Acts 16:33
At that hour of the night the jailer took them [Paul and Silas] and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his family were baptized.

When the jailer accepted the word of God that Paul and Silas shared with him, his eyes were opened and with those open eyes came compassion. Paul and Silas were no longer just prisoners but injured men who needed attending. Before that, the jailer had been complacent.

I wonder how often I have missed human need and suffering because of a callous heart. I drive the same streets every day. I walk the neighborhoods. I go to the same grocery store and eat at the same restaurants. Am I looking and not seeing?

Martin Buber spoke eloquently of man’s ability to look at “the other” without seeing in his book, I and Thou. Am I looking at other as “object” … as an “it,” or as a person … a true “thou.”

William Shakespeare captured this idea slightly differently (but effectively) in the Merchant of Venice through one of the speeches of Shylock: “I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?” [Act III, sc 1] Replace the word Jew with “the poor” and you get the idea.

The jailer could not do much. He couldn’t free Paul and Silas, he couldn’t change their circumstances, but he could give a small comfort: he could wash their wounds.

When I see poor and wretched souls, I become numb with the enormity of their deprivation. What can I possibly do? Perhaps it’s only the small act that needs doing in the moment…. washing wounds by listening, touching, asking, engaging, feeding, sharing. Perhaps I should stop worrying about what I cannot do and simply do what I can do.

I have heard it said that we can never “out give” the poor. Their need will always be greater that our ability to meet it. This sentiment reverberates in Jesus’s own words: “The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want…” [Mark 14:7a]

First off, a big thank you to Nikki, Kate, and Cayce for the opportunity to guest blog at Irene’s Daughters.  I hope I can contribute something to the excellent posts and discussions thus far!

Last week I came across this CNN article about a group of seniors who grew up in Macon, GA during the Jim Crow Era, and recently held a racially integrated 50th high school reunion.   The article is well worth reading, not only as encouraging stories about race seem so rare these days, but also because it’s a good starting point for a number of different discussions about race.   In particular, the article got me thinking about the invisibility of white privilege, and the importance of concrete action to racial reconciliation and anti-racist activism.

I got to thinking about white privilege after reading comments from seniors – black and white – interviewed in the article who recalled that as children, they perceived segregation as normal.  It wasn’t something to be challenged or questioned, and for some it wasn’t even understood as discriminatory.  It was simply a “way of life,” taken for granted as the way the world was and had to be:

Listening to his mother and her childhood friends, Cordell said, he was struck by how segregation was “was so transparent to them at the time they were living through it. It was a way of life, so they didn’t acknowledge its existence.”

“I find it interesting how human nature teaches you to accept things that are — and some people question the reality, and other people don’t.”

Institutionalized racism and white privilege work in much the same way in the present day.  We are accustomed to the many effects of racism and white privilege in our society: the disproportionate dominance of white males in almost every sector of business and culture, de facto segregation in schools, churches, and workplaces; racial gaps in hiring, income, and school performance, to name just a few.  Many Americans have become so inured to these realities that they see them as just The Way Things Are – or worse, just the way “those people” are.

This is part of how privilege of any kind works – by presenting an uneven playing field as anything but what it is.  People who benefit from privilege don’t generally believe that they have been given a leg up on those who don’t; rather, they tend to believe that everyone has an equal opportunity to get ahead in life, and they just happen to be ahead because they have worked hard, made good choices, and otherwise made good use of the same opportunities everyone else has.  By this logic, social and economic racial disparities can only be explained by failure to take full advantage of these opportunities.  Privilege thrives on the assumption that a system of unfair advantages is really a system based on pure merit.  This mythology ignores the ongoing effects of past racial injustice, denies the reality of present-day racism, and presents white privilege and racial disparities as natural byproducts of the way things are, the way people are.  This naturalization of racial injustice is a major obstacle to candid discussions about white privilege.  It is very difficult to have a discussion about something that we are taught to believe doesn’t exist.

So the question is, what can we as people committed to anti-racism and racial reconciliation do to challenge white privilege and make it more visible?  We need to ask ourselves how we have bought into white privilege as a way of life.  White allies have a particular responsibility to check and question their own privilege, but those of us who are POC can also play a part.   We may not have access to white privilege, but we often participate in it and buy into it.  With that in mind, here are some of the ways I am working to resist the tendency to naturalize white privilege (and other forms of privilege) in my own life:
- I am working to become more conscious of the ways I buy into white privilege:  making positive assumptions about white people (well-off, intelligent, safe) and negative assumptions about POC (poor, uneducated, dangerous).  Assuming I have a right to information about POC that I wouldn’t dream of asking a white person (where are you “really from?,” etc.)
- I share my perspective as a POC with my white friends and family members.  It’s not that it’s my job to educate them, but that it’s important to be open to have conversations about privilege with people who might be more disposed to hear where I’m coming from.
- I am working to become more conscious of my own privilege in other areas, and to recognize that privilege and prejudice are intersectional.  I have access to privilege because of my socioeconomic status, my sexuality and gender identity, and my religious upbringing, and I have a responsibility to check and question myself on those counts.

