Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Unit 6: Racism

Introduction to 9^th grade Peace and social justice social studies

Guiding Questions: What is racism and how does it affect me and others? Does Taiwan have a race problem? What can I do to promote racial equality?

The ppt guide is more detailed, has more videos and is more thorough than this blog.

I. Definitions of racism

A. Implicit Racism test

B. Racial Discrimination and the law; A comparison between Australia, the US and Taiwan

C. 8 Categories of racist behavior (Mandarin definitions, English Definitions)

Have you ever seen any of the above in Taiwan? Explain.

II. Racism in America

Vocabulary:

Stereotypes

Race

Racism

Malcolm X

Racialism

Identity

Consensual

Discrimination

Racial prejudice

A. READING Excerpt: RACE AT THE ROCK: RACE CARDS, WHITE MYTHS, AND POSTRACIAL AM ERICA

By J. Jeremy Wisnewski

There are stereotypes of blacks that go back at least two hundred years: the sexual, animalistic African, exotic seducer of white women. The philosopher and social theorist Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) refers to this as the “sexual myth” surrounding black men. As Fanon puts it, “The white man is convinced that the Negro is a beast; if it is not the length of the penis, then it is the sexual potency that impresses him”—both of which, Fanon insists, are mere racist clichés that separate whites from other races.1

Malcolm X claimed, with some justiﬁcation, that he was really sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence for sleeping with a white woman (not for burglary). The judge of the case couldn’t bear the thought of the “sexualized Negro” “having” a white woman…

“Racialism” defined by the contemporary philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, lurks at the core of a continued misunderstanding of the problem of race. Racialism involves the belief that

we could divide human beings into a small number of groups, called “races,” in such a way that the members of these groups shared certain fundamental, heritable, physical, moral, intellectual, and cultural characteristics with one another that they did not share with members of any other race.2

As Appiah goes on to argue, no such groups exist. Indeed, grouping races “for biological purposes, your classiﬁcation will contain almost as much human genetic variation as there is in the whole species.”3 The most we can classify as a “race” is a group of partially reproductively isolated people. As Appiah points out, though, this means that “no large social group in America is a race.” 4

The problem is that we seem to be stuck thinking that they are real. This, as we’ve seen, can lead people to adopt, or even to be forced into, particular kinds of identities.

Once the racial label is applied to people, ideas about what it refers to, ideas that may be much less consensual than the application of the label, come to have their social effects. But they have not only social effects but psychological ones as well; and they shape the ways people conceive of themselves and their projects.5

Behind our thinking about race, then, is a kind of racialism— the view that race is essential to who one is and what one does.

There’s still a lot of discrimination based on the false idea that races are essential to who one is. So even being a certain way right now doesn’t alleviate the inequality that has been sustained in our social institutions. It likewise doesn’t make racial prejudice go away.

The fact that race is socially real but biologically spurious makes issues of racial equality all the more difﬁcult. On the one hand, we want to promote racial equality. On the other, we want to deny that there is anything that really counts as a race. The situation seems to require something like double- talk: we want to have race and do away with it too.

Yet the idea of race is socially real, and it has very real consequences. If the ultimate goal is equality, we don’t need any biological notion of race to strive for it. Whatever one’s social group happens to be, and however one self-identiﬁes or is identiﬁed by others, the goal is the same: that we have equal treatment of those who have historically been treated in ways that fall far short of this. But what does equal treatment require?

The notion of equality shouldn’t be misunderstood. It doesn’t mean treating everyone in identical ways. It means, rather, giving equal consideration to the interests of everyone involved. Absolutely equal treatment—taken to the extreme— would involve giving the same medication to everyone, even when they didn’t need it. It would involve forcing everyone to watch the same movies at the same times, to eat the same foods with the same spices, to have romantic relationships with the same people in the same ways. In short, it would turn a desire to end oppression into an even more oppressive system in which people were forced to be equivalent to one another. Equality demands considering the different interests of people equally; it doesn’t mean demanding that everyone have identical interests.

When we see that races aren’t biologically real, and that thinking of them as real leads to inequality, we put ourselves in a position to give up both racism and racialism. This doesn’t mean we won’t use the word “racist” anymore, and it doesn’t mean that inequality will just evaporate. What it does mean, though, is that we’ll be better able to see the con- sequences of our assumptions about race when they bubble up—and this will give us an occasion to act to rectify whatever injustices we encounter.

Questions

1. According to Kwame Anthony Appiah, what it the misunderstanding of the problem of race?

2. Is race real? Explain.

3. What is the author’s idea of equality? Do you disagree or agree? Explain.