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Introduction to the Lesson
The purpose of
this third lesson in second unit is to introduce the education student to mental models,
concepts and constructs known as "race " and "racism".
Discussions of “race” and racism are rarely free of prejudice. Nor are they often characterized by the vaunted objectivity so
fundamental to western rational discourse.
Prejudice based upon
notions of “race” that have no scientific basis permeate the fabric of
western (European) cultural thought. of a significant number of
the world’s cultures are from infancy given a regular diet of the
misconceptions,
stereotypes and partial truths associated with “race.”
These exert a profound influence on one’s thoughts, feelings and
behavior often without the individual being consciously aware of them.
The individual member of a culture is taught to believe erroneous
information about “race,” if not directly, then indirectly with the
same faith and fervor one apportions to deity or a higher power. The motives of the cultural agents who transmit this information,
directly or through example, are many and varied. Some of these agents
merely teach what they were taught and pass on erroneous information
unchallenged and unprocessed. Others see no problem in teaching misconceptions, stereotypes, and
partial truths about “race”, if doing so protects individuals under
their care. Still others teach and model prejudices about “race”
deliberately, and in keeping with personal or cultural group agendas of
superiority, exploitation, oppression and control.
They attempt to provoke members of their own particular group into
retaliatory action for real and imagined wrongs visited on the group by
those inimical others. (McNair, 1998)
Ian F. Hanley
Lopez writing Harvard
Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 1-62, 6-7, 11-17 (Winter, 1994)
explains how race has been used in the law. He asks:
What is Race?
When some people use the "race" they attach a biological
meaning, still others use "race" as a socially constructed
concept. It is clear that even though race does not have a
biological meaning, it does have a social meaning which has been legally
constructed.
Is there a biological construction of "race? :
By . . ."biological race," I
mean the view of race espoused by Judge Tucker, and still popular today,
that there exist natural, physical divisions among humans that are
hereditary, reflected in morphology, and roughly but correctly captured
by terms like Black, White, and Asian (or Negroid, Caucasoid, and
Mongoloid). Under this view, one's ancestors and epidermis ineluctably
determine membership in a genetically defined racial group. The
connection between human physiognomy and racial status is concrete; in
Judge Tucker's words,
every individual's race has been "stampt"
by nature. . .
[D]espite the prevalent belief in biological races,
overwhelming evidence proves that race is not biological. Biological
races like Negroid and Caucasoid simply do not exist.
[A]. . . newly
popular [argument] among several scholars, [is] that races are
wholly illusory, whether as a biological or social concept. Under this
thinking, if there is no natural link between faces and races, then no
connection exists.
So where did
this notion of three (3) races come from?:
The notion that humankind can be
divided along White, Black, and Yellow lines reveals the social rather
than the scientific origin of race. The idea that there exist three
races, and that these races are "Caucasoid,"
"Negroid," and "Mongoloid," is rooted in the
European imagination of the Middle Ages, which encompassed only Europe,
Africa, and the Near East.. .
Nevertheless, the history of science has
long been the history of failed efforts to justify these social beliefs.
Along the way, various minds tried to fashion practical human typologies
along the following physical axes: skin color, hair texture, facial
angle, jaw size, cranial capacity, brain mass, frontal lobe mass, brain
surface fissures and convolutions, and even body lice. As one scholar
notes,
"[t]he nineteenth century was a period of exhaustive and--as
it turned out--futile search for criteria to define and describe race
differences.". . .
Attempts to define racial categories by physical
attributes ultimately failed. By 1871, some leading intellectuals had
recognized that even using the word "race" "was virtually
a confession of ignorance or evil intent."
The genetic studies of
the last few decades have only added more nails to the coffin of
biological race. Evidence shows that those features usually coded to
race, for example, stature, skin color, hair texture, and facial
structure, do not correlate strongly with genetic variation. . .
The rejection of race in science is now almost complete. In the end, we
should embrace historian Barbara Fields's succinct conclusion with
respect to the plausibility of biological races:
"Anyone who
continues to believe in race as a physical attribute of individuals,
despite the now commonplace disclaimers of biologists and geneticists,
might as well also believe that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the
tooth fairy are real, and that the earth stands still while the sun
moves."
So why do these erroneous ideas persist?
