White people don’t deserve to be congratulated for doing the bare minimum. When a white person aims to be anti-racist the first thing they do is expect those of minority groups to hold their hand while they mess up. They are not your parent, your therapist, or your teacher. The checking-in glance to people of color when you want to make sure you said the right thing, the anxiety of not being “politically correct” is …
November 2019 was when the first case of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, was reported in China. January 2020 a lab confirmed the first case of COVID-19 in the United States. Fast forward to today, September 2020, where there are 34.4M cases and 1.02M deaths worldwide (CDC, 2020). This led to closures, social distancing, and quarantining. People all around the world had their everyday lives shift and change. However, the coronavirus is not the only pandemic …
Race is not talked about at Muhlenberg. One of the programs at Muhlenberg, and honestly the only program, that is mandatory for students to increase awareness about diversity is the Sedehi Diversity Project (a documentary theater project created by students, culminating in a performance for incoming First Years at orientation). I applaud all those involved in the emotional and extremely valuable play that is intended to promote not only race talks, but conversation about all …
This idea that Black women are the perpetual mules of everyone else has been ingrained in our society. We see it in the media when all we see are Black women marching for Black lives. We see it portrayed in the media with Black women playing the help, the nanny, the supporting motherly character, or the best friend used simply to illuminate the main actress’s character. The image of the Black woman has been, historically …
Something that comes with education, of any kind, is the tendency to find ways to apply it and allow it to inform the way we now view the world. These new understandings and connections are the drive that makes us eternal students. What is complex, especially in the vital and often difficult path of education that unpacks and explains the functions of racism and oppression in a White Supremacist system, is allowing this to begin …
It starts with you. If you want to be an agent for positive change, your actions must be self-motivated. You have to start with yourself. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve incorporated biases that frame your perception of people of color. It’s difficult to come to terms with this, because no one wants to think they hold prejudices. But we all do. And we often exercise these prejudices without knowing. We make fundamental …
In a couple of days, I will graduate from learning about racism. I will complete the course with the choice of continuing to stay informed or not. I can run on the moving sidewalk, stand still, or forget about it all together. I will no longer be graded on the quality of my newfound knowledge, but the true evaluation will be how I use it to make a difference. A letter grade in a course …
My mom was born in South Africa, and when I was in the fifth grade, everybody asked why I was not black. I remember thinking how ignorant these kids were, and wondering why they thought everybody born in Africa was automatically a person of color. There were times where I felt bullied, and I was uncertain about my identity. Here I was being told that I should be black, when the color of my skin …
I cried when I found out the results of the 2016 presidential election. I cried hard. I fell asleep the night before quite early, because I was tired of being bombarded with political ads and the disgusting hate that I would see every day on Facebook. I went to bed early believing that I would wake up to Hillary Clinton being our next president. It didn’t happen that way and the several paragraphs that were …
Special Guest Post by Ginelle Wolfe ’16 I knew work would be tough the day after the election because I work with kids at an elementary school. Each teacher I talked to said they were not going to discuss the election, as the assumption is that most students would not even understand what happened. While I understand that approach, my situation is a little bit different. I teach English Language Development classes, so the majority …
Recently I was listening to an episode of the podcast About Race, a podcast where 3 hosts discuss current race issues in an open way. One of the hosts mentioned that black assimilation to white culture as a solution to race disparity is problematic. They looked at a specific study that showed that black people who moved to white middle-class neighborhoods before they were twelve had a “compound interest of awesomeness” where they were more …
After stumbling upon Macklemore’s “White Privilege II,” I was excited to hear what he had to say. It felt like a direct application of the concepts that we had been learning in Contemporary Racism. The song directly references protest slogans from the Black Lives Matter Movement, police brutality, the double standard of hip-hop, and (of course) white privilege. He goes as far as to call himself out for the base of his fame from—and the …