Let us review our definition of chauvinism based on "race." We have said previously that any kind of fear-based chauvinism e.g. chauvinism based on race, gnder, sexual orientation, social class, religion, ability etc., is the combination of attitudes of prejudice and the actions or behaviors of discrimination. Therefore, chauvinism based on race or racial bigotry can be characterized as:
This definition of chauvinism based upon "race" implies an exercise of power (individual and institutional) but is vague on the issue of macrocultural support of the discriminatory behaviors that deny power, privilege and status in "racial" outgroups. As such, it is necessary for us to revisit our definition of racial chauvinism to address specifically the issues of power and cultural sanction that become pronounced under the rubric of racism.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (1967) emerged as important "marginal" activist/academic voices offering explanations for the social unrest of the 1960s that came to be known as the "Black Power" movement. Carmichael, the former president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Hamilton, a researcher at the New York Metropolitan Applied Research Center added their voices to those who attributed the causes of the "Black revolt" to racism.
They were, if not the first, among the first to make distinctions between overt and covert, individual and institutional racism.
Individual Racism
A range of discriminatory behaviors, driven by prejudice, that act to deny individuals and groups power, privilege and status was described at the end of Essay #2. These were designated:
1. Antilocution or negative (abusive) verbal expression
2. Avoidance
3. Discrimination or exclusion
4. Physical attack or abuse and
5. Extermination or murder, massacres, pogroms and genocide
(Allport, 1958 and Parillo, 1994).
It was demonstrated in the previous discussion of "race" that a broad, general (and simple) categorization of racism is not possible. An individual (or individuals) who holds prejudices against members of other "racial" groups may direct the foregoing behaviors against members of those groups, but can we call these behaviors "racism"?
According to Carmichael and Hamilton, individual racism:
. . . consists of overt acts by individuals which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property.
This type can be recorded on television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of commission . . . (Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967, cited in Bennett, 1991, p. 49).
Missing from the Carmichael/Hamilton definition is specific reference to direct or indirect sanction of these overt acts by a society's institutions and dominant culture. If an individual kills a member of another "race" in a fit of racial hatred, then s/he is a bigot and murderer.
If an individual who belongs to a dominant culture and "racial" group kills a member of another "race" in a fit of racial hatred, and knows that because of the society s/he lives in there is a good likelihood that s/he will not be charged for his crime or may be convicted of a much lesser crime, s/he is a racist and a murderer and the murder is an act of overt, individual racism.
The ubiquity of overt, individual racist violence is conspicuous throughout the history of the United States of America (Cf. p. 26-27).
Most persistent "racial" groups in the United States--those "nonwhite" groups who either chose not to assimilate or who were prevented from assimilating into the American macroculture--have been victims of overt, individual racist violence.
Many African Americans, particularly those forty-five years and older and regardless of where they were in the country at the time, have had impressed upon their individual and collective psyches the following acts of overt, individual racist violence. For many, consciousness of these acts extends beyond the actual into the symbolic:
In 1955, in Le Flore County, Mississippi, fourteen year old Emmitt Till was brutally murdered by "Night Riders" and thrown from the Tallahatchie bridge into the Tallahatchie River (remember the "Ode to Billie Joe"?).
His crime? It was alleged that he whistled at a white woman.
In April of 1959, in Poplarville, Mississippi, Mack Charles Parker, accused of the rape of a white woman, was abducted from the Poplarville jail by Klansmen and lynched.
He never had a chance to defend himself in a court of law.
June 1963, witnessed
(1) the murder of Medgar Evers, a Mississippi NAACP leader outside of his home and in front of his children in Jackson, Mississippi hours after a speech by President John F. Kennedy calling on Americans to banish segregation and racism from the land, and
(2) the disappearance (and murder) of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, three civil rights workers, in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Their bodies were found a year later, shot and buried in a pit outside of Philadelphia.
On September 15, 1963, a powerful dynamite blast devastated the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Denise McNair, four young African American girls attending Sunday School.
On Tuesday, March 9, 1965, three European American ministers from Boston, Massachusetts were attacked either by Klansmen or Klan sympathizers in downtown Selma, Alabama.
