Tag: Racism

Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)

Work Cited

Ito, Tiffany A., Krystal W. Chiao, Patricia G. Devine, Tyler S. Lorig and John T. Cacioppo. “The Influence of Facial Feedback on Race Bias.” Psychological Science 17(3):256-261

Williams, Monnica. “Colorblind Ideology Is a Form of Racism.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 2011, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism.

Just How Present is Racism? (Part 6)

Image Credit: https://www.theatlantic.com

Racism is a societal issue that plagues humanity’s ability to advance and develop in a healthy, equal way. This societal issue is arguably one that has not gotten better but has instead changed shape generation after generation. With this post, I hope to illustrate just how real white privilege is, even in 2019.

This topic may seem obvious to some readers. If so, feel free to click on the link provided. There I talk about what can be done to stop this systematic issue and how each and everyone one of us can make a difference.

First, I would like to explain a common white space view and its flaws. When defining this term, Elijah Anderson says, “A white space is a situation that reinforces a normative sensibility in settings in which black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present. This situation is explained to vary from neighborhoods to churches to any public setting, yet always have the overwhelming presence of white people.” This is essentially saying that a white space is when there is a clear majority of white people, so much that it creates expectations that black people are exempt from. When referring to this issue Victor M. Rios says, “The sheer majority of white citizens has created a self-perpetuating system of inequality for minorities of all types throughout the United States.”

The flaw with these white spaces is the misconception that arises with the absence of a solid black presence. I am not saying many of these white space individuals will deny racism, but I have instead found a common belief that misinterprets where the issue comes from. In these environments, there seems to exist the prominent belief that racial problems are strictly derived from economic issues. In other words, rather than seeing these two separate issues, people instead see them as one.

Using the same example from my first post, the average African-American appears less qualified in the job market when compared to their white counterparts. This is directly correlated with the worse education and minimal opportunities the average black American is provided. These are all objective facts, but what I misunderstood at the time was why this difference in education came to be. At first, I thought that’s just how things were because better education is directly connected with wealth, which the average black American has less of when compared to their white peers. Yet, after reading on the subject, I have discovered deliberate segregation between the quality of education young American’s receive, which I went into detail for my second post.

In the example above, the white space individuals would see the inequality of education as bad luck. When in reality, the inequality is through deliberate segregation fueled by racial motives. Therefore, rather than believing racism is actively happening throughout society, the common belief is that societal racism is a thing of the past and people of color simply need to economically catch up.

With this misconception defined and understood, I believe the next question is to wonder just how big the United States white space is. From my personal experience of growing up in Upstate New York, I can attest it is prominent in a lot of small towns. Yet I would also argue the issue is much bigger than just that. I believe the simplest way to illustrate this idea is to point out the fact that when a black American is asked their race, they will most likely say African-American. Alternately, when a white American is asked, they will most likely respond by saying that they are American. They will not say European-American, as they probably are, but will instead respond strictly with American.

This ties to the idea of double consciousness, where people of color must identify as an American, but also as a person of color. They must acknowledge their multiple identities since different expectations exist with each identity. These multiple identities are destructive when there are negative stereotypes associated with them, and you can bet white spacing will make sure to do that.

Another way I can think to clearly show that the United States is a huge white space is simply by using statistics. Black Americans make 58% of what the average white American makes every year. How do you explain that? Is it simply bad luck or is there something else at play?

Image Credit: https://www.pewresearch.org

The statistics continue when looking at the chart to the right. With black and Hispanic groups only taking up 28% of the United States population, it is a mystery to how they take up 56% of the prison population. This is a catastrophic number. This roughly implies that a black American citizen is six times more likely to serve time in prison than his or her white counterpart.

All these issues are real, few will deny that, but they do not necessarily prove that racism is an issue separate from economic inequality. One could continue to say that all these problems are simply due to the aftermath of slavery. Yet, I find that mindset to be incorrect for two main reason. One, because of implicit racism (I encourage you to click on the hyperlink. There I go into detail about the effects of and how implicit bias works). And the second is because of the laws and actions that individuals have done deliberately against people of color.