What are your thoughts on how we can work to expose and challenge white privilege?  Please share your ideas in the comments.

I’ve often struggled personally with how to reconcile my education as a budding anti-racist with the realities of my family life.  Inevitably at this time of year, when prayers of thanksgiving are offered in my church and in the homes of various family members, we tend to gloss over or flat out ignore the significance of this day in our nation’s history.

As kids, we’re taught all kinds of wrong things about the first Thanksgiving.  Fortunately, things are improving from the time when I was a child parading around in a paper-feathered headdress in a school play.  Scholastic even has some advice for educators who still haven’t gotten the story right.  As Resist Racism points out, this is often the only time of year that non-native people even think about Native Americans, and sadly, our thinking is usually caricature.

While in my own little piece of the world, I’m reading and blogging about racial injustice, white privilege, and the life, what happens when I go home with my head full of this stuff and encounter challenges at the dinner table?  How can I present what I’ve learned in a gracious way but still remain committed to my ideals?

Love Isn’t Enough has a great guide for alternative activities that would be helpful if I were teaching elementary school, but inviting my family over for a day of mourning in solidarity with my native brothers and sisters wouldn’t exactly fly at Thanksgiving with the in-laws.  The mere mental image of that scene reminds me of the passage that says,

And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.’ -Matthew 13:57

I’m not looking to get run out of town, or stoned, but I know that often times those are the breaks for doing the right thing. I’ve taken my fair-share of attempts at insult, bearing up under the labels of “bleeding-heart” (which doesn’t really hurt my feelings) or hearing, “lighten up, you’re so sensitive.”

For me, it’s not just limited to participating in activities where people will remember to thank God for the bounty of America, while ignoring the past and present pain our riches have cost others.  We never neglect to give thanks for the troops, but often forget all those civilians killed in the crossfighting.

It’s also the fact that in many of these family gatherings, there will be open use of racial slurs, or stereotypes.  Because ours is a white family, we are a meeting of “us” that can launch into conversations about “them.”  Do I confront these things?  Make passive-aggressive sarcastic comments (as I’m prone to do)?  Should I make a scene or let these things pass knowing that this will be my children’s only exposure to most of the folks for a whole year, and my husband and I can clean up the mess later?

I’ve done it all, and rarely gotten any of it right.  Anyone out there have similar experiences?  How (if at all) do you handle it when you go home with this for the holidays?

Dear Scary,

About a decade ago, the PTA council I belonged to was in the middle of a heated debate.
Should we bring this “scary guy” in to help with the new zero tolerance push from the school district.
My son was about eight at the time, and school was not going well for him.
He was always the kid at the end of the zero tolerance inquisition.
So I really wasn’t keen about another guy coming in and telling me what was wrong with my son.

Some fliers were passed around about the message this guy had, and I quickly realized
the discussion was about how he appeared not the message. I was interested to hear what
this guy had to say. So my vote was to bring Scary Guy to our elementary school.
Our world was harsh surroundings for my son, nothing he could do was right in the eyes
of the principal, staff, or kids. But the message of love and acceptance kept us hanging
on this pasts decade.

The school district my son was at nearly drove him to desperation, recommended medication,
and finally just threw him away. But the words and beliefs of the Scary Guy lingered.
Through a miracle of sorts, our paths crossed with Scary in 2007.

My son was just going through the motions trying to pull himself back together after the
abuse from the kids and teachers. Scary spoke with him at length in one on one sessions,
and out on road tours for charitable organizations. His words helped strengthen my whole family.
His lovely writer, Cathryn provides a inspirational muse to the troubled soul.

We are happy to report Calvin is in college, and faced with an upcoming transplant.
Sadly, he still gets harassed in person and on FaceBook, with threats and negative comments.
But with someone like Scary in his life, nothing can hold him back from success.

Love you,
Stephanie

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Ok, so according to you, it’s perfectly fine for two girls to basically have gay sex and simulate masturbation on stage, but when two guys do the same thing, it’s crude? What the fuck??? That doesn’t even make sense!!! THAT IS THE MOST PREJUDICED STATEMENT TO EVER COME OUT OF YOUR MOUTH. FUCK YOU. You tell me all the time how it’s important to treat EVERYONE equally, but then you go around saying shit like “How dare Adam Lambert flaunt his sexuality? It’s disgusting!”

I’m sorry, but if you ask me, that’s just fucking unreal. How can you be so sexist and prejudiced and just all around unfair, yet go around saying things like “You should treat all people equally?”

I am at a loss for words. I am appaulled and disappointed and disgusted in with you, Mom. Dad, too.

As I walked around the city, I can see many people with stereotype, prejudice and discrimination toward a certain group of people.
“Ew! Adam is a gay. Hate that!”
“This kind of uneducated person will only slow down the country from improving.”
“Wear like that, definitely not a good person.”
“Better stay away from the blacks or I may be so unlucky to be targetted by them as a victim.”
I wonder, do they know that their stereotype, prejudice and discrimination may cause harm to the particular group of people?

