“Paper Cuts Hurt Too”: Getting Students to See Race when they Claim that They Don’t

I teach courses that deal with race and racism, gender and sexism, class and classism. The challenge I often confront is how to get students, students of color and Euro-American students, to “see” race and racism. Many of these students have been introduced to race via multiculturalism. One of the challenges of a multicultural curriculum lies in the ideology that we are all “one.” Additionally, students are often taught that to see race somehow makes them individually “bad” because only evil people see race and to see race is to be a racist. Thus students often argue that they don't see race. 

For my students of color, they too don’t see race. Many of these students subscribe to the ideology that we are now living in a non-racial society as a result of the ideology of individualism. The ideology of individualism is often worn as a badge of honor to prove that they “belong”.

I won’t necessarily focus on how the myth of multiculturalism hurts both students of color and Euro-American students alike, albeit in different ways. Instead, my focus is on how to get them to see race and racism as ideologies that are still present in their lifetime.

To help my students to see race, I rely on the analogy of a paper cut. It’s not perfect. But it at least gets most students to envision the existence of racism as something that they might not “see” but that can simultaneously exist.

As I introduce my students to theories of race and racism I often ask, “How many of you have had a paper cut?” Every hand floats into the air. I then ask them, about their experience with the pain associated with such a cut. Many will say that for something often so small and invisible that the pain can be intense. Then we talk about getting others to see the cut. Think about it, you know the paper cut exist because of the pain and more than likely it bled. However, after you’ve wiped away the blood, the obvious evidence, it is almost impossible to get someone to see your injury. The evidence of your pain is not always evident to the naked eye.

I then begin to introduce students to the legacy of slavery. While the institution of slavery is no longer evident (as they envision it as a result of what they see on television), the impact of slavery is ever present in today’s society. Why? Because racism and the hierarchy of race have not disappeared. They might not be able to see it (and believe me when I tell you that we have an entirely different lecture on why they believe they don’t see race, when they use it as an organizing principle) but their understanding of absence does not render race absent.  After all, someone telling you that they don’t see your paper cut does not mean that it does not exist.

We then use this analogy to transition into conversations on institutional racism and how it’s possible to have racism without racist (see Bonilla-Silva). With this analogy, students are better able to comprehend passive racism and active racism in a way that is non-threatening as it takes away the “I” from the conversations. Thereby allowing us to have more in-depth conversations that go beyond personal guilt.

This is the sixth post of my 31-day blogging challenge. You can tweet me at Dr_JZ using hastag #31dbc to share your thoughts on how you teach on difficult topics. 

50 Years later and the Bombings Continue

It might seem like a bit of hyperbole, the title. After all no one has bombed a church and killed four innocent Black girls in the last fifty years. So it must be a bit overdramatic of me to suggest that some fifty years later racism is still a key factor in the deaths of Black girls and Black women in the U.S.

I listened to the brief nods of recognition given to the 50^th anniversary of the bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. This was the bombing that resulted in the deaths of Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. Many talked about what a horrific event this was and how it helped to fuel the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. In the midst of the brief ceremonial recognition period, there was very little historical context provided and the coverage I saw did not ask how such acts of racialized-gendered violence are still present today.

This was the case because so many of the brief references dealt explicitly with the ideologies of racism and White supremacy as though it was not dynamic and continual. Whether intentional or not, there seems to be a desire to have such behavior only be couched in the past—a past that seems to start and end with the bombings and the immediate aftermath. What is ignored is the long history and continuing racialized-gendered treatment of Black women that is evident in the U.S.

I won’t rehash much of this history. Several have done a wonderful job of detailing Black women’s lives during the slavery era, the Emancipation Period, and the 1960s. Instead, I want to focus on how the bombings continue today and why there seems to be no protest.

I whish that I could offer a complete overview of Black women’s socio-political and economic position in the United States, but I can not do so at this time. Even more so, I wish that I could present a historical review of their socio-political and economic position of Black women. While we have little bits and pieces of this story, it remains disjointed. Instead, I present a snapshot of a few issues that I believe capture the nebulous position of Black women in the United States and show how racialized-gender continue to influence their lived realities.

Black women and Incarceration

According to the Sentencing Project, 

“The number of women in prison, a third of whom are incarcerated for drug offenses, is increasing at nearly double the rate for men. These women often have significant histories of physical and sexual abuse, high rates of HIV infection, and substance abuse. Large-scale women's imprisonment has resulted in an increasing number of children who suffer from their mother's incarceration and the loss of family ties.”

