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Discrimination and racial bias
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Race oppression
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In the article “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Patricia J. Williams, she begins by bringing up the point that her kid was said to be color blind in school. After being told by three different teachers, she took her kid to an ophthalmologist who said that his vision was fine. She realized that “he resisted identifying color at all by saying I don 't know when asked what color things were”. She learned that the teachers in school were telling the children that color didn 't matter in order to combat racism that was happening between the youth. She states that “this dismissiveness, however unintentional, leaves those in my son’s position pulled between the clarity of their own experience and the often alienating terms in which they must seek social acceptance”. The author is saying that these teachers are trying to say that they don 't see color in which they don 't see a problem existing. The next main point that is brought up by Williams is that “whiteness is unnamed, suppressed, beyond the realm of race”. She says that “none of the little white children who taught me to see my blackness as a mark probably ever learned to see themselves as white”. What she is saying here is that as a society, a kid who is white never recognizes there color. Being white is not considered anything …show more content…
I think telling them not to talk about it and to be embarrassed by the question is adding to the problem. By explaining to the kid that they are different and that is okay it will help them grow up seeing the differences as nothing more than a physical difference. It is also important to make sure our youth knows that just because the people around us are different, that does not mean they are less capable of doing anything. By teaching our youth this instead of being anxious and hushing aways the questions, we can bridge the gap that we have built between the
E. D. Hirsch and Lisa Delpit are both theorist on teaching diverse students. Both of these theorist believe that when teaching diverse students, teachers need to see their students for who they are. Seeing your students for who they are, means you look past the color of your students’ skin and recognize their culture. According to Stubbs, when teachers look at their students equally, no matter the color of their skin, then the teacher is considered colorblind (2002). Being colorblind is not a great thing because we should not treat all of our students the same, since each student is different. It is important to see our students for who they are because our classes are unique. Instead, our classes represent a rainbow underclass. According to Li, the rainbow underclass is the representation of families who are culturally diverse and economically disadvantaged (2008). In order to meet these student’s needs, teachers need to think about the struggles that each student face.
She states “whiteness is not a kinship or a culture,” and that “whiteness is not who you are.” (5). She states that whiteness “is not an identity but a moral problem” (6) and that changing your skin tone from white is not the answer to the problems of whiteness. Biss accomplishes her point of what whiteness is not and now uses this to give us now a sense of what whiteness is and it being an illusion that is harming to those around us. Biss also describes that she has found “refusing to collude in injustice is easier said than done” (6), which means that saying you are not going to participate in the act of injustice acts is easier than actually putting that movement forward. You never really have to think about being white because the things nonwhites go through does not apply to them. She believes whiteness is costing her, her moral life, her community and has driven a wedge between her neighbors and herself. Biss explains of the uncomfortable uncertainty she had with life and it being good. She was “pestered by the possibility that all” of everything she knew “was built on a bedrock of evil and that evil was running through our groundwater” (7). Biss was pestered by the idea of what the lives of whites and the American dream were mainly built on, the oppression of
This made the author dislike and have hatred towards the parents of his fellow classmates for instilling the white supremacy attitude and mind-set that they had. It wasn’t possible they felt this way on their own because honestly growing up children don’t see color they just see other kids to play with. So this must have meant that the parents were teaching their children that they were better and above others because there skin was
One of Beverly Tatum's major topics of discussion is racial identity. Racial identity is the meaning each of us has constructed or is constructing about what it means to be a white person or a person of color in a race-conscious society. (Tatum, pp Xvii) She talks about how many parents hesitate to talk to their children about racism because of embarrassment and the awkwardness of the subject. I agree with her when she says that parents don't want to talk about racism when they don't see a problem. They don't want to create fear or racism where none may exist. It is touchy subject because if not gone about right, you can perhaps steer someone the wrong way. Another theory she has on racial identity is that other people are the mirror in which we see ourselves. (tatum pp18) 'The parts of our identity that do capture our attention are those that other people notice, and that reflects back to us.'; (Tatum pp21) What she means by this is that what other people tell us we are like is what we believe. If you are told you are stupid enough you might start to question your intelligence. When people are searching for their identity normally the questions 'who am I now?'; 'Who was I before?'; and 'who will I become'; are the first that come to mind. When a person starts to answer these questions their answers will influence their beliefs, type of work, where they may live, partners, as well as morals. She also mentions an experiment where she asked her students to describe themselves in sixty seconds. Most used descriptive words like friendly, shy, intelligent, but students of color usually state there racial or ethnic group, while white students rarely, if ever mention that they are white. Women usually mention that they are female while males usually don't think to say that they are males. The same situation appeared to take place when the topic of religious beliefs came up. The Jewish students mentioned being Je...