One example of this was accidentally found by Michelle Alexander when analyzing data on Reagan’s War on Drugs. She was surprised to find that the use of illegal drugs was declining before the “war” was declared. Not only that, but once the “war” was declared, a steady increase in illegal drug use proceeded with each year that followed. To top off these surprises, she found that the media was very successful at covering stories and headlines ringing keywords like, ‘crack whores’ and ‘crack dealers. And “coincidentally” everyone who made these notorious headlines were people of color (Alexander, 2012).

Now one could attempt to state that regardless of all these claims the fact still remains that the dealers and criminals of the 1970s were mostly all people of color… but that too is a skewed perception of reality. Another researcher, by the name of Richard Delgado, found that the amount of capital stolen or destroyed through crime was less severe from the average black offender, compared to the average white offender (Delgado, 1995). In other words, the average black criminal stole or destroyed less than the average white criminal. So, all of the breaking news headlines of ‘crack whores’ were in fact targeted and limited into showing part of the crime happening thought out the country. And don’t forget that crime began to uptick once the “war” against it was declared.

I’m also sad to say this policy actually worked. As the last thirty years have shown, incarceration rates have gone through the roof. For the last three decades the U.S. prison population has grown five times as fast as U.S. population. And as previously said, that increased incarceration rate is not being shared equally. To bring in new data, a black person is almost four times more likely to be arrest for marijuana possession than a white person. Yet, statistically both groups smoke about the same amount of marijuana per person.

Racism is not just a passive afterglow of slavery as many people think. It is an active issue within a system that encourages and reinforces it. With these distinctions in identities, it is obvious that people of color are in many ways living a different life than their white counterparts. They are living a life of less income, with a higher probability of being criminalized, and implicit bias that even they themselves cannot escape from.

Therefore, Don’t think for one more second this is something that will simply fade away. Actions and policies like the War on Drugs, redlining, stop-and-frisk, the New Deal, and so much more, are all continuing this cycle of inequality. The white space of America is a place with very minimal pockets of true equality. Let us ban together and acknowledge that this issue is actively happening, and therefore requires active action to improve.

The Whole Series is Now Available:

Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)

Work Cited

Alexander, Michelle. “Introduction.” The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2012): 1-19.

Delgado, Richard. “Rodrigo’s Eight Chronicle. Black Crime, White Fears – On the Social Construction of Threat.” Rodrigo Chronicles (1995): 164-189.

Gramlich, John. “Gap between Number of Blacks, Whites in Prison Narrows.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 12 Jan. 2018, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/12/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/.

Victor M. Rios (2015) Decolonizing the White Space in Urban Ethnography City and Community Pages (258-261)

Is the NBA Racist? (Part 5)

Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder was a CBS sports commentator for twelve years. Knowing the ins and outs of the NBA, Snyder was as good of a commentator as any. Regardless of his experience and on the job knowledge, one day Snyder was asked why there was such a high number of black athletes in the NBA. Ignorantly, he explained what Heidi Lujan and Stephen DiCarlo call, the “slavery hypertension hypothesis” (Lujan and DiCarlo, 2018).

Snyder explained that black people have been naturally selected through the years of slavery to have physically superior bodies. This, he explained, is why the NBA is eighty percent black. Personally, I find his answer to be very similar to Thomas Jefferson’s when establishing what race was best for what job. The only difference is that Snyder is saying this after three hundred years of “modernization” and “growth”.

Lujan and DiCarlo, both being researchers on this topic, explain that his hypothesis’ credibility is far too weak to be broadcasted for the world to hear. They explain plenty of other theories with far more support, but far less recognition.

