Racism still exists? You bet it does...

I'm not a naïve person nor am I blind to the racism that still exists in this country, but it still shocks me on how ignorant a mass majority of Americans are about the amount of racism that goes on daily in our society. There are a lot of different forms of racism and countless examples I could give but in this blog, I'm going to discuss some of the terms we learned in our IDS 101 class along with some personal stories that I feel have relevance.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary: rac·ism \ˈrā-ˌsi-zəm\ : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

In Beverly Tatum's Defining Racism, she gives the analogy of racism as an ongoing cycle like a conveyor belt at an airport. Active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of White supremacy and is moving towards it. Passive racist behavior is the equivalent of standing still as no overt effort is being made to go in the opposite direction. Anti racist behavior is actively walking in the other direction faster than that of the conveyor. Although I am not quite sure that I understand her stance on the differences between her ideas of racism or prejudice as it frankly gave me a headache reading the article, I do like her analogy stated above.

I've always considered myself an anti-racist but after listening to examples in class I realized that I am not entirely innocent when it comes to stereotyping a group of people. I've laughed at “off color” jokes made by both whites and people of color, even told an inappropriate joke and have clammed up when someone made a racist comment. Mostly because I don't like confrontation and the offender was properly a friend or co-worker. Over the last year and a half something changed in my typical non-confrontational ways. I became aware of how I was reacting, or not reacting and started to comment on how I found the offender's statement “inappropriate”. I realized I don't care if I get resistance and I'm no longer afraid of the consequences of me standing up to things I find offensive.

My personal experience with racism wasn't against me, a person with white privileged, but with several family members. Ah.. let me explain. Growing up my parents started doing foster care for specially needy children in South Florida. I would say about 95% of the children we took in were of African American or non-white decent and all of them were from drug addicted mothers. My parents taught their children (all eight of them) to love each other no matter the color of their skin. And we did. Our family adopted three of the more than 100 children we took in over the course of six years. All three siblings are of African American or Haitian decent.

Most people we encountered in daily life thought what my parents were doing was admirable. Taking in children that had no where else to go for various reasons. While others, could only see their skin color and how they couldn't possibly be raised by white people. Some of those comments were made by African Americans. Afraid that we wouldn't teach them their heritage. Over the years the stares became more frequent. My brothers friend wasn't allowed over to our house because his father didn't want him catching AIDS from any of the foster children we took care of. What? Where did this hatred come from? The time was the late 80's during the height of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS discussions were a huge topic in the media and with friends. I remember hearing a lot about how blacks from Africa were spreading the disease. Is this where that stereotype he had came from? Possibly.

Another recent incident happened when I introduced my brother to a man I was dating. I talked about my brother a lot since he does live with me but never mentioned his skin color. After they met, he whispered to me, “you didn't tell me he is black”. My response was “I didn't think it mattered and I don't usually introduce my siblings as my black or white brother or sister. I see them as my siblings. Period. No color difference.

After watching the videos on the race experimentation in class on Thursday, I became outraged again. (I've previously seen these same videos). The man that asked if the lady played the black card... really? I've never personally witnessed the kind of blatant racial profiling that was shown in the department store, but I am positive that I would react as that last female did when she took the wronged woman and walked out with her taking her business elsewhere. I believe that there are more people like this in the world than not, but if you don't take on the role of anti-racist, those passive people won't have any role models to learn from.