One of them, Rev. James J. Reeb, received a fatal head wound.
On March 25, 1965, a European American housewife from Detroit, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, who had come to Selma, Alabama to support the Alabama campaign of the Civil Rights movement, was shot and killed by a carload of Ku Klux Klan nightriders while ferrying marchers back to Selma from Montgomery.
On June 6, 1966, James Meredith, one of the first African Americans to integrate a major southern university, the University of Mississippi, was shot on the second day of his march through Mississippi to determine if the state was safe for people of African descent.
On April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony at the Lorraine motel in Memphis Tennessee, the Rev. Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper's bullet.
In almost all of the foregoing acts of racist violence, few of the criminals were caught, convicted or sentenced with the maximum penalties these crimes carry.
(James Earl Ray was convicted of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, but questions of a larger conspiracy still loom large in the minds of those close to the incident.
Byron de la Beckwith was finally convicted of the murder of Medgar Evers after thirty-one years in February, 1994.
Klansmen accused of murdering Viola Liuzzo were arrested and tried in 1965/66 but their court case ended in a mistrial.
In the other instances, e.g., the Birmingham bombing, the Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner murders, etc., there were no arrests.
If there were arrests, there were no convictions.
If there were convictions, the sentences were lenient and often almost inconsequential.)
The failure to arrest, convict and punish individuals who perpetrate "racial" crimes exemplifies direct or indirect support of these crimes by the predominant culture and its institutions.
Several distinguished African American scholars have attempted to differentiate racism from racial bigotry by introducing into the definition of "racism" an element which may be described as the "power to oppress."
James M. Jones (1972), professor of psychology at the University of Delaware, provides a most elegant definition of this type. Racism, he says:
. . . 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).
This definition encompasses racism at the individual, institutional and cultural level.
The "exercise of power against a racial group defined as inferior by individuals . . . with the intentional or unintentional support of the entire culture"
would be what Jones would describe as individual racism.
This definition is certainly descriptive of the patterns of European or "white" racism and of course its most virulent form, "white" supremacy.
There is little doubt that the concept "race," hierarchical (biological and otherwise) classifications of human beings and the systematic oppression of whole groups of people because of their "race" are inventions of eighteenth and nineteenth century European cultural thought and European capitalism.
These concepts and practices must be relentlessly resisted and opposed whenever and wherever they surface.
RACISM OR RACIAL BIGOTRY?
Jones' definition and others like it, however, may leave the impression that the victims of European or "white" racism can't be "racist."
Are "people of color" are less culpable, blameworthy, censurable or reprehensible when they commit acts of verbal abuse (ethnophaulisms), avoidance, differential treatment, physical abuse and murder?
Is it fair to say that because they neither derive power from nor have the support of the dominant culture to exercise power against the "superior" or dominant racial group that their racial bigotry is any less odious?
Racial bigotry--the attitudes of racial prejudice and behaviors of discrimination acted out by individuals without institutional or macrocultural sanction or support--is no less an evil than the same behaviors which are acted out by individuals driven by "white" racism.
The magnitude of institutional or cultural racism with respect to its historical "body count" and its potential to cause human suffering for a large number of people is certainly greater than individual acts of "bigotry."
Certainly individual acts of racial "bigotry" do not compare in matters of scale with genocide or "ethnic cleansing."
On the level of individual, interpersonal interactions, however, ethnophaulisms, avoidance, differential treatment, physical abuse and murder are just as heinous whether the perpetrator is "white," "black," "brown," "yellow" or "red."
The writer has had the disconcerting experience of witnessing the relief play across the faces of the victims of European or "white" racism when they "learn" that they are not, by definition, racist.
They have been told that they are not racist when they describe or characterize members of other "racial" groups with derogatory names, words and expressions; minimize or avoid completely any social interaction whatsoever with them.
They have been told that they are not racist when they treat members of other "racial" groups differentially and unequally, when they physically abuse and/or murder members of other "racial" groups.
They have been told that they are not racist because they don't have the power to oppress large groups of people or the direct or indirect support of the dominant culture.