...few
in this society seem prepared to fully relinquish their subscription to
notions of biological race.. . .[including the] Congress and the Supreme
Court. Congress' anachronistic understanding of race is exemplified by a
1988 statute that explains that "the term 'racial group' means a
set of individuals whose identity as such is distinctive in terms of
physical characteristics or biological descent."
(1) The
Supreme Court, although purporting to sever race from biology, also
seems incapable of doing so. In Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji,
(2) the Court determined that an Arab could recover damages for racial
discrimination under 42 U.S.C. § 1981. . .
Despite [a] seeming
rejection of biological race, Justice White [stated]:
"The
Court of Appeals was thus quite right in holding that § 1981, 'at a
minimum,' reaches discrimination against an individual 'because he or
she is genetically part of an ethnically and physiognomically
distinctive subgrouping of homo sapiens."' (8). . .
By adopting the
lower court's language of genetics and distinctive subgroupings, Justice
White demonstrates the Court's continued reliance on blood as a metonym
for race. . . .
In Metrobroadcasting v. FCC, (6) Justice Scalia
again reveals the Court's understanding of race as a matter of blood.
During oral argument, Scalia attacked the argument that granting
minorities broadcasting licenses would enhance diversity by blasting
"the policy as a matter of 'blood,' at one point charging that the
policy reduced to a question of 'blood . . . blood, not background
and environment."' (5)
What is meant by the social construction
of race?
I define a "race" as a vast
group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent,
socially significant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry.
I argue
that race must be understood as a sui generis social phenomenon in which
contested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical
features, races, and personal characteristics.
In other words, social
meanings connect our faces to our souls. Race is neither an essence nor an
illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing process
subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro
effects of daily decisions. . .
[R]eferents of terms like Black, White,
Asian, and Latino are social groups, not genetically distinct branches of
humankind. (3)
James
M. Jones (1972), professor of psychology at the University of Delaware,
provides a rather elegant definition of racism.
He
says, Racism
. . . results
from the transformation of race prejudice and/or ethnocentrism through
the exercise of power against a racial group defined as inferior by
individuals and institutions with the intentional or unintentional
support of the entire culture (Jones, 1972, p. 172).
Justin Podur defines racism in this way:
Racism is a
social system that has two main effects: first, to constrain people's
lives by sorting them into positions in a hierarchy of power, prestige,
status, wealth, opportunity, and life chances; and second, to maintain,
extend, and reproduce this hierarchy by using political, economic,
patriarchal, and cultural power. The system has five key components:
(1) The
economic system-- shunting people of colour to the bottom of the
economic system and keeping them there;
(2) Geography--
maintaining spatial separation between white people and people of colour,
or, if space is shared, ensuring that the space is controlled by whites;
(3) Culture--
by denying people of colour the means of communication, by controlling
cultural institutions to determine how people communicate and therefore
think about themselves and society;
(4) The state--
by using force to fight any changes in the other components of the
system; by denying political power to people of colour;
(5)
Kinship and Gender-- by enforcing separation between races, preventing
intimacy and socialization together, race is maintained as a social
fact. (http://www.zmag.org/racewatch/znet_race_instructional2.htm)
These
overarching definitions will guide reading readings germane to this
lesson. The student will be exposed to such related concepts as
racial profiling, segregation, Apartheid, "Jim Crow", etc.
This
lesson was developed to address
elements of competency #3 on the barriers to understanding
diversity for education majors who are taking EDG 2701 in
partial fulfillment of the graduation requirements for an Associate of
Arts degree in Teaching (Elementary), Teaching (Secondary), Early
Childhood and Exceptional Education.
Competency #3 reads (in part) as
follows:
"The
student will examine barriers to understanding diversity by
Demonstrating that cultural differences among students
and teachers are natural and inevitable and should be
celebrated.
Defining the concept of prejudice and learning ways to reduce or
eliminate it and its related "isms."
Reviewing one's own viewpoint and value system, and
compare and contrast these with the viewpoints and values of others from
diverse backgrounds.
Defining the concept of a cultural filter and explain
how it affects the way a person or a group perceives reality.
Defining the concept of transformation (including
paradigms and paradigm shifts) and explain how it affects the way a
person or a group reduces or eliminates prejudice and
discrimination.
(A complete list of all the competencies for EDF 1005 is provided
below by clicking on the link titled
competencies) | 