One of these alternative theories points out the fact that the average black family makes sixty percent of the average white family. Therefore, they have limited access to certain sports such as swimming and hockey. Sports like these require much more organization and funding than sports like basketball. So, rather than black people being biological hybrids, the assumption is that black people growing up are only left with few sports to fight over (Lujan and DiCarlo, 2018).

Another theory, which goes highly unrecognized, is the criminalization of the African American identity. This identity issue is brought up with terms like double consciousness and intersectionality. Starting at a young age, there are societal pressures put on black students that to do well in school one must be “white”. These black students are then left with the decision to give up their identity and attempt to pursue a “white” career in an unsuitable environment or believe in their identity and attempt to find a career that allows them to be who they are (Ferguson, 2000).

Picking between a rock and a hard place, many students take the latter. By taking the latter these individuals are left to look at their role models. And can you think of who they may be? What type of professions allow individuals to remain “black” and still make a good living? Well, a large portion are NBA players, because as said before, eighty percent rule the courts.

Not to mention that natural selection and evolution doesn’t occur within a few generations. The effects are significantly minimal even after ten, twenty, full generations of mammals. So even if these alternatives weren’t available, the main explanation is highly questionable on its own.

At least for me, I was left to wonder why these logical explanations of the NBA are left in the background and are instead commonly trumped by the idea that slavery somehow helped people of color (Lujan and DiCarlo, 2018).

To explain this phenomenon, one must consider our Implicit Bias. This bias has allowed for certain norms and hypotheses to flourish when in reality they are ignorant and most likely incorrect. It shapes how we see the world, which in a way creates the world. It is this shaping that causes employment inequality issues, our tendency to justify white actions, and belief in easy fallacies rather than the blunt truth.

Implicit racism is a huge underlying issue that is going unnoticed because whether many people know it or not, they are encouraging and supporting it. The NBA is simply one example of the US societal issue on race. Rather than pretending slavery was good in some ways, we need to accept the hard truth. It wasn’t. It didn’t genetically alter African Americans through natural selection. And it wasn’t a necessity for societal growth. It was simply wrong and to this day people pay for that wrongdoing. So, the least we can do is acknowledge it. Because the first step to fixing a problem is admitting it exists.

Read next Wednesday to hear about how racism is a very active process in the United States today.

The Whole Series is Now Available:

Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)

Work cited

Alemán, Rosa. “What Is Intersectionality, and What Does It Have to Do with Me?” YW Boston, 24 Apr. 2018, www.ywboston.org/2017/03/what-is-intersectionality-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me/

Dicarlo, Stephen E, and Heidi L Lujan. “The ‘African Gene’ Theory: It Is Time to Stop Teaching and Promoting the Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis.” American Physiological Society Journal | Home, 2018, www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00070.2018

Ferguson, Ann. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (2000): 578-587

“Jimmy Snyder (Sports Commentator).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Nov. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Snyder_(sports_commentator)

Kristin. “Understanding W.E.B. Du Bois’ Concept of Double Consciousness.” Kristin Does Theory, 2012, kristindoestheory.umwblogs.org/understanding-w-e-b-du-bois-concept-of-double-consciousness/

Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)

The recently released movie, BlacKkKlansman, captures Ron Stallworth’s work in the late 1970s as an undercover cop in his Ku Klux Klan investigation. As an African-American police officer, he infiltrates the Klan’s ranks by impersonating as a racist white man. Having a white detective take his place for face to face encounters, he eventually receives his certificate of membership and successfully cons a KKK grand wizard (Taylor, 2014). **Haha, I love it.**

Stallworth’s story proves the ignorance and irrationality of this organization. Stallworth’s success caused a decline in support of the Klan and the publication of a black empowering book and movie. Deliberate actions like these are arguably the only way to end both explicit and implicit racism.

In an effort to define the different forms of racism, many neuroscientists have begun to divide racism into either explicit or implicit racism. Explicit racism is a term used when describing acts of racism such as the organization of hate groups, like the KKK, using racial slurs, or consciously supporting racism (Quianna, 2018). It is the conscious decision that some individuals make to support their belief of oppressing a group of people depending on the color of their skin.

