in society.

While these women no doubt felt that their outbursts of emotion came from a genuine place of solidarity and empathy, it was seldom experienced that way by people of color. To them, the crying was self-indulgent behavior that sucked up the energy in the room and redirected the conversation toward the emotional distress of the crying white woman, not the people of color taking great personal risk in sharing their stories of oppression.

White tears are a powerful manifestation of white fragility, a way of neutralizing or stopping a discussion about racism by transforming it into a conversation about an individual white woman’s hurt feelings.