Stereotyping involves making assumptions and applying an attribute to a group of people without knowing all the facts.
When I was in the crowd, I overheard a group of people saying that Indians are violent and Malays are lazy.
This can lead to prejudice and discrimination.

Prejudice is an attitude or belief on a group of people based on personal or social ideals without considering the facts.
I saw few women were chatting. From the way of a Chinese mother spoke, it showed that she dislikes Indians due to some personal beliefs.
Prejudgment.

Discrimination is the act of being unfair to certain groups of people.
It is based on prejudice.
Continue from the above example, the Chinese mother told her daughter not to play with her Indian friend by telling her that the Indian girl may influence her to become bad.

Prejudice is a state of mind which many people see as harmless to people but discrimination is the action which resulted from prejudice and can be harmful.
All these prejudical attitudes and discriminatory behaviour may hurt people.
Stereotype, prejudice, discrimination.
Do you have any of them?

From the abstract of a new paper to be published by PNAS:

People tend to view members of their own political group more positively than members of a competing political group. In this article, we demonstrate that political partisanship influences people’s visual representations of a biracial political candidate’s skin tone. In three studies, participants rated the representativeness of photographs of a hypothetical (Study 1) or real (Barack Obama; Studies 2 and 3) biracial political candidate. Unbeknownst to participants, some of the photographs had been altered to make the candidate’s skin tone either lighter or darker than it was in the original photograph. Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, whereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern. For evaluations of Barack Obama, the extent to which people rated lightened photographs as representative of him was positively correlated with their stated voting intentions and reported voting behavior in the 2008 Presidential election. This effect persisted when controlling for political ideology and racial attitudes.

And more from NPR:

[Eugene Caruso] and his colleagues took different photos of then-candidate Obama and digitally manipulated them to alter just the areas of exposed skin. “So we sort of isolated the head and the hands of Obama and altered the skin tone to make it relatively lighter in tone or relatively darker in tone,” Caruso says.

The research team then showed the altered photos, plus the unaltered ones, one at a time to undergraduate students and asked them to rate the photos in terms of how representative they thought each photo was of the candidate. They researchers also questioned the students about their political views.

Liberal participants were most likely to rate a lightened photo of Obama as being most representative of him, while conservatives were most likely to say that about a photo that had been darkened, according to their findings published in a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

What’s more, the researchers found that the degree to which someone saw a lightened photo as being representative of Obama was related to whether he voted for him a week later.

That was true even after the researchers controlled for political views and measures of bias against blacks, says Caruso. “Assuming that people had equal levels of political conservativism,” he says, “the extent to which you rated the lightened photos as more representative was, over and above your ideology, also predictive of your voting intentions and your voting behavior.” …

Caruso also says he recently has been looking to see if skin tone can affect people’s level of support for a novel biracial candidate when people’s political affiliation with that candidate is ambiguous.

In one new study, his team used altered photos of a person described in the experiment as a candidate for a position with the Department of Education. People were shown either a darkened, lightened or unaltered photo of the fake candidate and then asked a few questions about their views on various issues facing the department.

All participants were told that the candidate agreed with them on half of the issues. But when asked if that candidate would get their support, says Caruso, “lo and behold, those who saw a photo with darkened skin accompanying the candidate’s biography just a few minutes earlier reported that they were less likely to vote for this candidate.”

To begin our study and reading of To Kill a Mockingbird, we conducted a lesson on US history. Our novel is set in the state of Alabama before the civil rights movement. During this time, laws were in place to segregate the races. These came to be known as “Jim Crow Laws.” One of the main themes of this novel is the fight against such societal injustice. We watched a few video clips to get a sense of the extent of racism in the South during the 1940’s — 1960’s (which is when our novel is set).

This student slide show outlines some examples of “Jim Crow” laws. The states where the laws originate are included.

This clip interviews a professor who runs the Jim Crow Museum which displays examples of racist art from past and present. WARNING: Some of these images may be offensive to some viewers.

This student slide show offers a very clear explanation of Jim Crow laws in relation to the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. WARNING: There are plot spoilers from the novel….stop the video when you see the book cover if you don’t want to hear them.

According to a recent study, most children will, by their ninth birthday, be conscious of racism and will understand stereotypes and how they work. This research was conducted at the Rush NeuroBehavioral Center in Chicago and involved 124 children between the ages of 5 and 11. 

The children were told a story about a fictitious place called Kidland. In Kidland, there are Greens and Blues, with the former believing the latter are not terribly bright. Researchers found that at about the age of nine, children began to pick up on the effects of the stereotype, positing that Blues would not be asked to join the spelling team or to become part of a study group. Moreover, most of the older children understood the similarities between the biases in fictitious Kidland and those in real-life.

These results suggest that stereotypes and prejudice emerge early on in life. They may thus be durable and somewhat resistant to change. At the same time, the findings suggest that these attitudes are learned, emerging at a time when children are becoming more conscious of the world around them. As such, racial bias should not be seen as intrinsic or inherent. Rather, prejudices are filtered through our discourse, cultural narratives, stories, jokes, cartoons and institutions. None of these are set in stone, but neither are they easily changed. Importantly, as this study suggests, if we want change, we’re going to have to start young.