On the other hand, we have implicit racism. This is the unconscious bias we have when making judgments about people of a certain race and ethnicity. This is shown when someone dismisses job and college applications, expresses microaggression, or subconsciously supports racism (Quianna, 2018). This bias develops from everything we experience throughout our lives. From the books we read, movies we watch, and the people we meet, they are all factors that develop our implicit racism (Gladwell, 2005). It is this form of racism that can only end through deliberate action and conscious thought.

These two forms of racism play a huge role in America’s history and how we live our current day to day lives. Yet, as already alluded to, explicit racism is arguably dying. For instance, in the 1920s the KKK was at the peak of their strength in America. They had fifteen percent of the eligible population in their cult, which reached as high as four million members (Moore, 2018). Now the KKK is at a mere 3,000 members (Trimble, 2017). Therefore, at first glance, it would appear racism has been on the decline for quite some time; however, this does not address the other side of the coin.

On the other front, the fight against implicit racism has remained at a standstill. Scientists are aware of this due to implicit-association tests (IAT). IAT measures the association between concepts by pairing two together and timing how fast someone can categorize them. The assumption with this test is if one can categorize two words together quicker than another two then our subconscious brains believe they have something in common.

The IAT for racism tests how well we associate people of color with the word “bad” and Caucasian faces with the word “good”. Through Project Implicit, I found that sixty-eight percent of participants have some amount of preference over white people compared to black people (Greenwald, 2011). To make matters worse, Malcolm Gladwell conducted an IAT only on African-American participants. Shockingly, he found that about half of the participants have a stronger association with whites than they do with blacks (Gladwell, 2015). In large, these results showed us just how inescapable implicit racism is in all Americans today.

If explicit racism really is as weak as it first appears, then how is implicit racism still so evident in our mindsets? How could so many of us advocate for equality when our subconscious is stuck in the 1920s? In short, this is because today’s society was built by white people, and therefore is structured for white people. As previously said, implicit racism is developed through everything we experience. Those experiences all build on themselves because with subconscious thought comes subconscious action. One may not even notice the speed he or she dismisses a job application because the first name is stereotyped as a “black name” (Ziegert and Hanges). Or even question the whitewashing of America’s history books.

Implicit racism is a problem that we can only change through deliberate action. Through conscious action that goes against our unquestioned, subconscious thoughts. One that fights this “natural process” of white people on top and black people on the bottom.

Ron Stallworth’s police work was not just extraordinary because it helped weaken explicit racism, but it also did the same for implicit racism. His publication of black empowerment has now been published for the world to read and watch, which is one step in the right direction for our subconscious minds to remember.

Please feel free to read the next post as I discuss a specific example of how our subconscious minds affect our world in unexpected ways.

The Whole Series is Now Available:

Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)

Work Cited

Gladwell, Malcolm (2005) Blink in Black and White Blink Pages 77-88 ELAINE BROWN

Greenwald, Tony, et al. “ProjectImplicit.” About the IAT, 2011, implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/iatdetails.html.

Moore, Leonard. “Ku Klux Klan.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Oct. 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan.

Quianna, Canada. “Implicit vs Explicit Racism.” The Responsible Consumer, 15 Sept. 2018, theresponsibleconsumer.wordpress.com/implicit-vs-explicit-racism/

Taylor, Matt. “The Black Undercover Cop Who Infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado.” Vice, Vice, 30 May 2014, www.vice.com/en_us/article/wd4gym/we-talked-to-the-black-undercover-cop-who-infiltrated-the-kkk-in-colorado.

Trimble, Megan. “These States Still Had Active KKK Groups in 2017.” U.S. News & World Report, U.S. News & World Report, 2017, www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-08-14/the-kkk-is-still-based-in-22-states-in-the-us-in-2017.