Additionally,

Black women, in comparison to other groups of women, are experience higher rates of incarceration according to the Sentencing Project. Black women, in 2010, relative to White women were incarcerated at nearly 3 times the rate (133 versus 47 per 100,000). Hispanic women were incarcerated at 1.6 times the rate of white women (77 versus 47 per 100,000).

Black women and AIDS

The CDC informs us that “At some point in their lifetimes, an estimated 1 in 32 black/African American women will be diagnosed with HIV infection, compared with 1 in 106 Hispanic/Latino women and 1 in 526 white women.” While the rate of infection seems to be decreasing, Black women remain disproportionately impacted by HIV and AIDS

Black Women, employment and wealth

According toThink Progress, “Unemployment rates have declined for most subgroups of women since the start of the recovery, but not for adult African-American women.”  

The National Women’s Law Center states, 

“The June 2013 unemployment rate for adult African-American women (12.0 percent) was higher than their rate at the beginning of the recovery in June 2009 (11.8 percent), and was nearly 1.7 times higher than their rate at the beginning of the recession in December 2007 (7.1 percent).”

“Black women working full-time, year-round were typically paid only 64 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men. Hispanic women working full-time, year-round were typically paid only 54 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.”

Finally,

“African American women have continued to increase in educational attainment more rapidly than white women, yet the proportion of African American women in the service sector still hovers around 25 % compared to 15.4 % of White women. In addition, African American women are under-represented in management-level and professional positions and face significant barriers in the transition from low-wage jobs to professional occupations.”

What does this mean for Black Women and the Black Community?

Black women have made substantive progress since they were forcibly brought to the U.S. They have made improvements in terms of accessing education for example. However, the data above paints a grim picture for Black women as a group. They highlight how race and gender influence Black women’s experiences.

Gendered-racism is the thread that undercuts all of the above issues. Structural inequalities, and oppressive structures, rooted in race and gender hierarchies, are at the heart of the growing health and economic crises. These growing crises threaten to take Black women away, often thought of as the backbone of the community, from the community. So while there might not be bombings of churches in the U.S. today, the underlying ideologies that led to the bombings continue.

Consequently Black women continue to die and no one seems to be sounding the alarm.

This is the fourth post of my 31-day blogging challenge. This is the second post under the general theme of “Critical Social Issues” You can tweet me at Dr_JZ using hash tag #31dbc to share your thoughts. 

My life in a “Post-Racial” World

It’s been a while since I last posted. It’s not because I haven’t wanted to. So much has happened that I wanted to comment on. However, I was working through my response to a number of racist-sexist emails and tweets I received in response to the Trayvon Martin Social Justice Award I organized.

I will not post the correspondences I received. What I will tell you is that some went so far as to wish death to my family and I. Some felt inclined to tell me that I was racist, ignorant…. I’m at the point where I actually feel sad for these individuals. Sad that they cannot see how what they “condemn” they actually perpetuate.

There were a few issues that I address before I speak to my experiences as a Black woman living in a so-called post-racial world.  My sister-colleague, Professor Janni Aragon, and I will blog about post-racialism around claims such as “We have a Black President” in the near future.

Silence Perpetuates Racism

I was asked why not name the award in honor of Martin Luther King. I smiled; it was clear to me that this individual seemed to have embraced a rather deracialized understanding of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. In the 1960s he was not a “hero” in the eyes of a few. Oh, but in this so-called post-racial society some seem to have forgotten this. In the whitening of Martin Luther King (whitening in the sense that his image is often used to assuage White guilt) some have forgotten that his message involved a form of radical racial justice. 

In deed I decided on Trayvon Martin because his death, in part, embodies the radical racial justice calls of Dr. Martin Luther King—not the sanitized recitation we engage in every January. For many of the young individuals I encounter, Trayvon Martin’s murder resonated with them. But some would never know that because like the White liberals Martin Luther took to task in his “Letter from Brigham Jail” they refuse to listen. They refuse to allow minoritized and marginalized individuals to speak. And when we speak they often work to discredit our claims.

As Martin Luther King Jr. articulated in his letter “I am in [all states and cities] because injustice is here.” Yet, some deny it’s existence because they want to believe that we are existing in a post-racial state, where racism in a thing of the past. Those of us who dare speak of racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are told that we are simply agitators who need to stop engaging in “destructive” and “divisive” efforts. This is part of a muting/silencing project that must be resisted in the same way that Jim Crow laws were resisted.

