What does Antiracism Mean?

Image source: Millenial Grind

[Please note--this is not an extensive, comprehensive definition--it is my working definition.]

I'm sure you have probably heard the term antiracist recently.  It is a current trend for organizations and businesses to use the term antiracist in their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion documentation and activities.  

But what does the term Antiracist really mean?

Not being racist is NOT antiracism.  In fact, nobody in the americas can escape being racist in some way.  

Being antiracist is actively working toward creating a society that does not view individuals as representations of their entire people.  

Being antiracist is being actively engaged in bringing about this change in your organization. We must root out the idea that certain groups of people are superior, by their nature, and force structural change in our workplaces, organizations and society.

A way of thinking.

Here is what Ibram X. Kendi says about it in his book How to be Antiracist:

"To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right -- inferior or superior -- with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races. To be antiracist is to deracialize behavior, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behavior is something humans do, not races do."  

Acknowledge and understand that we exist in a society that has been shaped by racist ideas, policies, practices, laws and organizations.  Anyone who has been raised in the Americas has been raised in a world that is based on skin color, and revolves around the concept of whiteness.  Whiteness here being, the idea that people from Europe are the most important, most intelligent and highest form of beings on the planet.  Therefore, being as white as possible leads to the aforementioned characteristics and importance.  The farther away one is from whiteness lends itself to negative characteristics being slavish, inhuman and stupid and being less important among many others.  

To acknowledge this, is to become conscious that one must have biases and unconscious beliefs as a result of being raised in the Americas.  This must lead to critical self-reflection. 

Personal reflection

Being aware that one must have racial biases and in effect, be racist to a certain extent, if one were raised in the Americas is the first step to becoming antiracist.  One must critically reflect on one's ideas, behavior, body sensations and relationships with BIPOC if one wants to advance towards antiracism.  Only when someone becomes conscious of their behavior and ways of thinking, can they then work on fixing that behavior and thought.  

Being antiracist also means actively listening to criticism when others call out your racism.  This is such an important aspect of being an antiracist!  

I would say you can't be an antiracist if you don't do this.  

I've had friends call me out and my first bodily feeling was anger, denial and mistrust.  But after backing away for a bit to reflect and really listen to the critical words and ideas about my racist behavior and way of thinking, I was able to hear their message of love to me.  And it really is a message of love if someone feels the need to call you out on something.  If they didn't care about you, then they wouldn't say something.  I've been able to see problem areas related to racism in my life because of my loving friends who have helped me see where and what I need to work upon.

Denial is the friend of racism

Being raised in the racist milieu that are the Americas, it would be irrational to deny having racist ideas in our heads.  This culture is based on a strict set of racial categories with characteristics applied to each category.  This culture is racist in its structures and thought.  

So, like the alcoholic, the first thing we must do is come to terms with the fact that we are all racist to a certain extent and the only antidote to racism is acceptance and then an antiracist stance.  It is a disjunction, you are either a racist or antiracist--there is no in between.  Getting past denial is the first and one of the most important steps to becoming antiracist.  Accept the fact that we don't have control over the systems we were born into, but that we can change these systems for future generations by becoming antiracists.

A way of being

 Being anti-racist requires that the we act when we see policies, behavior or ideas that racialize behavior.  This means that we also analyze the structures that we operate within.  The organizations we work, live and die within have been created in a world that is explicitly racist.  We have come a long way, but it is time to dismantle racism, the policies that uphold racism, the ideas, the actions and the beliefs that are the infrastructure of racism is what we are going for here.  

We can all do our part, whether it is calling out racist behavior in the supermarket, or analyzing deep organizational policy for racialized ideas, concepts, practices and procedures EVERYONE can do something towards making our society an antiracist society instead of a racist society.  

Being antiracist requires us to:

• Accept that we live in a racialized society and have been impacted by this
• Be actively engaged in dismantling this racialized way of thinking
• Be actively self-critical in terms of racist thinking and behavior
• Be dynamic and ever-evolving in our antiracist thinking
• Use what we learn from our antiracism to dismantle other forms of oppression

Librarians with Spines Author Showcase #3

 

Information and registration is here:

https://www.librarianswithspines.com/blog

Your Death Will Be Our Reality Television For The Day or 21st Century Lynchings

Black dead bodies pile up on the television screens across the nation.

While there is a 'debate' about force by some fancy people in some fancy room.

Children live in terror everywhere.

Educated grown men and women tremble at the sight of a police officer.

These are lynchings that puts the Klan to shame.