Ziegert, Jonathan C. and Paul J. Hanges. “Employment Discrimination: The Role of Implicit Attitudes, Motivation, and a Climate for Racial Bias.” Journal of Applied Psychology 90(3):553-562

How Unnatural Racism Is (Part 3)

In 1619 a Dutch ship arrived on the shores of the British colony known as Jamestown, Virginia. Aboard were nineteen African slaves. Those nineteen individuals, taken against their will, were the first to suffer from a four hundred year long, and counting, human-made catastrophe. It was then that American slavery began, which quickly evolved to the societal racism we see today. Today’s post is written to show that bad luck had nothing to do with that ship arriving on the Virginian shore.

David Olusoga (2015) states, “Ideas of Africans as inferior, backwards, and barbaric can be traced back to those justifying slavery in the 18th century. And the stereotypes still cast a shadow over the continent”. Olusoga continues his point when referring to the 18th-century slave owner, Edward Long. Long is notorious for writing the book History of Jamaica, which was the most damaging published text for racial ideas to ever exist. With his lack of scientific training and extreme eurocentrism, Long wrote a very influential book on why and how Africans are inferior and possibly not even human. Regardless of lacking any scientific evidence to back his claim, his book was widely accepted and published throughout Europe.

To make matters worse, Long was not alone. Books, novels, articles, you name it, were being published all throughout the world with the commonality of spreading this awful opinion as truth. And it wasn’t just the “bad guys”. Thomas Jefferson is a shining example of one of our founding fathers with misguided intentions. In Jefferson’s analysis of people of color, he finds that they are biologically conditioned for manual labor since they lack the intelligence and beauty of white people. He follows by stating how they are also “tolerant of heat” and are simply better designed to work a physically demanding job with little thinking involved (Fields, 1990). His thoughts were then shared with the world to help create a country. A country built to favor white people and provide their “biologically deserved” jobs. When black people were left to work jobs where their “tolerance to heat” came in handy.

As already stated by Olusoga, these forms of influence were published for one reason and one reason only, to justify slavery and colonialism. With the turn of the 15th century, the dominant European powers learned about the millions of people and acres of land that could be theirs, all they had to do was grab it. Being technologically superior, there was little to nothing Africans and Native Americans could do to stop these European invaders. Even countries as small as Belgium were able to colonize all the Congo and strip it of its land and people. Therefore, the issue of colonizing land and people was not external, but instead internal.

The European leaders needed to find a way that their citizens would be on board for the slaughter and enslavement of millions of people. They needed a justification for their actions, one that was more than simple greed and the desire for power. They needed to be seen as leaders doing it both for themselves, but also for the people they were colonizing. And that is exactly what they did.

Before long, writers like Long and Jefferson began to dominate the public consciousness. It created the idea that non-Europeans were inferior to the human race. And it was their duty, as Europeans, to conquer these people and teach them their ways.

This technique has proven to work century after century. King Leopold II ruled Belgium and committed the single largest genocide known to mankind. His army killed up to ten million Congolese and enslaved the rest. In justifying his actions, he stated that Belgium was of a superior race who deserved land and wealth from the inferior Congolese.

Sound familiar? Hitler gave quite a similar speech. In justifying the slaughter of nine million people, Hitler explained that Germany was a superior race, who deserved to rule to world. We can also look at Manifest Destiny. The United States deserved the land it took over and that it was their given right. As a last example, we see this with mass incarceration today, especially in the United States. These prisoners broke the law and therefore deserve to be imprisoned.

In all these examples, nobody thinks to question the people who decide what is or is not deserved. My question is why do 360,000 people right now deserve to give up time in their life for stealing things of financial value, rather than simply paying it back plus some? Another question I have is why did seven million people deserve to be arrested from 2001 to 2010 for marijuana when eleven states currently have the drug legalized? I believe that sometimes we need to question whether people really deserve the things that happen to them.