The distinction between acts of racism and bigotry with respect to the impact on the individual victim is difficult to discern, especially by the victim.
Whether one calls it racism or bigotry, the humiliation, the pain, and the mortality experienced by the victim is just as acute--and just as morally repugnant.
Institutional Racism
There is another kind of racism, which is greater in destructive scope than the worst of overt, individually racist (or racially bigoted) acts.
It is a kind of racism that
"originates in the operations of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than . . . " individual racism (Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967, in Bennett, 1990, p. 48).
If individual racism is overt acts by individuals rooted in racial prejudice which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property, then institutional racism consists of overt and covert acts by institutions rooted in racial prejudice which cause death, injury, and the destruction or confiscation of property and which deny power, privilege and status to members of other so-called "racial" groups.
The history of the United States of America provides as clear a theater as any in which one may observe the villainous role of institutional racism develop and unfold.
The United States, with its predominant European population, more than any of the other European colonies enjoyed an almost complete transfer of European cultural and capitalist institutions to its shores. In the process, it established a fairly synthetic Anglo-European macroculture and a "powerful capitalism" built upon the exploited labor of millions of African slaves.
According to Rodney:
Like other parts of the New World, the American colonies of the British crown were used as a means of accumulating primary capital for re-export to Europe . . .
American economic development up to mid-nineteenth century rested squarely on foreign commerce of which slavery was a pivot (p. 87).
The racist beliefs promulgated by European and American interests that served to justify the African slave trade have already been cited and discussed in Essay #4.
TWO BASIC THEMES
The extent to which those beliefs permeate European and American cultural thought is effectively illustrated by Alexander Thomas and Samuel Sillen (1972) in their book, Racism and Psychiatry.
Thomas and Sillen reveal the "tenacity of tradition, the deep roots of racist thinking in the disciplines concerned with human behavior" in the United States of America (p. v.):
In its long and ugly history in the United States, white racism has improvised a thousand variations on two basic themes.
The first is that black people are born with inferior brains and a limited capacity for mental growth.
The second is that their personality tends to be abnormal, whether by nature or nurture.
These concepts of inferiority and pathology are interrelated and reinforce each other. Both have served to sanctify a hierarchical social order in which "the Negroes place" is forever ordained by his genes and the accumulated disabilities of his past.
This view has a traditional corollary. It is that the black man functions best, psychologically, when he stays or is forcibly kept within the limits of his handicap.
Unburdened by responsibility , he is cheerful and happy. Thrust into the competitive arena, he breaks down.
Social tasks and privileges that are normal for white men are too stressful for him.
Therefore, the racists argue, the best interest of both the black man himself and of the larger society dictate that his psychic impairment be recognized (p. 1).
From early invocations of scriptural authority, to sophisticated treatises rooted in "scientific" racism, "white" racist/"white" supremacist assumptions and beliefs have been prominent in the core of American cultural thought.
These assumptions and beliefs gave sanction to institutions and institutional policies and practices that denied power, privilege and status to people of African descent . The same effects have been experienced by other cultural groups beyond the pale of the phenotypic and genotypical boundaries of "white" racism/supremacy.
Takaki (1993, citing Labaree, 1959) reports that the venerable American statesman, Benjamin Franklin, noted with alarm "that the number of 'purely white people' in the world was proportionately very small" (Takaki, p. 79):
All Africa was black or tawny, Asian chiefly tawny, and "America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly so."
The English were the "principle Body of white people," and Franklin wanted more of this type in America.
"And while we are . . . Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus," he declared, "why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People?
Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawnys, of increasing the lovely White . . . " (Takaki, p. 79).
Slavery and the Naturalization Act of 1790 are probably the most obvious early examples of American institutional racism. According to Parillo:
Slavery replaced indentured servitude in the [American] South. Blacks were forcibly taken from their African homelands and sold into a lifetime of slavery in a land they did not choose and in which they had no opportunity to advance themselves because they were not free . . . (p. 353).
THE NATURALIZATION ACT OF 1790
With respect to the Naturalization Act of 1790, Takaki contends that it defined political membership in the new American republic:
Prospective citizens would be required to go through a probationary period so they would have time to understand republican principles and demonstrate "proper and decent behavior."
