America’s Disguise
What do you envision when someone mentions racism? For many Americans, racism elicits an image of a white individual engaging in intentionally harmful acts towards a person of color. While this image is justified based on the historical underpinnings of the United States, it is not all encompassing and overlooks many modern manifestations. Racism has evolved to primarily impact people of color through covert methods at a systematic level. Unfortunately, white dominate culture and racial illiteracy has prevented many people from recognizing such systematic oppression as racism. Until we can look at it from that perspective, institutions like public schools will subconsciously perpetuate its pernicious effects. In this work I will explore how the American education system contributes to systemic racism through racial illiteracy and maintenance of white dominate culture, and its connection to my educational journey.
Racial Illiteracy
The American K-12 education system contributes to systemic racism by neglecting to engage in discourse that promotes racial literacy. DiAngelo (2012) supports this claim by stating that any white person living in the United States is bound to develop superficial opinions about race because society will only address race in superficial ways. Through my educational experience, I can attest to this lack of honest racial discourse. I recall topics such as race and diversity never being discussed unless the material explicitly required it. Furthermore, any lesson that was racial in nature, such as the civil rights movement, was always concluded with the firm assertion that “race does not matter”. As a white student, with no other racial literacy, I took my teachers word as truth and felt there was nothing more to be learned. Little did I know, such superficial comprehension of race devalues diversity and leads to racially problematic concepts such as individualism.
Individualism is the belief that we are all unique, race has no meaning, and failure is not a consequence of social structures but rather of individual character (DiAngelo, 2012). This concept is a form of racial illiteracy because it dismisses the collective experiences of racial groups and creates a justification for inequality. I now believe that our education systems superficial racial rhetoric serves to validate individualism, thus contributing to systemic racism. If students are not provided the means for understanding and combating racism, why are we surprised when it is perpetuated?
Reflecting on such superficial educational experiences with my developing racial literacy, I became keenly aware of how susceptible white people tend to be to these fallacies. I feel embarrassed that I was once so blind to the racial realities of society, yet grateful that I have grown intellectually. As a future educator, it is important that I continue to expand my racial literacy so that I can interrupt the cycle of systemic racism by providing my students with honest discourse.
White Dominate Culture
Another way that the American education system contributes to systemic racism is by upholding bias rooted in white dominate culture. The National Museum of African History and Culture defines white dominant culture as the normalization of the white racial identity, practices, beliefs, and culture. In the school system, we can see this normalization through the historic forced assimilation of people of color, focus on Eurocentric curriculum, and a predominantly white faculty (Spring, 2018). This contributes to racism because it perpetuates a culture where non-white individuals are falsely perceived as abnormal and valueless.
It is important to recognize that this normalization of “whiteness” inherently normalizes racial illiteracy and the presence of microaggressions. Kohli and Solórzano (2012) explain how our predominantly white teaching forces’ unwillingness to correctly pronounce culturally diverse names and providing “Americanized” nicknames is a racial microaggression because it portrays sentiment that non-white names are an inconvenience. My white privilege has allowed me to traverse my educational journey without experiencing microaggressions, including those aimed at names. I have however seen other students endure a continual battle over correct pronunciation. For example, my classmate Aprille (ah-pr-el) became so fatigued with explaining her name that she began to identify with the white dominate cultures pronunciation of April.
At the time, I did not consider that this choice was made because of institutional and internalized racism. However now that I have recognized it as so, I can consciously attempt to mitigate the pressures of white dominant culture on the diverse student population. One way that I plan to do this is by reading my roster prior to class and looking up any names I am unfamiliar with. If I am still unable to articulate names, I believe it would be best to ask the student for help and remind the class that this is my limitation (Kohli & Solórzano, 2012).
Conclusion
In summary, racism is deeply embedded in American culture and institutions. To properly address this fact, the education system must reevaluate its racial literacy practices and maintenance of white dominate culture as contributors to systemic racism. Once educators, especially white teachers, recognize their racial illiteracy they will be able to develop them and provide the honest racial discourse that is required to identify, confront, and inhibit systematic manifestations of racism. This racial literacy will also expose how white dominate culture in the education system does a disservice to students of color while simultaneously reinforcing white superiority. To this end, I leave you all with the reminder that “institutionalized racism is the societal default; to not act against it is to collude with it” (DiAngelo, 2012, p. 213).
References
DiAngelo, R. J. (2012). What does it mean to be white? Developing white racial literacy. New York: Peter Lang. Chapters 1, 2, & 10.
Kohli, R., & Solórzano, D. G. (2012). Teachers, please learn our names!: Racial microagressions and the K-12 classroom. Race Ethnicity and Education, 15(4), 441–462. doi:10.1080/13613324.2012.674026.
National Museum of African History and Culture. (n.d.). Whiteness. Retrieved from https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness
Spring, J. (2018). Chapter 6: Student Diversity. American education (18th ed., pp. 148–175). New York, NY: Routledge.