This is Freedom in the US at the beginning of the 21st century.

Embedded #Whiteness: A Legacy of Brutality

[This is the last installment of a three part series on Whiteness.]

  Whiteness is a concept that describes the cultural, lingual, institutional beliefs, practices and behavior that maintains access to power and reinforces power for White people and people of lighter skin tones.  
This colonial system was created for and by Europeans for the benefit of Europeans. Everything was in relation to the European--this is a hallmark of the concept of Whiteness--that everything is judged in relation to Whiteness and not something else.  

Whiteness is embedded in the fabric of everyday life in the US

The use of patrols to capture runaway slaves was one of the precursors of formal police forces, especially in the South.

Slave patrols were organized groups of three to six white men who enforced discipline upon black slaves during the antebellum U.S. southern states.

http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing

The police are still seen by many people to be racial enforcers, they are seen as the colonial strong arm in black and brown neighborhoods--they are most often occupiers--not public servants.

Mistreatment, beatings, rapes, robbing, bribe demands and other behavior is expected by many communities of color when they encounter the police.

I worry that I will be pulled over and shot by a police officer on my daily commute far more than

Famous image of African American flood victims lined up to get food & clothing fr. Red Cross relief station in front of billboard ironically extolling WORLD'S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING/ THERE'S NO WAY LIKE THE AMERICAN WAY. Location: Louisville, KY, US Date taken: February 1937 Photographer: Margaret Bourke-White

African Americans have never been accepted as White.  

They  have been ostracized from the American Way of life for the most part.  

They are colonized subjects within the colony.  

Segregation, lack of educational resources, lack of opportunities are all hallmarks of being Black  in the US.

It behooves those who don’t want these hallmarks to adhere to Whiteness as much as possible.  We see this exemplified in too many POC who have achieved ‘success’ in this society.

 

This is a screenshot I took from an article on Slate.

What is the implicit message here?

How does it relate to the previous image?

South Bronx 1970’s/slaves quarters,  Colbert Co. AL

Things don’t change much in a society based on Whiteness.

Please think about these images for a moment.

Baltimore or
Saskatoon

Contemporary racial disparity based on Whiteness in  Baltimore on the left.

Contemporary racial disparity based on Whiteness in Saskatoon on the right.

Please think about these images for a moment.

 

This is how Black and brown kids are often treated at school.

Our kids are ‘over disciplined’ from an early age--sometimes from preschool on…

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/21/292456211/black-preschoolers-far-more-likely-to-be-suspended

Even after Brown Versus Education schools are still segregated.

Black and Brown schools are patrolled by police and brutality occurs often to students of color.

This can take the form of detentions, or suspensions or other academic marginalization ‘consequences.’

Or it can take the form of violence.  As in the case above (Spring Valley HS in SC), or as seen in several other recent videos of police officers brutalizing students of color.  

This cop was fired. 

Schools should be a place where everyone is welcome.

Schools should and must be supportive of people.

Schools should be accepting, edifying and challenging for ALL students.

Schools need to have disciplinary actions that are non-violent.

Schools should not hold up Whiteness as an ideal of education.

Adheres to and believes in Whiteness.

One other thing about Whiteness is that it can be adhered to by non-white people.  

Many people of color and those who purport to want to help people of color adhere to the system of Whiteness that the educational system upholds, supports and requires of POC who want to succeed.  

I say that this is why we have made little to no progress in equity, diversity and inclusion in our school systems and our society. 

Embedded Whiteness

The brutalities that were used to enforce the racial hierarchies of yesterday are still with us today.They used to come in the form of lynchings--back in the days of Jim Crow....

Now they come in the forms of Police shootings of unarmed African Americans and Latinos in far greater numbers than Whites.  

They come in vigilante shootings of unarmed African Americans, for example--the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

 So, what does this have to do with Education? 

Please think about these questions:

·       How do you see Whiteness relating to Education?

·       Can you think of some examples of Whiteness in Education that you have seen?

·       How can we mitigate Whiteness in Education?

·       Should we mitigate Whiteness in Education?

·       How does Whiteness impact Educational Technology?

·       Does Whiteness come in between the truth and investigators?

Slavery (a Tool of Colonialism) and Whiteness: a Legacy of Brutality

Part 2 of  a 3 part series on Whiteness and colonialism.

[This post is in no way meant to be an exhaustive historical analysis of Slavery and Whiteness.  It is meant to introduce the topic and is meant as a tool for discussion.  Time limitations prohibit me from writing more extensively on this topic.  Thank you for reading.]