Through this careful screening, the government would exclude "vagrants," "paupers," and "bad men."
But the policy makers went further in their efforts to create a homogeneous society.
Applicants for naturalized citizenship were required to reside in the United States for two years as well as provide "proof" of good character in court and document their republican fitness.
They also had to be "white" (Takaki, p. 80).
The "inferior brain" ascribed to Africans and "limited mental capacity" rendered them unsuitable for the requisite republican citizen performance criteria--hard work, self-control and the accumulation of wealth.
The stresses of republicanism, according to the Founding Fathers of American democracy, would be much too traumatic for the African's delicate mental health.
Slavery kept African people happy and safe "within the limits of . . . [their] . . . handicap."
Thus no "Black" immigrant was suitable for citizenship.
Even after slavery was abolished, racist beliefs regarding the African's mental capacity and very humanity had become so fundamentally a part of the core beliefs of American cultural thought that, with the exception of the brief period known as Reconstruction, they manifested themselves in laws ("Jim Crow" laws) and official policy (segregation) which legitimized differential racial treatment.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 with additional legislation in 1965, 1968 and 1991 was an attempt to prohibit racial discrimination and discrimination of other kinds. This has proven difficult as instances of discrimination, racial and otherwise, persist to this very day.
The Naturalization Act of 1790 did not merely single out Africans, but (in the words of Franklin) the "Tawnys" as well, including those domestic "foreigners," the Native Americans.
RACISM AND THE NATIVE AMERICAN
In the minds of the Founding Fathers, "Tawnys," specifically Native Americans, may not have had the severity of disability of the African. But because they were not "white," they were disabled nonetheless and unsuited for republican citizenship. According to Takaki:
Though they were born in the United States, they were regarded as members of tribes, or as domestic subjects; their status was considered analogous to children of foreign diplomats born here.
As domestic "foreigners," Native Americans could not seek naturalized citizenship, for they were not "white" (p. 80).
Institutional racism as experienced by the Native American took the form of annihilation, expulsion, segregation, isolation and deculturalization.
Early contacts between Native Americans and European were marked initially by cooperation and hospitality when Europeans were few and depended for their survival on "good neighbor" relations.
As the numbers of Europeans increased, relations became increasingly hostile and marked by sporadic warfare as European designs on Native American land became evident.
Another lethal consequence of Native American-European contact was the fact that whole populations of Native Americans were decimated by such European diseases as cholera, tuberculosis and small pox (Parillo, 1994).
According to Takaki:
When the colonists began arriving in New England, they found that the Indian population was already being reduced by European diseases.
Two significant events had occurred in the early seventeenth century: infected rats swam to shore from Samuel de Champlain's ships, and sick French sailors were shipwrecked on the beaches of New England.
By 1616, epidemics were ravaging Indian villages (p. 39).
Many European colonists cited the "pathogenic" annihilation of the Native American as a "sign" from God--that God was clearing the land to make way for European destiny.
Between 1763 and 1978 there have been twenty-two official government actions visited on the Native American in what is now known as the United States of America.
Some of these such as the Royal Proclamation of 1763 established Native American "tribes" as independent nations and created the context and rationale for treating Native Americans as domestic "foreigners."
Others like the Indian Removal Bill (1830), the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek (1830), the Dawes Act (1871) and the Termination Act (1953) were either transparent "legal" processes designed to dispossess Native Americans of their land holdings or misguided policies that had the same effect.
The Indian Removal Act called for the expulsion of all Native Americans from Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama to the west of the Mississippi River.
Over fifteen thousand (15,000) Native Americans died on forced marches from the southeastern states to Oklahoma territory between 1830 and 1846.
Between 1850 and 1880 Congress established the more than three hundred (300) "Indian" reservations (most of which still exist today). In 1871, it ended the independent nation status of tribal groups, making the Native American a "ward" of the federal government.
The reservations, or American "homelands" presented one of the ugliest of America's several faces of legally sanctioned segregation.
The Native American "became" an American citizen in 1924 under the Indian Citizen Act.
