[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.
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…
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?
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.]
"...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
Libraries can and should be an important weapon against terrorism. "Librarians are soldiers in the war against ignorance!" Racism is fundamentally ignorance which leads to hate. This is a call out to all librarians to help end the ongoing terrorism against people of color in the US.
People of color in the US live under a state of domestic terrorism. This terrorism is conducted via many official channels. The education system, law enforcement, healthcare, judicial system and other aspects of the state have been and are used against people of color in the US.
The terrorism we experience on a daily basis meets ALL the criteria below:
"Domestic terrorism" means activities with the following three characteristics:
Involve acts dangerous to human life that violate federal or state law;
Appear intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination. or kidnapping; and
Occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.
For example, here is how law enforcement treats our children in school:
Spring Valley High School 'safety 'officer' and student
What kind of an education can on get while studying under these conditions? What kind of educational experience does this girl now have?
This terrorism is conducted by state officers from all levels of law enforcement in the US. As a person of color, I am more worried about being assaulted, or being shot by a police officer than I am of any sort of domestic terrorist. I have been the subject of humiliating questions like, "What gang are you in?" "When was the last time you were arrested?" and other non-question insults by the police.
Libraries Against Violence
Our libraries can help mitigate this situation by providing a broader viewpoint of the world to our patrons. We can do this by pooling our resources, sharing information, planning and implementing programming that addresses the ongoing terrorism of POC by law enforcement and other state agencies.
This is a country that relies on force as a first choice solution to almost ALL problems.
When force/violence is used as a tool like this, then it becomes part of the culture.
Once it becomes part of the culture individual citizens will begin to use force as a problem solving tool--just as we have seen with the increasing mass shootings in the US.
Violence and force are now normal and everyday. One turns on the television, visits a news web page, or turns on the radio, and one is confronted with a smorgasbord of violent offerings.
Librarians can help mitigate this situation by helping to educate people and offer alternative sources of information.
Contemporary lynching victim: Michael Brown
This violence/force is most often directed at people of color in the US It is used to create contemporary lynchings--in the form of killings of POC by police. These lynchings serve to reinforce POC's lack of respect in society, the lack of value placed on our lives, and the fact that our bodies can be violated and left dead in the street as some sort of macabre warning to everyone else.
The officer in the video at the high school is practicing this kind of intimidation. He is showing the other children what is in store for them if they don't immediately fully submit to someone who might harm them.
Library/Librarian Activism
Libraries can do much to help fight against this type of terrorism. They can sponsor programming, have cultural events, reading groups, conversation groups, maker spaces, lectures and collections that can help educate the public and academia (if you work in an academic library).
A symposium sponsored by the Boston Radical Reference Collection
As librarians we can curate collections that are well rounded and that address multiple perspectives on our culture--not just the standard viewpoints adhered to by conservative anti-intellectuals (I don't think all conservatives are anti-intellectual).
We can use our spaces to hold important discussions and debates and we can help facilitate these events. Our special skills at doing research and presenting the findings in an intelligible manner can be used to help in the fight against the terrorism that POC in the US face daily.
It is our duty to help fight against terrorism.
What are some other ways libraries, librarians and other information professionals can help fight against this kind of terrorism?
