Reading and blog assignment for Malcolm/Martin/McIntosh

We have quite a bit of reading in order to tackle the subject of race relations in the U.S. next week, so please start early.

In the reader, read:
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.- "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"
Peggy McIntosh- "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"

in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, read the following chapters:
Ch. 1, Ch.'s 10-15, the last 3 pages of Ch. 17, Ch. 18

There is no good way to excerpt from this book. All of it is important, all of it is brilliantly told and written. What I have selected are the passages I view most cogent for having a discussion of race and racial politics over-all. If you have time, either now or in the future, read all of this book.

For the blog- report back the following:

List the privileges you enjoy, relative to your race, gender or class status. You can borrow these from McIntosh's list, or add some of your own. Next to that, list the ways you feel you have been disadvantaged or disenfranchised by the same institutions or systems McIntosh points to.

Finally, review the handout (reprinted below) and think about how you want a discussion on race in our classroom to be conducted. I expect, more than ever, that everyone will be at their best as students and people in order to go through this process intelligently and usefully. The expectation is born of my high regard for you as students and interlocutors. Have a good weekend,

Dillon

Guidelines for a discussion about race in(and) class-

Before we get started on this discussion, which it seems we are really anxious to have, there are some things we need to establish in order to have this conversation rationally and productively. To begin with, a few things to keep in mind while we re talking to one another:

- No one in class is a representative of whatever race or ethnicity you might think they are. No one can sensibly answer questions about “Mexicans” or “Asians” or any “them”, in a general, authoritative way. We can all only answers questions about ourselves and what we’ve experienced, and only when we want to.

- There’s a lot of names out there, let’s think about what they mean and their uses.
There are names with hyphens, African-American, Asian-American, etc. These terms are a way to refer to both where a person or group of people came from, and the fact that said person or persons now reside in the U.S.. They are useful terms because they are often the most accurate terms- they let us talk about the fact that someone has ancestors, possibly as close as one or zero generations away, from outside the U.S., but is today a citizen of the U.S. In the case of African-Americans, they allow us to replace terms which many have argued are derogatory: “negro” and “black”. You can still find the former used in literature up until the mid-1960’s. The latter has not dropped out of use completely, and in many cases there is ambiguity about whether its use is appropriate.
In the case of people who are themselves born, or whose ancestors were born, in Latin American countries, it makes no sense to use a term like Mexican-American, because Mexico is in the Americas. There are two broad ways to refer to folks form Central or South America. You can say Latino/a, which means simply that the person is from, or has ancestors from, a Latin American country, or you can designate the country itself: Mexicano, Salvadoreño, Cubano, etc.
There are also a special class of words adopted from the mother tongues of immigrant groups to talk about them. Terms like Chicano/a (for Mexicanos born in the U.S.), Pinoy/Pinay (for folks form the Philipines living in the U.S.), Desi (for folks from Southeas Asia- places like Pakistan and Bengladesh). Some of these terms have complicated histories that include derogatory connotations, so we must be attuned to trying to pick up the conventions of usage in a given community for clues on the appropriate way to use them.
- Finally, the special case of the word “nigga”. This word is connected historically to “nigger”, a word whose use no one is defending, and is itself now a distinct term. Many comedians have thought they are very clever pointing out that different rules attend the use of this word by different people. That’s true, but it’s also true of a word like “dumbass”, which you can use benevolently about a good friend, and maliciously against a stranger. The fact that the usage rules for “nigga” specify the race of the person using it seems to put some folks up in arms. It is worth remembering, in context of thinking about this word, that every word a black person could use for centuries was constricted, based solely on their race, in the same way that every other thing a black person could do was constricted by their race. The fact that there is now a single prohibition running in the opposite direction hardly seems, from this vantage point, all that great an injustice. My observation has been that the usage rules are far more complicated than ‘only African-Americans can use it in reference to themselves’. The word is embedded in certain cultural practices, particular to certain regions, and is as much an identity marker for those things as it is for race. If Bill Cosby used the word ‘nigga’ he would immediately be called out, because everyone knows damn well that no one in his neighborhood talks like that. It is entirely up to you whether or not you think you can or should use the word ‘nigga’. Like all choices, some consequence surely attends it.

After we’ve got our heads around that, we can begin talking about “race” and “racism”. First, however, I want to point out a few things:
- No one in this room is any one “race”. The percentage of people in the world whose genetic makeup is from only one of the anthropologically recognized racial groups, or smaller conventional ethnic groups, is probably much less than one percent. If you are European, you are possibly Celtic, Aryan, Teuton or any other number of things before you are “white”. If you are mexicano/a, you are possibly Aztec, Iberian, Celtic, or any other number of things before you are “mexican”. Something to think about. African-Americans are themselves most often descendant of several distinct African nations, as well as, in very many cases, some degree of “white blood”. Being of mixed race is the rule, rather than the exception, and it is purely a matter of ideology that only a minority have to navigate a mixed-race “identity”.
- In general, we don’t know anything about the contents of another person’s mind. If what we are understanding by the term “racist” is some set of ideas or beliefs in a person’s head, than we would do well to remember that we have no access to these ideas or beliefs outside of what a person says.
- There are many who have argued that the important phenomena connected to racism are not individual beliefs and ideas, but social conditions and institutions. This phenomenon, or group of phenomena, is called “institutional racism”. Institutional racism is concerned with larger patterns and forces in our society that seem to effect entire groups of people consistently, and with investigating the underlying causes. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the perspective studying institutional racism is not concerned with what individuals believe. On this view, it is entirely possible to participate in institutional racism, to be, in some sense, a “racist”, regardless of whether you hold any prejudices towards a person based on his or her ethnicity or religious background. You are a racist insofar as you benefit from institutional racism, by enjoying the appropriation of a greater degree of society’s resources for your group than are allotted to other groups, through systematic and purposive acts of governmental and non-governmental institutions.