Institutional racism and a persistent resistance to forced assimilation have conspired to make the Native American the most disadvantaged of America's disadvantaged.
FUNCTIONS OF INSTITUTIONAL RACISM
Carmichael and Hamilton paint a picture of institutional racism that is to say the least, sanguine:
When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five "black" children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of society.
But when in that same city--Birmingham, Alabama--five hundred "black" babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, clothing, shelter and proper medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed or maimed physically, emotionally, and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the "black" community, that is a function of institutional racism (Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967, cited in Bennett, 1991, p. 49, quotation marks inserted by author).
The substitution of the adjective "red" for the adjective "black" in the foregoing citation would depict figuratively the comparable conditions of the Native American. The actual facts are far more startling.
If deficits in food, clothing, shelter, health care along with the debilitating physical and mental effects and affects of discrimination are "functions of institutional racism," as Carmichael and Hamilton suggest then the following statistics are instructive:
· The 1990 census showed a 38 percent increase in the Native American population.
· The Native American birth rate is almost twice the national average.
· 41% of the Native American population (808,000 people) live on reservations. Another 400,000 live in communities contiguous to the reservation. Slightly more than 750,000 Native Americans live in urban communities.
· Unemployment among Native Americans living on reservations ranges from 50-85%.
· Unemployment among urban Native Americans approaches 40%. 75% of urban Native Americans live below the "poverty line."
· The Native American life span is about ten years less than the national average.
· Leading causes of death among Native Americans are accidental death, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, diabetes, homicide and suicide--all higher than the general population average.
· Death from alcoholism among the Native American is five times the general population average.
· While there are proportionately more Native American school aged children than their general population counterparts, slightly more than 50% of these students will graduate from high school and of these graduates, less than 50% will enter college and of these, 14% will graduate.
· 25% of Native American homes lack indoor plumbing. 14% of Native American homes lack electricity (adapted from Parillo, 1994, pp. 243-262).
The experience of institutional racism is not unique to Americans of African descent or Native Americans. Other "Tawnys" have felt the stain of American institutional racism as well.
Mexicans found their tentative hospitality to the "Yankee" repaid in the coin of "manifest destiny."
After losing Texas and California in the Mexican-American Wars (1836-1848), they, like the Native American became foreigners in their own country.
In addition to verbal abuse, avoidance and acts of individual racist violence visited upon them by Americans, they were subjected to "Anti-Greaser" laws, disenfranchisement, the loss of their lands and properties and the exploitation of their labor.
RACISM AND THE CHINESE AMERICAN
The Chinese began immigrating into California and the western states around 1849. They were at first considered "model" workers in the California gold mines, on the railroads, transforming the tule swamps and the marshes of the Sacramento and San Joachim river deltas into prime agricultural land.
Before long, however, they were soon assigned the racial inferiority experienced by Africans, Native Americans and Mexicans before them. According to Takaki:
Indeed the newcomers from a Pacific shore found that racial qualities previously assigned to blacks had become "Chinese" characteristics.
Calling for Chinese exclusion, the San Francisco Alta warned in 1853:
"Every reason that exists against the toleration of free blacks in Illinois may be argued against that of the Chinese here."
White workers referred to the Chinese as "Nagurs," and a magazine cartoon in California depicted the Chinese as a bloodsucking vampire with slanted eyes, a pigtail, dark skin, and thick lips.
Like blacks, the Chinese were described as heathen, morally inferior, savage, childlike, and lustful.
Chinese women were condemned as a "depraved class," their immorality associated with a physical appearance "but a slight removal from the African race" (Takaki, 1993, p. 205).
Racism segregated the Chinese into the Chinatowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Idaho and Montana. Racism forced them into low-wage jobs. Racism in the form of the Naturalization Act of 1790 prevented them from obtaining citizenship and in California, because of alien land-holding laws, prohibited them from owning land.
The California Supreme Court (People v. Hull) in 1854 ruled that Chinese and other "nonwhites" could not testify in a court of law against "white" people.
This ruling persisted in the California courts until 1870.
In 1882, The U. S. Congress prohibited Chinese immigration.