There is nothing natural about racism. It was socially constructed to justify the barbaric and inhumane actions of the European leaders during the age of colonialism. And unfortunately, the has been working since the moment those nineteen human beings began their lifetime work in Jamestown. We need to look past this thousand-year-old method and try to see the world in a new way. One that is interpreted by how you think, not how society wants you to think. The next post will touch on implicit bias in order to see just how deeply rooted this construct is within us all.

The Whole Series is Now Available:

Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)

Work Cited

Editors, History.com. “Slavery in America.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 12 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery.

Fields, Barbara. “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review (1990): 95-118.

Jefferson, Thomas. “The Difference is Fixed in Nature.” Notes on Virginia (1785): 95-103.

Sawyer, Wendy, and Peter Wagner. “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019.” Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019 | Prison Policy Initiative, 2019, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html.

Olusoga, David. “The Roots of European Racism Lie in the Slave Trade, Colonialism – and Edward Long | David Olusoga.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 Sept. 2015, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-racism-africa-slavery.

Redefining Racism (Part 2)

Image Credit: https://www.facebook.com/pg/Denying-Racism-Is-The-New-Racism-1027649753912073/posts/

Racism is a system of advantage based on race. This definition of racism was first coined by Daniels Tatum. With this definition, she creates a clear distinction between prejudice and racism. Prejudice, being an individual act, is a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience. While racism is more of a systemic structure that individuals have little to no dictation over (Tatum, 1997).

What I find interesting about this distinction is the conclusion she is able to draw from it. She states that all white people, living in the United States, are racist, while all people of color can not be racist. She is not saying that all white Americans have a prejudice towards people of color. Instead, she is explaining that all white Americans benefit from this systematic advantage, and therefore must be racist. There is literally nothing a white American can do to not reek the benefits of their skin color.

Before I continue, I would like to encourage you to read one of my posts that explains the benefits that all white Americans have over people of color. I can say from personal experience that growing up in a white space can cloud one’s judgment. Thus creating an illusion of racism as a mere side effect from the years of slavery. Which buys into the narrative that people of color are only economically disadvantaged and unfortunately snowball into creating a number of other societal problems. When instead racism and economic inequality are entirely different issues. If this is your stance on the matter, please feel free to click on the link provided.

Daniels Tatum’s statement is initially very hard to hear. At least for me, it was instantly rejected before any rational thought. I believe this is because being called a “racist” is one of the single worst words to be called in modern society. Due to “new racism”, there exists the illusion that racism is mostly a thing of the past, and anyone called it is a direct attack on being a modern, moral creature.

As a clarification, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva defines “new racism” as the form of racism that has existed since the late 1960s. He explains that this new wave creates the idea that racism is largely a thing of the past, rather than a huge current issue (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). It is the belief that racism has, in large, been defeated and that we now mostly live as an enlightened society. The graph to the right shows an example of such. I was astonished to find that segregation is as much of an issue as it was fifty years ago. Somewhere along the battle over civil rights, society decided the issue was resolved and moved on. Yet it only took a few decades for the issue to resurface once again. It has resurfaced, but this time people believe there is nothing to fight over.

Racism is still a huge problem. It is one that incarcerates hundreds of thousands of Americans, creates a huge inequality in pay, and harms millions of people every year. Racism, new racism, is very real and it is something that we are all bound to. Being a system of advantage or disadvantage, it is not enough to simply be “blind” from skin color. To truly combat racism, and to truly not be racist, we need to step up and take action.

Next week I will go into detail about how race associated with color is nothing more than a construct and how that construct has been used to divide our understanding of who gets and does what. Racism is arguably not what it once was, but I hope by the end of this session of posts you understand the issue is still significant enough to fight for.

The Whole Series is Now Available:

Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)

Work Cited

Chang, Alvin. “The Data Proves That School Segregation Is Getting Worse.” Vox.com, Vox Media, 5 Mar. 2018, www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-getting-worse-data.