Not only does White discuss those instances of racial prejudice, she also talks about how racism affected her in her adult life. She is unsure if her being black was the reason her group of faculty members were denied a boat to explore the river. However, finally at the end of her essay, White explains how she overcame her fear and connected with a part of her identity that allowed her to find peace and strength in nature. She talks about how her ancestors from Africa were not afraid of the world around them and how they embraced it and how she
And as if this were to completely prove his point, Williams speaks of how "not the Negro", but poor whites were used next to make rich whites richer. It started off as indentured servitude, where a person would sign a contract to work for someone for a certain number of years in exchange for his passage to America. It was later that kidnapping and forced shipment of humans was used for labor. This might not be an example of racism, but it would be a good example of classism.
The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered (in April 1968,) Jane Elliott’s third grade students were confused and upset. Growing up in a small, all-white town, they were not exposed to racism, and did not understand the meaning of it. Therefore, Jane Elliot decided to show her class what discrimination feels like. She informed the class that they were going to change the way things were done. The students were then divided by eye colour-blue eyes and brown eyes. The blue-eyed children were praised, and told that they were smarter, nicer, and better than the brown-eyed children in every way. Throughout the day, they were given special privileges that the brown-eyed children did not receive. Those privileges included extra recess time, access to the jungle gym, a second helping of food at lunch, sitting at the front of the classroom, and being allowed to participate in class discussions. In contrast, the brown-eyed children were forced to wear brown collars around their necks. They sat at the back of the classroom, and their behaviour and classroom performance was constantly criticized by the teacher. The students from the superior group (even those who were usually sweet and tolerant) became mean, and began to discriminate against the inferior group. The students from the inferior group would struggle with class assignments, and perform poorly on tests. On the second day of the experiment, the roles were reversed, making the brown-eyed children superior to the blue-eyed children. The results were similar, but the brown-eyed students didn’t treat their blue-eyed classmates quite as bad as they had treated them. When the exercise ended, the students hugged and cried with each other. Jane Elliott once said: "After you do this exercise, when the debriefing starts, when the pain is over and they're all back together, you find out how society could be if we really believed all this stuff that we
Williams was a great one for “nigger” jokes. One day during my first week at school, I walked into the room and started singing to the class, as a joke ‘Way down yonder in the cotton field, some folks say that a nigger won’t steal.’ Very funny. I liked history, but I never thereafter had much liking for Mr. Williams. Later, I remember we came to the textbook section on Negro history. It was exactly one paragraph long. Mr. Williams laughed through it practically in a single breath, reading aloud how the Negroes had been slaves and then they were freed, and how they were usually lazy and dumb and shiftless. He added, I remember, an anthropological footnotes his own, telling us between laughs how Negroes feet was so ‘Big’ that when they walk, they don’t leave tracks, they leave a whole in the ground.” (The Autobiography of Malcolm X,32 )
"My Children are black. They don't look like your children. They know that they are black, and we want it recognized. It's a positive difference, an interesting difference, and a comfortable natural difference. At least it could be so, if you teachers learned to value difference more. What you value, you talk about.'" p.12
“ The average white man of the present generation who sees the Negro daily, perhaps knows less of the Negro than did the similarly situated white man of any previous generation since the black race came to America. Pickens’s also cites this as the source of racial issues, “Furthermore and quite as important as anything there has been some change of attitude in the white people among whom the Negro lives: there is less acquaintanceship, less sympathy and toleration than formerly “. This is in concert with Locke’s belief as he states, “ if the Negro were better known, he would be better liked or better treated.” William Pickens also discusses education as a means of diversifying and uplifting the Negro community. “…for the Negro has very few lawyers, doctors, historians, and poets,-and the whit historian poet will not really write the Negro’s history nor sing his songs. Pickens’s theory of intellect intersects with Locke’s
