Think of all the conversations, the books, the interviews, the commencement speeches. These must number in the hundreds of thousands. Now imagine that Rev. King himself had to actually speak his words those thousands of times to each of those different audiences, over and over again.
How would he feel? Reminding yourself of that thought experiment might help if you are just undertaking conversations about race and racism, and find yourself surprised to hear those with more experience e. Your surprise may fade if you find out how long, how earnestly, and how fruitlessly many such speakers have already been talking, offering everything from their personal concepts of racial identity to the myriad thoughts, impressions, and experiences that feel connected to it.
Thankfully, some of the people we want to hear from have recorded their perspectives in articles, books, videos, and other media we can readily absorb and share. However, our racially inclusive society could facilitate more and better real-time exchanges by making them more reliably rewarding. In a racially inclusive organization, it would be natural to formally recognize those who help the firm appropriately address the significance of race for its workforce. These might be colleagues who proactively organize and volunteer to speak in company brown bag lunches about marginalized perspectives, who offer to start and moderate discussions in an antiracist reading club, or even those who have regularly modeled and inspired courageous, constructive race-related dialogue.
More informal rewards might also be essential. With a topic as complex and multidimensional as race, skillful listening e. Far more than any other species, we humans can actively design our environments to suit our interests.
When this happens, we load our environments with cues and reminders of our existing beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge bases, not of the many unfamiliar frontiers we have yet to explore.
In this way, we end up embedding bias in our environments that can subtly influence our own judgments and behaviors. We load our environments with cues and reminders of our existing beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge bases, not of the many unfamiliar frontiers we have yet to explore.
Recognizing that environmental cues will always be seeding thoughts in our heads, it becomes clear that avoidance of offensive or stereotypical seeds would not be enough for our racially inclusive community to rest easy.
Where historical inequities have already instilled and nurtured stiflingly inaccurate views of racial groups in our minds, new seeds would be planted, and old ones would be deliberately neglected. This would be both unfounded and unhelpful.
Our biases—racial and otherwise—can and do change , and there is encouraging evidence that we may dismantle many stereotypes if we create a society with racial diversity in all jobs and social roles. In remembering that people can change, however, our racially inclusive society gains an advantage in preventing those stereotypes from hardening into structural barriers. That ordinary people can control their own destiny. The year was and those were relatively innocent times.
Left and right, Democrat and Republican, liberal and conservative - they tended to try to work together to find the common ground upon which they could stand, rather than exploit and widen the fissures that might separate, in order to gain political advantage.
In those heady days, when co-operation was more often the norm than a rarity, there were clear understandings on the need to improve race relations. An understanding that America was still failing to uphold its own ideals.
Can we truly say there is a clear understanding of that now? An appreciation of the inequality of American society when it comes to race and discrimination? I'm hopeful we can still say that, but it took the brutal death of George Floyd to jolt Americans from a position of seeming complacency, where a president could feel confident enough to say that "there are very fine people on both sides" after anti-racism protesters clashed with a group of white supremacists in Charlottesville in Why is racism still such a problem for the most powerful country on earth?
You'd think a Civil War might have been the last word on the issue. The slave holding states of the Old South did battle with the northern states in , fighting for the right to extend slavery into the vast lands of the West as America grew. But the South was never admonished for having slaves in the first place. History quickly rewrote the Civil War as a "quarrel between brothers". For the North, what was vital was re-admitting the old Confederacy back into the bosom of the family.
Racist views and bigotry - no problem, just don't disturb the Union. There was no attempt to change the hearts of Southern racists. They include schools, the court system, the media, and organisations. Institutions and history work together to give certain groups of people more of a say in how their country is built.
The history of British colonisation in Australia means that our laws, schools and other bodies were shaped by the dominant group, while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were excluded from this process.
This meant that racist government policies such as the White Australia policy and The Stolen Generations happened without much resistance from the dominant, white group.
The high rates of Aboriginal deaths in police custody and of imprisonment of Aboriginal young people are just two modern examples of how institutionalised racism can shape racist policies that have long-lasting effects. But the most important way these two things work together is by creating an imbalance of power based on race. This is why a black person can use the n-word, or why Asian people can make jokes about their own race.
There is no imbalance of power in that exchange. Certain races and cultures are the targets of stereotypes that paint them as lazy, dirty or untrustworthy. This can have a pretty big impact on things like their job or housing opportunities. Everyone, including minority groups, who lives on Australian land also benefits from the systemic racism against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Martin Luther King Jr. The racism we see today has been around for centuries. In fact, it was the racist views of the European explorers wh ich com pelled them to question the humanity of the racially distinct natives they encountered.
Racism was one of the mechanisms they used to justify slavery and extermination. Looking back at the history of this country, race has always been used to fuel the notion that there are two distinct groups: w hites , and all others. The Constitution of the United States asserted this notion. In , Congress passed an act declaring that only free, w hite immigrants could become naturalized citizens. This essentially declared: White men had rights; Black people and other groups had none.
Citizenship gave individuals numerous privileges, including the right to vote, the ability to sit on juries and the eligibility to be elected to public office. Being w hite also meant you had access to better jobs and resources. For example, after WW-II, hundreds of thousands of GIs came home ready to start families and achieve the American dream of home ownership.
The Federal Housing Administration made that possible by guaranteeing them long-term, low-payment mortgage loans. Black GIs, on the other hand, were faced with a much different reality. They had no access to the same types of loans; in fact, many housing development owners went as far as stipulating that their houses were not to be sold to Bla ck people.
The dim reality is that the society we live in today is a product of racism and w hite privilege. Many of us were raised by racist parents who were themselves the product of a society set up to make life infinitely easier for w hites and much harder for Black people. Many studies today prove this assertion. In a study conducted by Bertrand and Mullainathan, they found that even your name can be a strike against you if you are Black, regardless of your qualifications. For this study, they distributed 5, resumes to over 1, employers who were not only hiring but also aggressively trying to diversify their organizations.
Some of the resumes had typically w hite names while others had typically Black ones. In addition, the average w hite-named candidates received more callbacks than the highly skilled, Black-named candidates. As you can see, even centuries later, the same dynamics are in place: for some individuals, their race gives them access to opportunities; for others, race is the reason they are denied those same opportunities.
To no surprise, many white people today would readily dispute this notion of racial inequality.
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