Comments on: A Story of the Way Racism Manifests Itself Today

By: nashkrod

nashkrod — Fri, 04 May 2012 03:50:25 +0000

I really appreciated Kristen bringing up the “anything but race” rhetorical style (Bonilla-Silva, 2007). In a situation like this, I can see why people would find it easy to find other reasons to account for their treatment of Carrie and her daughter. She’s troublesome, she has RAD, she’s a risk to the school, etc. I am curious as to what explanation Carrie’s neighbors and the other parents would use to explain their isolating Carrie after the incidence. Why wouldn’t they reach out to Carrie for help? If the problem was only about Carrie’s one “troubled” daughter, then why would the parents change how they treat Carrie?

I think this story also brings up something that we did not get to address in class, multicultural families in America. In this case, Carrie is White and her daughters are Asian. What does that mean for how society looks at Carrie? Her daughters? We also live in a society where people are biracial or multiracial. This starts to complicate things. As we learned from Devine (1989), we categorize people. What happens when people no longer fit into our categories?

By: kw237335

kw237335 — Thu, 03 May 2012 22:01:37 +0000

I agree with what Michela has said; this story seems to be an example of aversive racism and of implicit attitudes coming forward. While reading this story I wasn’t so sure but after reflecting on the story, it seems to be clearly indicated that their neighbors have isolated them because of the daughter’s race in conjunction with her condition. This got me thinking, if Carrie’s daughter were a white child rather than an Asian-American child, would the neighbors be shutting them out or would they be more likely to want to help Carrie deal with her daughter’s condition. There is definitely evidence of colorblind racism in this story because these people are shutting out a minority child but are able to blame it on something else. They are able to use the “anything but race” rhetorical style and say that they feel that Carrie’s daughter is a risk and they find it necessary to shut her out because she has this condition. They can say that their actions have nothing to do with race and are rooted simply in the condition on the child. These people do not think that they recognize color in others and do not believe that they treat whites different than minorities. But it has been found that they actually do treat them differently.

By: Michela

Michela — Wed, 02 May 2012 21:45:48 +0000

I think Tory makes some interesting connections. I think it seems like a mixture of a few approaches; it seems easy to ignore the cultural differences and say that she’s just a difficult child and it has nothing to do with race. However, I don’t this is true because her racial identity has seemed to cause her significant difficulty in a community that has a colorblind approach. If she’s a minority member amongst a community of Whites, I think a lot of research we’ve read is that when racial identity isn’t acknowledged, the racial biases appear in implicit, non-verbal ways. I also think the way that the community jumped on the opportunity to explain their discomfort with her was because of her condition; it’s a form of aversive racism because they are looking to explain their pre-existing feelings of an implicit bias and rationalize with a response that doesn’t involve race—therefore they can’t be racist. I think it’s also important to acknowledge how all of these components could be related; we’ve learned about how racism can not only have effects on an individual’s identity, but can also have an effect on an individual’s psychological well-being. I can’t imagine the stress an individual endures when they experience colorblind racism, yet because of social norms, isn’t allowed to talk about it.