Plan of the Slaver Vigilante.  Image source: http://goo.gl/BTYfpC

"...northern European settlers and traders, such as the English and Dutch, had less prior exposure to sub-Saharan Africans, or to Mediterranean slavery systems. Their laws for establishing chattel slavery formed primarily in the context of the New World, with a heightened economic incentive to secure slavery for plantation agriculture through rigid racial hierarchies." http://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/africanpassageslowcountryadapt/sectionii_introduction/contrasting_beginnings_of_slav

Slavery and Whiteness

Slavery and Whiteness go together like snow and skiing.  They have always been with us--since the Europeans came to the US and created the notion of Whiteness--that the world was created for the benefit of White people and their allies.  Whiteness helped form the world of slavery in the Americas, slavery formed the basis for the economies of the America, Whiteness and remnants of slavery are embedded in the world and the economies birthed in American slavery. 

Strict systematic racial hierarchies were created and brutally enforced.  And by brutally enforced I mean whipping, torture, dismemberment, rape, burning alive, family separation,  and other forms of intimidation and force were used to maintain the racist social structure created by Slavery and maintained by Jim Crow and now the New Jim Crow.

Slave auction advertisement

Vast numbers of slaves were imported to the Americas as merchandise

1. 1525 First slave voyage direct from Africa to the Americas
2. 1560 Continuous slave trade from Brazil begins
3. 1641 Sugar exports from Eastern Caribbean begin
4.1655 English capture Jamaica
5. 1695 Gold discovered in Minas Gerais (Brazil)
6. 1697 French obtain St Domingue in Treaty of Rywsick
7. 1756 Seven years war begins
8. 1776 American Revolutionary War begins
9.1789 Bourbon reforms open Spanish colonial ports to slaves
10. 1791 St Domingue revolution begins
11. 1808 Abolition of British and US slave trades takes effect
12. 1830 Anglo-Brazilian anti-slave trade treaty
13. 1850 Brazil suppresses slave trade
14. 1886 Last reported transatlantic slave voyage arrives in Brasil

            In the US, slave owners often treated lighter colored slaves better.  This privilege and other social, educational and economic privileges based on color and an adherence to the standards of Whiteness are still in full effect today and are embedded in ALL us organizational structures.  Those who reinforce the standards, values and systems of Whiteness are rewarded.  These concepts apply to all people of color, not just black people.  The darker the adherent, the more valuable they are to the system.  This is another example where the individual example becomes equated with the systemic examples.  There is a constant logical error when one does this and it leads to false conclusions.  "But professor X is Black. so racism can't be that bad!"  Or some such nonsense will be spouted by adherents to this logical error.

"In his controversial study of the black bourgeoisie, E. Franklin Frazier (195 7a) argued that mulattoes, blacks with white progenitors, led a more privileged existence when compared with their "pure black" counterparts. During slavery, these fair-skinned blacks were at times emancipated by their white fathers. After slavery, their kinship ties to whites gave them an advantage over other blacks in obtaining education, higher-status occupations, and property. Because "the majority of prominent Negroes, who were themselves mulattoes, married mulattoes" (Frazier 1957a, p. 257), light-complexioned blacks passed advantages on to their light children. This process of advantage maintenance by mulattoes lasted well into the 20th century (Landry 1987). So one's position in the community ultimately reflected the amounts of "white blood" in his or her ancestry, and patterns of stratification in the black community included considerations of skin tone."Keith, V. M., & Herring, C. (1991). Skin tone and stratification in the Black community. American journal of sociology, 760-778.

Don't be fooled--brutality was the order of the day. 

            Privilege based on skin color also carried over to the Black community after slavery.  Whites and oftentimes other Blacks treated lighter skinned blacks than their darker counterparts.  Those who adhered to the system of Whiteness were rewarded, as much as their status allowed them to be rewarded, those that didn't were lynched, or imprisoned or otherwise excluded from mainstream (White) society.  Not only did this impact the former slave populations, but it impacted Indigenous and Latino and other people of color.  Those who were lighter skinned and who looked White received greater privileges and were more readily accepted.   This pattern is repeated in contemporary society via the New Jim Crow.  Those POC who don't adhere to Whiteness are disenfranchised and ostracized from mainstream US society.  Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.  These people can be killed or beaten at any time as we have witnessed day in and day out.

