racial discourse

observations or questions on how/why to talk about race and racism with others

Protesting #101

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On April 13th, Muhlenberg College participated in a nationwide day of action against racism and student debt by participating in the #MillionStudentMarch. This movement is a united demand for education as a human right. The movement seeks to gain 1) tuition-free public college, 2) cancellation of all student debt, 3) a $15 minimum wage for all campus workers, and 4) divestment from private prisons by all colleges and universities. Our Contemporary Racism class thought that …

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An Outside Perspective on the Million Student March

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On Friday, Muhlenberg participated in the Million Student March. The Million Student March is an event held at colleges to demand tuition-free public college, cancellation of all student debt, a $15/hour minimum wage for all campus workers, and divestment from private prisons. As a class, we were informed of the protest and its goals, and then headed over to take part, as a sort of exercise in allyship. There, the student organizing the protest gave …

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The Limitations of Language

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In Eduardo Bonilla Silva’s book chapter “The Style of Color Blindness: How to Talk Nasty about Minorities Without Sounding Racist,” he makes a caveat that in his analysis he is not calling white individuals racist, but rather addressing the individual in a racialized power system.  In the effort to explain academia’s understanding of racism to my friends who do not study these things, I always find myself in a dead end. My friends who are …

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Talking about race in a public setting?

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Talking about race in a public setting can end in many ways. If talking loudly someone else, who might not agree, could feel compelled to give their opinion. I personally don’t think that has to be a bad thing because both parties could walk away with something new learned. Or, it could end in angry people who don’t agree to act in a negative way to you and your friends and it could get dangerous …

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Talking about Trump

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As I was scrolling through Facebook the other day I stumbled upon a shared link by a conservative Facebook friend entitled, “I’m a Republican, Not a Moron: Being Conservative in a World That’s Not.”  Intrigued, I read through the article, the general gist of it being that everyone just needs to respect each other across party lines and that we have to learn that agreeing to disagree is okay. While I agree that respect and …

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The Significance of Social Cognition in Determining Racial Ideology

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As I read the section entitled “The Birth and Death of Slavery” in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, the key role social cognition played in creating racial ideologies became abundantly clear.  As Alexander explains in her historical analysis of the creation of race in colonial America, a fledgling country had certain capitalist needs for an increase in land and an increase in labor; in order for these …

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Supremacy and Privilege: The Insidious Consequences of Language

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The social constructs that define our reality seem so natural and organic it is as if they were created along with the four elements. But we know that things like race and gender were built by people in order to create a hierarchal society, so how do we begin to deconstruct the categories we both rely on and often cannot see? I suggest that the first step to deconstruction is changing how we describe our …

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Does Black History Matter

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Originally posted February 24, 2014   While stumbling around the internet this week I came across two articles that made me stop and think, this can’t be real. http://jezebel.com/last-night-on-jeopardy-no-one-wanted-to-answer-qs-about-1525439303 The first one that I came across was about Jeopardy, which on the night of 02/17, had a category called “African-American History.” The panelist were all white college students and they avoided the topic to the best of their ability. Reading the comments under the article, …

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A Sobering Experience

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WARNING: extremely offensive, racist language is used while quoting someone else (as well as cursing) A few weeks ago, I was hanging out with a few friends and acquaintances – we were talking, laughing, and having a generally good time.  We were sitting in a circle of various couches and chairs surrounding a coffee table.  Then, someone at the party (let’s call this person J) got a text from another friend saying that a third …

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Thinking about my white privilege

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This week’s class discussions were based mainly on the concept of white privilege. Although I understood the idea of white privilege before, the ways that we talked about it in class really opened my eyes to a lot of things I’ve never noticed. Every day, I benefit from white privilege in a number of ways. For example, I walk into each of my classes and am surrounded by people who not only look like me, …

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A Confusing Conversation

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In class we talked about how White people often times do not mention if a person they are talking about is Black, or will whisper the word Black and show discomfort if referencing a Black person. Over the weekend I witnessed this happen. My friend from home came to visit school. She was talking to somebody who shared mutual friends with her, and I heard her say “do you know Aaron, he’s uh you know …

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