Williams targets rap music, the “public airwaves”, and the mass who listens and watches. To narrow the public, she targets mostly male African Americans. Williams paraphrases Isiah Thomas on how it is offensive for a white man to call black women a demeaning name but it was okay for a black man to do so. Taking into consideration Isiah’s comment, using profanity against women, he understands using such a word to name women is unacceptable. Although he has not fully developed the idea that it is unacceptable no matter who says it but the thought was there. In an interview of sorts with the comment Isiah Thomas made, it can be reasoned that calling a person by an offensive name if it is “within the family” it is okay. For example, it is normal for an older sibling to pick or tease on the little sibling, however, when an “outsider” does the same action the older sibling will become defendant of the little one. The interviewer asks Thomas “a male calling a woman a b---- you find to be offensive?” to which he responds, “most definitely, black or white, but a white male calling a black female is highly offensive”. This could be what Isiah Thomas’s thought process when it comes the offensive name calling towards African American
I was late for school, and my father had to walk me in to class so that my teacher would know the reason for my tardiness. My dad opened the door to my classroom, and there was a hush of silence. Everyone's eyes were fixed on my father and me. He told the teacher why I was late, gave me a kiss goodbye and left for work. As I sat down at my seat, all of my so-called friends called me names and teased me. The students teased me not because I was late, but because my father was black. They were too young to understand. All of this time, they thought that I was white, because I had fare skin like them, therefore I had to be white. Growing up having a white mother and a black father was tough. To some people, being black and white is a contradiction in itself. People thought that I had to be one or the other, but not both. I thought that I was fine the way I was. But like myself, Shelby Steele was stuck in between two opposite forces of his double bind. He was black and middle class, both having significant roles in his life. "Race, he insisted, blurred class distinctions among blacks. If you were black, you were just black and that was that" (Steele 211).
Racism, stereotypes, and white privilege are all concepts that affect all of us whether we believe it or not. If an adolescent of a minority can distinguish these concepts in his society then we all should be aware of them. These concepts are all clearly demonstrated in “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”. Anyone and everyone could clearly understand this novel but the intended audience is middle school to college level students. The novel’s goal is to help white students understand the effects of white privilege in an easier, more understandable way. Concepts are easier to understand when someone feels like they are connecting to someone they have things in common with, which is exactly what this novel does. I, for one, was always
Children grow up with the ideas that the child’s parents influence on them. this may sometimes led to a misunderstanding. In To Kill a Mockingbird Scout and Jem also have misunderstandings. Atticus, Scout and Jem’s father, has taught and educated them well, but people like Cecil Jacobs don’t understand what Atticus is doing for Tom. In the world people have been taught to judge someone who is different. Racism is very common, and people are judged by religion, sexuality and skin
In his essay, his writes “One day one of a the group Irish kids passing through our block called me a n*****” and he also writes“The murder of light-skinned Emmet Till made me feel like a real Negro”. Even though he didn’t feel he could identify with being either white or black and wasn’t offend when called he was called a n*****. It wasn’t till something as cruel as the Emmet Till murder, that opened his eyes to the reality of things. He writes how he felt like a feel real Negro because of it, and I feel he means that he had a reality check and the differences he saw between him and other blacks like him dancing like an animated tin man and not speaking Ebonics meant nothing and regardless of all that, he was black in the eyes of the Euros(as he would call them). None of those things mattered to Euros and they didn’t care about how you spoke. They didn’t care if you were a good person or if you were of a light complexion. Only one thing mattered to the Euros, and that was your skin color, black was black to them.