10 Ways White Liberals Perpetuate Racism

[amb123]

Last edited Thu Sep 3, 2015, 08:52 PM - Edit history (1)

by George Sachs, Psy.D. - Huffington Post

*snip*

Microinvalidations are momentary acts that serve to invalidate the very people of color we care about. These unconscious interactions perpetuate the hopelessness many African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, and other people of color, feel in this country.

Paul Pendler, Psy.D., of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University Medical School and Phillip Beverly, Ph.D., Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Science at Chicago State University, wrote The Racism Root Kit: Understanding the Insidiousness of White Privilege.

The paper suggests that White people defer to an internal "root kit," or set of ingrained responses, to cover our racial biases and shut down those who intend to make us face them. Just like The Atlantic magazine did to today's college students.

"Sue and his colleagues delineated three forms of microaggressions: microassault, microinsult, and microinvalidation. Microassaults are explicit racial slurs with the intention to hurt an intended victim through name-calling. Microinsults are subtle communications that convey rudeness and attempt to demean one's racial identity. Finally, microinvalidations are comments that intend to exclude or nullify the feelings or experiences of persons of color."

* snip*

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-sachs-psyd/10-ways-white-liberals-pe_b_8068136.html

[hedda_foil]

1. Can't dispute these reactions/responses.

Altogether too many of them feel true. I'm appalled, but looking at the list, I realized that I've been guilty of all too many of them at one time or another. Probably most of us white liberals have been. Yes, it feels like white privilege.

[cheapdate]

2. I'm not convinced I need to microanalyze my relationship to racsim.

(Although, according to the author's inescapable logic, that statement is reason enough to prove just the opposite.)

I'm a "white liberal" born and raised in the deep South, a product of the Mobile, Alabama public school system, among the first bunch of young people raised entirely in desegregated schools in Alabama.

I think I know what racism looks like. My Scoutmaster (for a short time) was a klansman. My kindergarten teacher told us not to drink coca-cola from the bottle because "niggers" had been handling them. Walking back home to my house with a black friend after football practice, a carload of rednecks pulled over and fought us. My brother and I fought the neighbor's older kids across the street when they picked a fight with us "nigger-lovers" -- so called because my Mom occasionally had a black friend and co-worker over at the house after work. We weren't raised racist, and we weren't raised to have "white guilt" (which I find to be a strange concept.)

We were raised to believe that people are people and the color of a person's skin doesn't change how you treat them. Fuck what the neighbors say.

[Doctor_J]

3. so if you are a racist, then you admit it, and if you're not a racist,

you're a racist because you deny that you're a racist.

Got it. Good thing the author assures us he's not PC.

[U of M Dem]

4. I believe that the "White Racism" perpetuated by liberals

who care about race issues that the article is referring to is referring to prejudice.

Prejudice is not always about racism.

Prejudice in human beings is not a moralistic quality, it just exists. It is a part of our rudimentary survival toolkit.

From a psychological standpoint prejudice is an evolutionary trait rooted in discrimination between objects in the environment. The process that allows us to tell if the food is spoiled or fresh.

The process of prejudice formation is based on ones experience.

Prejudice as a construct is not in itself the problem. Prejudice is value neutral. From a survival standpoint some prejudice is good, some is bad, some neutral and most importantly it VARIES from person to person.

Racial prejudice that is acted upon and not checked by conscious thought resulting in racist behavior is racism and is wrong.

It is terrible that the social environment is hateful and bigoted, filled with violence and inequity... And it is the social environment that shapes prejudice in people.

Blanketly stating that (paraphrase) 'because white liberals in general share in a particular type of prejudice based on white privilege this perpetuates racism,' is in itself perpetuating racism by the same mechinism of targeting a subset of race (white liberals) and holding a set of prejudicial beliefs about them. I believe this is where the proverbial 'you don't know me' comes in.

It is hard to be critical of a particular race without making sweeping statements and without making vast assumptions of others' manners of thinking.

I agree people should challenge their prejudices and check their bias. But please do not try to prescribe a solution to racism using this mechanism, it undermines the efforts of people that are open and trying to make the world better for everyone.

The answer to racism is not the denigration of others based on experiential differences.