At this time only 5% of the Chinese population was female and only 4% were American born.
Small wonder that prostitution was such an important part of life in Chinatown!
Called the Chinese Exclusion Act, People v. Hull was renewed in 1892 and extended indefinitely in 1902. It was not until 1943 that Chinese women were finally allowed to immigrate (Parillo, 1994).
RACISM AND THE JAPANESE AMERICAN
Growing in population numbers from only fifty-five in 1870 to 111,010 by 1920, Japanese immigrants fared little better than their Chinese counterparts.
Unlike the Chinese, however, the considerably more Japanese women comprised the Japanese population. In 1908, in a so-called "Gentleman's Agreement" to limit Japanese immigration secured by President Theodore Roosevelt, Japanese "wives" were allowed to immigrate.
By 1920, 46% of the Japanese in California and 35% of those in Hawaii were women (Takaki, p.247).
Denied employment and entrepreneurial opportunity in virtually every economic sector other than agriculture, their industriousness and expertise in cultivation soon put them at odds with organized labor, vegetable growers and shippers, particularly in California.
In 1906, 93 Japanese children were forced to attend the Oriental school in Chinatown. In 1913 in California, immigrant Japanese were prohibited from owning land. Parillo cites Sanford Lyman's (1972) comments on anti-Japanese sentiment :
The anti-Japanese stereotype was so widespread that it affected the judgements of sociologists about the possibilities of Japanese assimilation. Thus, in 1913 Robert E. Park was sufficiently depressed by anti-Japanese legislation and popular prejudice to predict:
"The Japanese . . . is condemned to remain among us an abstraction, a symbol, and a symbol not merely of his own race, but of the Orient and of that vague, ill-defined menace we sometimes refer to as the 'yellow-peril' " . . . (p. 287).
The ultimate expression of anti-Japanese sentiment and institutional racism occurred in February of 1941, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when more than
. . . 110,000 Japanese, many of them second- and third generation Americans with as little as one-eighth Japanese ancestry, were removed from their homes and placed in what were euphemistically called relocation centers in Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming (Parillo, p. 288).
Although reasons of national security were invoked by the champions of Japanese "removal" it is no small irony that
J. Edgar Hoover, the much maligned director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.), said at the time that the so-called military reasons for the evacuation of Japanese citizens were "based primarily on public and political pressure rather than factual data" (Takaki, p. 380).
He stopped short of saying racism.
Earl Warren, then California Attorney General, and later in his illustrious career, Governor of California and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, led the chorus of California politicians pressuring the Federal Government to "do something" about the Japanese.
Who was putting the pressure on these local politicians?
Takaki, citing Broek, Barnhardt and Matson (1970), points an accusing finger at the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association, the Western Growers Protective Association, and the California Farm Bureau Federation:
"We've been charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons," the Grower-Shipper Vegetable Association stated in the Saturday Evening Post.
"We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the west coast or the brown man. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over . . .
If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows " ( p. 381).
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in clear violation of the U. S. Constitution,
signed an executive order to place all Japanese on the West Coast into internment camps.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to synopsize the institutional racist experiences of all of America's citizens of color. The foregoing examples were presented to illustrate the pervasiveness of racism in America's history, its cultural thought and its characteristic cultural behavior.
Cultural Racism
Cultural racism refers to those norms and mores of the predominant culture (macroculture) and work within the society to legitimize chauvinism and oppression based upon "race."
Cultural racism expresses itself in:
1. A conspiracy to silence and deny the culture of targeted cultural and subcultural groups which are phenotypically distinct.
Predominant culture or cultural groups informally attempt to demonstrate that targeted groups:
have no culture distinct from the macroculture or that
" . . . the implements, handicrafts, agriculture, economics, music, art, religious beliefs, traditions, language . . . " etc., of targeted groups are inferior (Bennett, 1994, p. 49).
