Robin D.G. Kelley said, “…racism is not ignorance. Racism is knowledge. Racism in some ways is a very complicated system of knowledge, where science, religion, philosophy, are used to justify inequality and hierarchy. And that is why you can’t think of racism as simply ‘not knowing.’”
This last statement allows great insight to racism. People learn racism. I can see it in my own life. In my high school history class we never talked about Native Americans being removed systematically from their land. We mentioned Native Americans and the pilgrims and how they learned from one another but not about what really happened. My teacher never mentioned the Jim Crow laws, the lynching in the early 1900’s- 1960’s, eugenics, blackface and so on. If we had talked about any of these things, minds would have opened in our classes. We would have been studying ‘whiteness’ and all it embodies. We would have been starting to counteract racism. It wasn’t until my first year in college did I ever study about the Jim Crow, lynching, eugenics and blackface. Reading and talking about these issues caused me to confront my own ‘whiteness’.
In my first LR I talked about my struggle with being “white”. I am not colorblind on the contraire I see in full color. I am not a saint, I don’t have everything figured out, I am on a journey; the journey isn’t full of answers it just leads to more questions.
Katie
**Take a look at the links, they are further
