After completing this class a little over a year ago I wanted to share with fellow members of the class what has truly stuck with me. I visit this blog again today to stress the importance of continuing your journey in the awareness, knowledge, and understanding of contemporary racism. As many of you know it is not a quick fix and I have realized that becoming culturally competent will take years of work in understanding myself, my biases, and the contributions of the world around me. In addition to this process taking time I encourage that you find allies in this journey. Without allies I do not think I would be able to continue in the fight for social justice. It is hard, emotional, and at times very uncomfortable but with the help of friends you can overcome these obstacles.
With that being said I find this blog helpful in that it enables me to reach out to allies and continue to share new ideas and discoveries! In this post today I would also like to share a new discovery I have found. I have just started graduate school and in my class, multicultural psychology, we talked about the concept of power. At first I thought it would be a repeat of everything I have already learned… but surprisingly it was not and intern helped me experience what I have learned about racism in a new light.
Power was defined as a groups ability to define reality. Racial realities of racial/ethnic minorities are drastically different from White racial realities. But who’s reality is the accurate reality? In addition how does the power to define and claim the accurate reality effect an individual and how they interact with others?
Power to define reality – what a interesting way to think of it. Food for thought that I will be chewing on for awhile. Thank you for sharing!
Thanks for writing Liz! Every time I learn about “this stuff” there is always something new in there – it is all so complex. You are highlighting an important point here. Having the power to define reality is something we discussed but only very briefly this past semester (Spring 2012) when we talked about microaggressions. We actually read a Psychology Today blog post about it written in 2010 by David Rivera, a doctoral candidate at Columbia (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/microaggressions-in-everyday-life/201010/the-power-define-reality).
Happy to have you as an ally and continuing blog contributor!