This is done by :
· denying targeted groups access to information and material about themselves (freedom of information);
· inhibiting frank and open discussion and/or debate on issues of interest to or concerning targeted groups (freedom of speech);
· preventing large numbers of targeted groups from congregating in one place e.g., bars, social centers, schools or denying them space to hold social and political functions (freedom of assembly);
· restricting the representation of targeted groups in certain levels of employment, business and education;
· revising or falsifying history and/or the historical accounts of events and social processes to minimize or distort the role of targeted groups or exclude them entirely, denying members of those groups important historical or contemporary role models.
2. Attempts to deny the popular strength of cultural and subcultural groups who are phenotypically distinct.
Power is often measured in numerical strength. Predominant cultural groups who identify with dubious "racial" categories attempt to distort, delimit or falsify population numbers of other "races," and/or redefine population categories.
3. Attempts to limit the visibility of cultural and subcultural groups who are phenotypically distinct.
The predominant culture or cultural groups attempts to persuade members of a targeted group that they should not define themselves in terms of their Africanisms, Asianisms, Hispanicisms, etc.
They are given the message that there is something inherently wrong with their phenotypic differences e.g., skin color, hair texture, skull, nose and eye shape etc., and cultural heritages; that they should keep vestiges of that heritage hidden and to themselves.
4. Attempts to create and define public spaces for cultural and subcultural groups who are phenotypically distinct.
The predominant culture or cultural groups attempt to force targeted groups into ghettos and enclaves where there is little possibility of integration into the general life of the community.
Neighborhoods, business establishments, and even professions are thus set aside for target groups.
5. Attempts to deny self-definition in cultural and subcultural groups who are phenotypically distinct.
The predominant culture or cultural groups attempt to label members of a targeted group rather than allowing those groups to label themselves.
Target groups have chosen terms of self-definition to redefine themselves in terms of perceived power and the validity of their culture.
6. Stereotypes members of targeted groups as a means of control.
The persistence of stereotypes hinders self and crosscultural understanding, and frustrates meaningful social change. (Adapted from Blumenfield, 1992 p. 7-8).
No better example of cultural racism exists than that of the traditional, formal school curriculum of the American educational system and its schools, its admission standards into institutions of higher education, its notions of "excellent" academic performance and its actual (in practice) epistemological orientation. Again quoting Bennett:
Cultural racism . . . [in America] . . . combines ethnocentrism, the view that other cultures are inferior to the Anglo-European, and the power to suppress or eradicate manifestations of non-Anglo-European cultures.
The legacy of cultural racism can be found in the formal [American] curriculum--in tests, media, and course offerings.
It can also be detected in the hidden, informal curriculum, as in low expectations for minority student achievement held by nonminority teachers, ethnic/racial myths and stereotypes held by students and teachers, and an unfamiliar, nonsupportive, unfriendly, or hostile school environment (p. 49).
Ending Racism
If bigotry and racism, whether individual, institutional or cultural, are to be eliminated, then individuals in all so-called "racial" groups will have to examine and change specific beliefs, values and attitudes about "race." These same individuals will have to change related negative behaviors directed towards members of other so-called "racial" groups.
More importantly, they will have to responsibly change in their respective cultures those institutions, social processes and "value allocation" systems which because of erroneous notions of "race" treat members of other "racial" groups differently and deny them power, privilege and status or, more fundamentally, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
All of this is possible when one attains authentic multicultural awareness/consciousness.
Authentic multicultural awareness/consciousness enables the individual, whether s/he belongs to a cultural group that has victimized other cultural groups or has been the victim of other cultural groups, to reduce and eventually eliminate his/her individual acts of racism and/or racial bigotry.
This is because multicultural awareness/consciousness creates changes in the individual.
Multicultural awareness/consciousness alters conscious and unconscious processes implicated in the commission of discriminatory (or in this case racist or bigoted) behaviors.
The multiculturally aware and conscious individual has learned to:
1. perform an ongoing audit of his/her beliefs, values, attitudes and perceptions.
Although individuals acquire beliefs, values, attitudes and perceptions through cultural and subcultural experiences, the multiculturally aware and conscious individual has learned to abandon the habit of accepting the same uncritically and often without question.
When an adequate or appropriate level of multicultural awareness/consciousness is attained, the individual becomes more accepting of different beliefs, values and attitudes, different perceptions of reality, and different conceptions of the world.
