White Professors Taking Responsibility for Teaching White Students about Race,Racism, and Privilege

How does a white professor teach a course composed of predominantly white human-services students about race, racism, and privilege? What are some of the pitfalls? What works? What is challenging? Why should such a course be part of the undergraduate human services curriculum? This article investigates these questions by exploring a course taught by the author, “Exploring Race and Challenging Racism in the United States.” A variety of pedagogical tools and approaches are discussed.     

White Racism,Social Class,and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action

Among scholars in sociology and history, the backlash against affirmative action has been blamed on White working‐class Americans. What has received far less attention is the individual and collective institutional role(s) played by the White middle and upper middle‐class in backlash politics. Given that individuals in these social classes have far greater institutional power than White working‐class Americans, their beliefs and practices deserve sustained critical attention, and, as the few existing research studies demonstrate, White middle‐class and upper middle‐class Americans have played an influential role in backlash politics. Part of the reason for this gap in the literature is that these groups are more difficult to access as research subjects. Gaining access to this population may require working through many levels of a bureaucratic organization designed to protect their time and privacy. Moreover, when interviewed, these Americans are more likely than their working‐class counterparts to mask racist sentiments through the polite language of “color blindness.” Research methods that complement surveys and in‐depth interviews are recommended as strategies for probing White middle and upper middle‐class Americans' deeply hidden beliefs.     

Racism, Rational Choice, and White Opposition to Racial Change: A Case Study of Busing

Despite significant declines in traditional prejudice, whiteresistance to desegregation and affirmative action has led someto argue that a new symbolic racism has emerged as the principalimpediment to racial change in America. Studies of oppositionto busing, however, suggest a nonracial or rational choice explanation;whites oppose busing because it is believed to have too manycosts and not enough benefits. Using data from a medium-sizedmidwestem city, this study estimates a multiple indicator modelfor the effects of traditional prejudice, symbolic racism, andrational choice on four types of opposition to busing—attitudestoward two-way busing, one-way busing, protest, and white flight.Traditional prejudice and symbolic racism are found to be partiallyindependent dimensions whose effects on busing opposition areentirely mediated by certain expected costs of busing. Thus,the findings support both racism and rational choice explanations.There is, however, no support for the notion that symbolic racismis a more important source of opposition to racial change thanis traditional prejudice.     

Current Manifestations of Racism: An Exploratory Study of Social Distance and White Racial Identity

Abstract

White racial identity theory postulates that White individuals differ in their psychological orientation to race. However, the racial attitudes research has not examined how these differences impact the degree of social contact an individual is likely to have with members from other racial groups. The authors assessed participants' White racial identity and social distance towards White, Asian, Black, Native, and Latino Americans. The nature of the relationship was examined with a canonical correlation analysis. The analysis revealed a significant canonical variate, which indicated that more developed White racial identity status attitudes were related to less social distance towards members of other racial groups, while less developed racial identity status attitudes were related to greater social distance preference. The authors discuss the results in terms of the implications for psychology and offer recommendations for future research     

Race: The Mythic Root of Racism

The term "race" was introduced into science two and a half centuries ago as an arbitrary convenience to describe geographic groupings of humans. These ad hoc racial taxonomies were seized upon, however, as "scientific" justification for slavery and other forms of social, political, and economic oppression. Over the last fifty years, geneticists and biologists have quietly abandoned race as a scientific concept, leaving the general public unaware that racial categories, associated only with culturally selected, physically superficial characteristics, are social rather than genetic. As a result, most individuals remain "racist" in the sense of predicating interaction on racial assignments thought to reflect deep physiological differences. Some of these are conventionally recognized "mean racists." The remainder, however, could well be considered "kind racists," for their seeming benign tolerance defines limits to integration, and their unreflective perpetuation of the enabling belief of racism, that races exist physiologically, serves as a wellspring for mean racism during social crises. Many societies are thus much more racist than they appear. Since the belief that others are physically distinct tends to extend social distance and exacerbate hostility, analysts of social conflict ignore this pool of hidden racism at their peril.     

Getting Started: Psychodynamics,Racism and Anti-Racism

Abstract

This paper mainly addresses white social workers who want to practise in an anti-racist manner. It aims to clarify common confusions about the relationship between therapeutic and political goals in anti-racist practice, which can lead workers to feel immobilised and unable to get started. Analysis of a case example based on the author's experience is used to unravel the strands of personal distress and experience of racism which a client may bring to a social worker, and the corresponding strands of personal and institutional racism with which the social worker must wrestle. It is proposed that familiar concepts of transference and counter-transference can be helpful in understanding the confusions about racism which white social workers may experience in practice encounters with black clients. The importance of all this is seen to lie in the likelihood of white social workers unwittingly reproducing racism, unless they are clear about the boundaries between the therapeutic and the political domains.     