Daniel Tatum (1997) Defining Racism:”Can We Talk?” Pages 100-107

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2015) The Structure of Racism in Color-Blind, “Post Racial” Pages 1-20

Victor M. Rios (2015) Decolonizing the White Space in Urban Ethnography City and Community Pages (258-261)

Bridging Our Understanding of Racism (Part 1)

I felt that an introductory post would be a good way to kick off this saga of seven posts that all address contemporary racism in its own way. And no, I am not talking about the past. I am not talking about the great feats of Martin Luther King Jr. Instead, I am writing about the racism that goes on every day in the United States. The system of inequality that exists in this country. One that many people believe is a thing of the past, or is something that they can do nothing about.

I should probably explain where this all started. My name is Jacob West and I am from Upstate New York, and as you may have guessed by my name alone… society identifies me as white. As the previous sentence shows, I grew up in what Elijah Anderson would easily classify as a white space. For most of my life I was completely alienated from the issue of racism.

Now let me attempt to quickly clarify the common white space view. As George Lipsitz has put it, “whiteness doesn’t have to speak its name.” Therefore, I knew racism was an issue, but I did not understand it because I have never felt it. At the time, I saw the discussion on racism as a misconception. I saw the oppression people of color face as an after effect of the years of slavery. This made sense to me because I looked at the matter solely from an economic perspective. I looked at the objective facts but misunderstood the causality of those facts.

For example, the average African-American appears less qualified in the job market when compared to their white counterparts. Due to the greater opportunities and quality of education whites are on average provided, black Americans are consistently disadvantaged. These are all objective facts, but what I misunderstood at the time was why this difference in education came to be. At first, I thought that’s just how things were because better education is directly connected with wealth, which the average black American has less of when compared to their white peers. Yet, after reading on the subject, I have discovered deliberate segregation between the quality of education young American’s receive, which I will go into detail in the following posts. In other words, rather than believing racism is actively happening throughout society, I believed that racism was a thing of the past and that people of color simply needed to economically catch up.

** This “post-racial” thinking of solely focusing on economics has been the root of, in my opinion, all of these disconnects in truth and disillusion. I simply wanted to add this paragraph as I have to emphasize the significance of this statement. Seeing racism through nothing more but the lens of economics misses direct legal components playing into institutional inequality and how economic position also does not erase stereotypes (Lipsitz, 2007). **

Sadly, I was not alone with this belief. This common white space misconception exists because it makes sense for the environment these people are within. Being withdrawn from social and racial issues, the people within these spaces simply do not see or experience issues outside of economic ones and therefore believe racism must pertain to the only issue they relate to.

The problem with this lies in the fact that just because someone is not present to hear something, does not mean a noise is not made. What I mean by this is that people within white spaces can still have a racist mindset, even if there is nobody for them to be actively racist towards. Therefore, subconscious racism forms in the culture and eventually normalizes ever so passively.

Through these seven posts, I hope to open the minds of these white space individuals, while also empowering the minds of these already present activists. Looking at implicit bias, a redefining of racism, and questioning racial norms, I hope anyone can pull some sort of useful information from these posts.

I was born in a white space, and therefore rationalized my understanding of the white space. My understanding of this other perspective, this true perspective, has only started to develop as I have begun to learn and hunt for knowledge that goes against my own beliefs and experiences at the time. Only when I developed this questioning philosophy, did I begin to see this very pressing issue that is in fact separate from economic struggle.

If you are reading this as an outsider, someone who has made their views outside of the mindset of racism, just as I did, I encourage you to continue reading every Wednesday and Sunday. I know it can be hard, trust me, I’ve been there, but sometimes the best thing to do is just read and listen to a view contrary to your own. To open one’s reasoning is to allow growth. And personally, I find growth to be one of the most important parts of being human. We need to allow each other to speak and listen to one another no matter the topic, and who knows, you may find that the systems we live by are a bit more controlling than you first thought.

The Whole Series is Now Available:

Implicit Racism, the Racism you Never Knew About (Part 4)