While working with school district administrators in San Diego County on improving educational outcomes about a decade back, I came across an engaging text by Dr. Tema Okun entitled The Emperor Has No Clothes: Teaching About Race And Racism To People Who Don't Want To Know.
Her name came across my feed this evening while meeting with a few graduate students. I was reminded of just how incisive her idea of privileged resistance was. She referred to it as the social dynamic that arises when a person is asked to abandon the denial that allows them to live in ignorance of their own privilege; the ways it shapes their lives at the expense of generations of specific groups.
One manner in which this privileged resistance propagates is through the claim of reverse racism. I ask pre-service teachers each time I teach a particular class at the university to reflect on the idea of whiteness in America (i.e. what it means to be “white”). I almost ALWAYS have to go out of my way to entice students that feel persecuted during discussions of white privilege to make their case or state their assertions, and most of the time, the argument starts with the claim that the material or classroom perspective is too one-sided. It leads to claims of white people being marginalized, persecuted, and that they are the silent majority: reverse racism. They say BIPOC get unfair advantages or that the playing field IS level. As the dominant narrative asserts, they experience the taking away of assumed privilege as equivalent to systemic discrimination.
But the most insidious one is the silencing and shifting of the causes of white supremacy. In the name of market economics or patriotism or historical legacy, cultural gatekeepers such as textbook publishers, entertainment moguls, and other purveyors of pop culture render invisible that which the power elite doesn’t want the public to see or know. Or, through socialization processes, some are taught to marginalize those who speak up to challenge the dominant discourse or the power elite, threatening their carefully crafted denial. Or they will play down the damage with claims that racism isn’t a big problem and that because they’ve never experienced it, it’s really just a made-up construct by the victims.
Or, they make racism about individuals or local groups. When racism is acknowledged, people trivialize it by portraying it as an isolated circumstance perpetrated by mean-spirited individuals (“bad apples”) or crazy fringe groups. They’ll even blame the victim by claiming that the oppressed deserve their fate because they behave dangerously or in an inferior manner to their own ways. They will defend against responsibility ‘til the cows come home but then turn around and starts shooting off about people being held accountable.
I hope the national conversation shifts away from the existence of systemic/institutional racism to finding better ways to teach/safeguard against it.
You?