Deconstructing Categories: The Exposure of Silent Racism

Although racism remains an enduring social problem in the United States, few white people see themselves as racist. In an effort to study this paradox, the research discussed here explores racism among those in the “not racist” category. Eight focus groups were conducted in which twenty‐five well‐meaning white women talked openly about racism; subsequently, the women kept journals to record their thoughts on racism. Findings indicate that silent racism pervades the “not racist” category. “Silent racism” refers to negative thoughts and attitudes regarding African Americans and other people of color on the part of white people, including those who see themselves and are generally seen by others as not racist. An apparent implication of silent racism inhabiting the “not racist” category is that the historical construction racist/not racist is no longer meaningful. Moreover, data show that the “not racist” category itself produces latent effects that serve to maintain the racial status quo. I propose replacing the oppositional either/or categories with a continuum that accurately reflects racism in the United States today.     

Media, Racism and Islamophobia: The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media

This article examines the representation of Islam and Muslims in the British press. It suggests that British Muslims are portrayed as an 'alien other' within the media. It suggests that this misrepresenatation can be linked to the development of a 'racism', namely, Islamphobia that has its roots in cultural representations of the 'other'. In order to develop this arguement, the article provies a summary/overview of how ethnic minorities have been represented in the British press and argues that the treatment of British Muslims and Islam follows these themes of 'deviance' and 'un-Britishness'.     

Racism and Anti‐Racism in Families: Insights from Performativity Theory

Possibilities for anti‐racism within the spaces of family life have not yet been contemplated in any depth in the extant anti‐racism literature. To address this, the first section of this paper demonstrates that families are a potentially critical site for anti‐racism, reviewing a large body of evidence demonstrating the key role families play in socialisation processes and in the development of racial attitudes. I also look at what can be gleaned from the literature on interethnic intimacy. The second section turns to the possibilities for anti‐racism within families, suggesting that too little is known about how members of families negotiate instances of racism, or the strategies used to restage or subvert racist discourses and practices within the family. The potential for anti‐racist performances to challenge expressions of racism in families has largely been overlooked in the international literature. I argue that the framework of performativity has utility for analysing responses to racism in families. Performativity theories conceptualise individual acts/utterances of racism and anti‐racism as enacting broader cultural values and structures. Viewing racism in families through theories of performativity directs us to consider how racist speech can be disrupted or strategically rejected and, hence, identify possibilities for anti‐racism.     

The Ideologically Colonized Metropole: Dutch Racism and Racist Denial

Many in The Netherlands deny the existence of race and racism even as significant research strongly suggests otherwise. This paper synthesized existing literature to illuminate The Netherlands' unique form of racism, which is rooted in racial neoliberalism, anti‐racialism (i.e. the denial of race), racial Europeanization, and the particular Dutch history of colonial exploitation. This article summarizes existing scholarship addressing racism in wide array of social institutions in The Netherlands before addressing the historical roots of Dutch racism and how Dutch aphasia and racial Europeanization deny the links between contemporary and historical oppression before, finally, offering an explanation for this disconnect.     

Talent,the Staying Power of Racism,and Transformation: Trans-Atlantic Observations

Abstract

This paper argues that the transformation of universities will not happen until the central issue of racial discrimination is consciously addressed at Predominantly White Universities (PWUs) in South Africa. The paper makes a concerted effort to address issues that reveal why Black faculty members in North American and South African academies have had to struggle to make their presence felt as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. It does this by looking initially at the history of intelligence testing the early pioneering South African Black faculty members, and by comparing the current contemporary scenes of both societies insofar as what African American and Black South African faculty members undergo. The paper concludes by positing that only in the event of a strong anti-racist agenda will genuine transformation of the PWUs be possible without alienating Black talent.     

Reproducing Inequalities through Development: The MDGs and the Politics of Method

Abstract

This article is a critical inquiry into particular methodological means underlying analyses of development, inequalities, and poverty in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) discourse. A populist approach to poverty reduction, the MDG initiative has gained much exposure at the expense of a closer scrutiny of the specific methodological premises (and their implications) underlining the development frameworks through which the goals were to be realized. A critical examination of premises of this kind demonstrates the way in which the application of specific methods in analyses of development and poverty is carefully crafted to serve discernible ideological ends. In order to explicate this by way of an example, I draw on MDG1 (and target 2 with reference to hunger), which I discuss in relation to its integration with the overarching development objective of realizing economic growth. My aim is to demonstrate how dominant explanations and understandings of poverty and hunger, social struggles for fundamental entitlements, and ultimately ‘development’, are construed in ways that are premised on abstractions from actual social and political relations; they are framed as ‘independent variables’ external to the very policies and strategies of international development. The critical engagement offered in my analysis is timely, given the extent to which the MDG initiative and the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals agenda have been presented without any attempt to answer to decades (and more) of critical arguments that offer more rigorous and sustained understandings of inequalities, including deprivations of basic life sustaining needs and fundamental entitlements.     

Beyond Racism: Response to Embrick,Hughey, Miller,Rosenfeld, and Ross

This essay serves as a response to Embrick (2016), Hughey (2016), Miller (2016), Rosenfeld (2016), and Ross (2016), all of whom reflected on my article “Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism,” published in the December 2015 issue of this journal.