Everyday I encounter stories of racism from the young people I serve. I see first hand how others go out of their way to tell them that they don’t belong. Black men are stopped and frisked, no not in NY, but on college campuses. They are treated as criminals because of the color of their skin. Students of color are called “nigger” and told to “go home” and that they "don’t belong.” Faculty members of color are treated with suspicion. If this is not racism, then clearly I don’t know what is.

Yet, their and my experiences are met with silence. We are told that while some individuals might be “bias” that life is better for us. I guess that we should be happy that we are no longer working on the plantation. However, I ask, when one is the recipient of such hate, when we are being terrorized on a daily basis, what exactly is better? And who is it better for?

Some are so caught up with defining racism by focusing on specific acts or at individual level behavior that they have lost sight of the fundamentals of racism. Racialized bodies might not be hanging from Southern trees. But that is not an indicator of a post-racial state. Racism may be direct, indirect, individual and/or institutional. Indeed as Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues we don’ need racist actors to have racist outcomes.

Racism is not a simple bias neither is it simply prejudice. Yet, some continue to conflate racism with these concepts. Racism involves the transformation of prejudice and bias, at an individual and/or institutional level, passively or actively, through the exercise of POWER against racialized groups deemed as inferior.

Racism, in the words of, Carmichael and Hamilton is "the predication of decisions and policies on considerations of race for the purpose of SUBORDINATING a racial group and maintaining control over that group." (Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, pg. 3)

Many, in an attempt to put the legacy of slavery behind them in hopes of achieving the utopian post-racial state, ignore everyday racialized-gendered practices that terrorize some of us.

As I live through my current experiences with gendered-racism I find myself fighting to have my voice and the voices of those who experience systematic racism on an everyday basis heard. I cannot pretend that these past few weeks have been easy. I’ve had a range of emotions. However at the end of the day I’ve decided to speak—to break the silence that is complicit with notions of post-racialism

Post-racialism is designed to render us silent or to mute our claims. It is because it requires silence that indeed post-racialism perpetuates racism.  Here are just a few examples of how post-racialism perpetuates racism via silence:

• Silence does not allow us to challenge the deracialization of Martin Luther King’s dream. Consequently we accept for example “A Day of Service” often with little thought to issues of equality, justice, and peace.
• Silence allows us to ignore issues of joblessness, HIV/AIDS, food insecurity and their relationship to race. We become silent when we use universal terms for fear of offending.
• Silence harms us when we deploy terms, such as “colored” and “nigger” that are steeped in historical a legacy of racial harm and crime and then claim “innocence” or “ignorance” when we are asked why.
• Silence harms us when we allow racialized actions to take place on a consistent basis and then simply say “sorry” and engage in no actions designed to implement institutional change.

Silence is sometimes the best response. However silence can also be an act of racism. When we claim at an individual and/or institutional level that we are committed to anti-racism and we remain silent in the face of racism our actions beg the question: Who or what does our silence protect?

Audre Lorde poignantly wrote, “Your silence will not protect you.” None of us are protected when we remain silent in the face of racism. So how do we respond to the silences that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned us against? Those of us who experience racism, overt and covert, must speak. Yes, we are at times intimidated, but our silence does not promote change. It is only when we consciously work to unmask the often hidden structures of power, of which silence is one, can we begin to challenge power structures. Those in the majority, who benefit at various levels from privilege, directly and indirectly, must also break their silence. The pleas of ignorance or that it’s not my problem, or the claim that I’m not racist, are inadequate and are not enough! The onus of fighting racism must not be placed on the laps of marginalized and minoritized communities. It is a problem that we must all raise our voices against. We cannot lament on how our speech will be responded to and/or interpreted.

More than stay-at-home vs. working-mothers: How the White woman conversation on motherhood ignores the realities of Black women

Breaking News: 

Angelina Jo Lee and Brad Pitt, after years of co-habitating and parenting 6 children out-of-wedlock, recently announced their engagement. 

Breaking News: 

 According to Hilary Rosen, 

“What you have is Mitt Romney running around the country saying, well, you know, my wife tells me that what women really care about are economic issues, and when I listen to my wife, that's what I am hearing.  Guess what?  His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She's never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we worry - and why we worry about their future.  I think, yes, it's about these positions and, yes, I think there will be a war of words about the positions.”

What do these two stories have to do with the so-called “mommy wars”? A whole lot. Both stories speak to privilege—class, racial and heterosexual privilege. 