The multiculturally aware and conscious individual sees the human being at the center of cultural diversity and acts to honor and dignify that humanity.
2. change beliefs, values and attitudes, particularly those rooted in fear, ignorance or in notions of the separateness of the individual human being.
Through intercultural contact, acceptance, and developing intercultural competence many of the individual's beliefs, values, attitudes, perceptions and behaviors change.
The multiculturally aware and conscious individual constantly reconstructs his/her standards of moral and ethical behavior as s/he begins to believe, value and behave differently.
These standards reflect the acceptance of the cultural aspects, factors and manifestations of others (Nobles, 1985), are known experientially; are neither strange, alien nor fearful. They do not provoke a "knee jerk" response.
3. see members of other cultural groups as no more or less moral, normal or human than himself/herself.
The multiculturally aware and conscious individual has no need to justify his/her behavior towards members of other cultural groups because that behavior is generally accepting, supportive and affirming. S/he celebrates life, diversity and humanity and serves the same because s/he believes they are deserving of service.
4. exhibit flexibility, versatility and adaptability in his/her emotional responses to people and situations.
The multiculturally aware and conscious individual feels good about himself/herself. S/he has not been rendered dysfunctional by difficult early childhood experiences or rigid and unexamined systems of belief, values and attitudes.
Through interactions with others, s/he has developed a repertoire of appropriate and effective situational responses to most human interactions and transactions or the capability to learn them and can adapt fairly easily to different environments.
5. be willing to make amends, and actually does so when and where possible, to those individuals and groups whom he/she has personally victimized or acquiesced to their victimization.
The multiculturally aware and conscious individual
understands the role of his/her culture in the formation of thinking, feeling, emotional responses and behavior.
S/he knows that s/he must constantly work at purging all vestiges of racist, bigoted and ethnocentric thought and behavior. As such, s/he realizes that one must constantly guard against the "automaticity" of individual and cultural programming that results in hurtful speech and behavior.
S/he recognizes that if one causes harm to someone, one must quickly correct those offenses when and where possible. In addition, the multiculturally aware and conscious individual acts to heal the resentments caused by racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia and the like.
6. develop a high tolerance for frustration.
Frustration, according to Parillo,
"is the result of relative deprivation in which expectations remain unsatisfied" (p. 78).
The multiculturally aware and conscious person is less likely to engage in comparing his/her resources and rewards (e.g., job, status, etc.) against those of members of other cultural groups.
S/he is thus less likely to direct aggression against the same and/or to scapegoat because of perceived differences.
7. be generally cooperative rather than competitive.
Competition, especially economic competition, often breeds conflict. The multiculturally aware and conscious individual while capable of competing, chooses to cooperate when possible; to define rewards and outcomes as divisible when possible.
8. question and/or challenge any social norm that demands blind conformity.
According to Parillo, social norms
"--the norms of one's culture--provide the generally shared rules of what is and what is not proper behavior; by learning and automatically accepting the prevailing prejudices, the individual is simply conforming to those norms . . . " (1994, p. 82).
The multiculturally aware and conscious individual honors and dignifies the human being regardless of cultural background and refrains from any behavior that derogates or humiliates others, whether according to their own cultural norms or such ethically transcendent norms which guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Multicultural awareness/consciousness in its most sophisticated manifestation demonstrates the perception, knowledge and understanding of several cultures (including microcultures and subcultures)--their systems of cultural thought, their patterns of emotional response, and their spirit/force and ideological imperatives.
It is an awareness that does not presume to judge one culture against another but evaluates a given culture against its own standards. It does not presume the "universality" of one system of cultural thought or one pattern of emotional response. Rather, it recognizes that the validity of cultural thought, its truth and truth processes and the appropriateness of cultural behavior are determined by the culture in which it originates. It recognizes that cultures adapt and change in response to the environment and/or to their contact with other cultures.
More importantly, multicultural awareness/consciousness enables the observer to see in the differences between cultures and their ideological imperatives the variety of human experiences needed for the human spirit, manifest in all cultures, to evolve.
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