"...the dominant white society had historically extended social and economic privileges, not available to darker blacks, to light-skinned blacks. Over successive generations these advantages had been cumulative so that the most successful blacks were disproportionately lighter in complexion. " Keith, V. M., & Herring, C. (1991). Skin tone and stratification in the Black community. American journal of sociology, 760-778.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch

Privilege and Whiteness

Whiteness is often championed by POC in defense of their positions in a culture that benefits those who adhere with Whiteness.   This can be conscious or unconscious on the part of said POC.  POC in leadership positions often behave in puzzling manners to the general population POC.  They believe in the concepts of Whiteness unconsciously (in most cases)--that they got to where they are because THEY deserve it--that if other POC worked as hard as them that they would advance as well--that Whiteness is not the problem...

"In defining whiteness, we want to start by saying that we do not directly equate whiteness with white skin. Indeed, people of color sometimes perpetuate whiteness because they may receive benefits if they serve as role models of color perpetuating whiteness (Delgado, 2009). Yet, any benefits received by people of color are always exceeded by those received by whites in alignment with Bell’s Critical Race Theory (CRT) of interest convergence (1980). "  Nishi, N. W., Matias, C. E., Montoya, R., & Sarcedo, G. L. (2016). Whiteness FAQ: Responses and Tools for Confronting College Classroom Questions.Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis, 5(1), 4.

Hypocrite Bill Cosby

Most often POC who break the rules of the White supremacist stratified society are vilified by their own kind.  Bill Cosby's attack against Hip-hop is a good example of this kind of house slave attack against those who don't adhere to the rules of the racist society they are forced to deal with everyday.  The society that treats them like criminals--even in preschool and elementary school.  POC are criminalized in the world of Whiteness.  Anyone who is not white is suspect.  The darker the person, the more suspect they are.  This not only holds with Black people--this is how all POC are looked upon by the general White society and those who uphold this society's views.  

"For example, social actors were involved in constructing laws, rules, and regulations that created structured social relations during Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights eras. Both black and white people, both enslaved and free people understood the racial rules that ordered their day-to-day routines in everyday life. Across time and space, racial routines in social interaction became institutionalized practices that ensured social distance and geographical separation between black and white population groups. The duality of structure concept suggests that, “people in interaction use the rules and resources that constitute social structure in their day-to-day routines in contexts of co-presence, and in so doing, they reproduce these rules and resources of structure."  Guess, T. J. (2006). The social construction of whiteness: Racism by intent, racism by consequence. Critical Sociology, 32(4), 649-673.

Paul's Boutique could not be made today.

The rules of copyright for instance--the White rules of copyright prohibit the free production of art that characterized early Hip-hop.  Hip-hop has adapted, but this attack and resultant change in Hip-hop music production is a good example of an attack by Whiteness on culture created by POC.  The educational system is full of rules and regulations and punishments that make it nearly impossible for many POC to succeed academically--which is directly related to economic success and "criminality."  Capitalist gangster rap also reinforces Whiteness.  This type of music reinforces the myths of Whiteness:  self-made men, rugged individualism, self-defense against POC and that money is the meaning of life.  These myths serve to keep POC divided, self-loathing and sexist to the extreme.  Whiteness is embedded in almost every aspect of US culture.  It co-opts cultural creations like hip-hop, rock n roll, jazz and anything else it encounters. 

Hip-hop has been used and abused to reinforce Whiteness

Up until very recently, not looking away from a White person, or staring a White person in the eye was grounds for lynching in the south.   This is a form of brutality that enforces Whiteness physically.  There are, however so many forces that are just as brutal that are not physical.  For instance, teachers charging that a student is upsetting the class with their behavior, that they are combative and do not obey the rules, that they are a bad student.  The student I am speaking of here is in preschool.  This is the beginning of the prison to pipeline route of the New Jim Crow (which seeks to disenfranchise by imposing criminality on POC and poor White people).  Where a White student might be looked at as inquisitive, free thinking, or rambunctious, a POC student is most often looked at as a troublemaker, a rebel or a delinquent.  What am I talking about--this is STILL grounds for lynching--not just in the south,  but nationwide.

Mike Brown, contemporary lynching

Whiteness has rules that must be maintained.  These rules have everything to do with slavery.

As a person of color, one may not:

Be arrested

Question any sort of systematic abuse

Be poor

Dress Casually

Think for themselves

Disbelieve in Whiteness and the rules of Whiteness

Be confident around White people

Be a thinker, academic, nor other type of philosopher

Be a practitioner of self-defense

Describe Whiteness in detail to White people