I’m not particularly interested in the personal lives of Lee and Pitt, but the response to their behaviors and chiefly how the media seems to be going gaga over their presumed nuptials stands in contrast to lesser known, relatively poorer and particularly women of color who have children out-of-wedlock. Furthermore, how this couple is treated even stands in contrast to how married, relatively well known, couples are treated. The first group of women are often treated as suspect, as criminal and in need to monitoring. In the case of the second group of women, in particular Michelle Obama, Fox News constructed her as a “baby momma”—a term typically fraught with negative connotation Black motherhood is often shrouded in a meta-narrative of negativity regardless of family formation, regardless of whether mothers are in the paid labor force or not. 

Rosen’s assertion and the response also speak to a form of privileging of mothers—in terms of class and also race. Many took Rosen’s comments as contributing to and fanning the continual debate of who works harder—mothers who not only mother but work outside of the home or those who choose mothering as their primary responsibility. In other words, it’s the debate about who is a better mother, which is measured in terms of who spends the most hours on the job and what constitutes a job. I’ll leave others to have this conversation. My concern is centered on how this conversation seems to (conveniently) leave out some women. 

Left out of these conversations are women for whom parenting is made that much more difficult as a result of low wages, poverty and the impact of existing laws. While I recognize that these are issues confronted by women regardless of color/ethnicity, I focus on Black women. 

Mothering Black Women

“Black women were about half as likely as White women to be a stay-at-home mother,…married black women have always been employed outside of the home in large numbers, even following World War II, when many of their white counterparts had withdrawn from the labor force.” (Census)

Like so many have eloquently said—Black women often don’t have the choice between staying-at-home or entering the labor force. Several in the blogosphere and on Twitter have focused on issues of pay inequality as a factor in limiting the choices of mothering Black women. As such, I won’t belabor this point. Instead I want to focus on how other policies—and not just labor laws—influence Black women’s functioning as mothers. 

For many women, economic struggle, compounded by race and policies that have racialized outcomes, is their daily reality. 

Consider the following:

Black and Latina women face particularly high rates of poverty. Over a quarter of black women and nearly a quarter of Latina women are poor. Black and Latina women are at least twice as likely as white women to be living in poverty.

In addition,

“The number of women incarcerated for drug-related crimes increased by 433 percent between 1986 and 1991. But for African-American women it rose an astounding 828 percent, while the increase for white women was 241 percent, and for Latina women a 328 percent increase.”

Finally,

“New research is showing that eviction is a particular burden on low-income black women, often single mothers, who have an easier time renting apartments than their male counterparts, but are vulnerable to losing them because their wages or public benefits have not kept up with the cost of housing. And evictions, in turn, can easily throw families into cascades of turmoil and debt.” 

Back to the uproar caused by Rosen. I don’t think that Rosen was really discussing which mother has it easier/harder. This seems to belittle her larger point around privilege—economic privilege and I add white economic privilege. So yes, I agree with Rosen. The Romneys have never dealt with “economic issues”. They have not struggled with paying rent versus paying the light bill. They, like most families, probably faced their own struggles, but more than likely they were not economic struggles. However, this is not my primary concern.

What I’m arguing is that many Black women don’t have the choice to stay-at-home—if they even have a home. The choice seems to be taken away from them either as a result of poverty, incarceration, their own or their partners’, or some combination. These issues cannot only be addressed via pay equity—yes this is a start. Pay equity, when not grounded in the realities of existing racial hierarchies, does little to change the fact that in many urban and rural communities, there is little to no access to jobs as a result of economic development policies. Furthermore, these women often have limited access to health care and education. These are all factors that impact the resources we have available to us and how we mother. A debate centered solely on pay equity or which mom works harder does little to address the fact that for many Black women, structural violence is a daily factor in their lives.

Interestingly most of the initial (mainstream) responses to Rosen’s comments seem to ignore these issues. Instead, they seem focused on having a debate that women of color feminists/womanists have long criticized traditional feminists of having. The construction of womanhood and motherhood, underlying the discussion of Rosen’s comments, relies on a hierarchy based on race and class. Black feminists and womanists have long argued that Black women have never been privileged as mothers. Instead, they have been thought of as dangerous, unfit (primarily because of the poverty they experience and their race) and to be controlled. Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body eloquently speaks of the denigration of Black women’s bodies and as a consequence their performance of motherhood.

As a result of the often degeneration of Black women, regardless of class, policies are often designed not to encourage (poor—in terms of income and perceived moral failings) Black women to stay-at-home, but to join the paid labor force. Where they can undergo a different type of monitoring and have limited access to “corrupting” their offspring (as believed by some). They are forced to find a job with little thought given to accessible and affordable child care, access to health care and whether or not the job pays a livable wage, among other issues. Policies seem less concern about addressing the growing incarceration of Black women and the increasing impact of foreclosures and evictions among this group of women.

So Rosen, maybe you shouldn’t have been so quick to apologize to Ann Romney. Stick to your guns. Force a discussion on privilege. However, I encourage you to consider how race intersects with class to render some more privilege than others. Then maybe we can bring Black women into this conversation in a way that treats them with dignity and respect.

Stand-in-your-house Rule: A “Different” Take on Trayvon Martin and Violence in the Public Sphere

 The recent murder of Trayvon Martin in this so-called “post”-race era shows what some in the Black community have been arguing for some time—race matters. This case has also brought to the forefront the intersection of public governance and private influence—who has access to make decisions in this so-called democracy (but that is a completely different post). Let me get back to the conversation at hand. For me, this recent violent removal of a Black body from public space makes me think critically about our understanding of community in this “post” state. And by post, I don’t mean post-racism or post-gender, but post human interactions (where race still matters). In a state where our interactions take place in virtual reality, if at all, how do we (re)define our understanding of community? Beyond this, how do we begin to think of our responsibilities to each other—that is the common good? 

I lived in a community in Prince George’s County, MD for five years. It wasn’t gated, but seems rather similar to the one where Trayvon Martin was murdered. During that time, I hardly saw children playing in the neighborhood. I knew that they existed because I would see them getting off the school bus and trekking home with loaded backpacks. Folk came home and went immediately into their homes never to be seen again, until maybe the next morning. We stayed behind our curtains, just like the folk who stayed safely in their homes as Trayvon Martin was murdered. Yes, some called 911, but might we have had a different outcome if someone had ventured outside and yelled? Might it have been different if we didn’t consciously or unconsciously follow the “stand-in-your-house rule?  It’s easy for me to sit here and wonder what if. But I have to.

I argue that this stand-in-your house rule is common and reflects the evolution of our modern day communities. This rule results from fear and an unwillingness to talk to each other, but is further reinforced by our virtual realities. We talk about racial profiling which I believe was at the center of the killer’s actions in the case of Trayvon Martin. However, what we haven’t really talked about, in a systematic way, is how a different type of fear played a factor in the murder of Trayvon. At the end of the day, the stand-in-your-home rule causes some of us to turn the other-eye at worst or engage in the “smallest” effort so that we can at least say, “I tried”. But have we tried? While we sit in our homes and lament about the decline of our neighborhoods have we sincerely and honestly tried to create a different type of community?

As we attempt to comprehend what occurred in this gated community, we have not reflected on how, regardless of race, we have become prisoners to fear. White fear and Black fear share a similar well spring—racism. However, they have different repercussions.  

Black folk, and no I don’t mean all Black folk, are living with a type of stand-in-your-home rule. We’ve become prisoners in our homes out of fear. Fear that we won’t be accepted in our larger communities, fear that we won’t achieve the American Dream. This is the type of fear that have caused us to lose sight of community and instead replace it with a form of individualism. I’m talking about the type of fear that causes us to work constantly, putting aside opportunities to build community, to come outside with our children and sit on our front steps as they ride their bikes. This fear is fostered by institutional and structural racism. This is how the fears of Whites and Blacks overlap—racism is at the core. White folk, regardless of socio-economic status, are also victims of this type of fear that has been cultivated via racism. Without knowing Black folk, in a substantive manner, White folk can operate under the assumption that we all pose a danger to their way of life—again, I’m not speaking of all White folk.  

 Racism plays a monumental role in the breakdown of our communities. We don’t trust each other and we don’t look out for each other. It seems that our actions are guided primarily by our individualistic desires to get a piece of the American Pie. In exchange we’ve forfeited getting to know each other.

As I reflect on Trayvon Martin, I’m reminded of a time when my neighbor was being physically and verbally abused. In the middle of the night I jumped up from bed in response to her cries. Without thought, I ran down the stairs and out the door. I rang the bell and asked, “Is everything ok?” I looked over my shoulder only to find my husband (who is a strong sleeper) standing behind me. No, I’m not a “hero” (a word often causally thrown around), neither am I “crazy” as some suggested when I told them this story. My intent was to use whatever means necessary to intervene on behalf of my sister who was crying out for help. Trayvon Martin cried out for help. But out of fear many in his gated “community” followed the rule, “stand-in-your-house” and left this boy out there on his own to die. How does this reflect on our understanding of community?

The question that I’m now left with is how do we mount a campaign, not only against ALEC, but against the fear that keeps us prisoners in our homes?