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Racism isn’t about ignorance. Some highly educated people
have upheld systemic inequality
Date: June 18, 2020
From: Washingtonpost.com
Publisher: The Washington Post
Document Type: Article
Length: 966 words
Content Level: (Level 5)
Lexile Measure: 1420L
Full Text:
Byline: Victor Ray;Alan Aja
About US is an initiative by The Washington Post to explore issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.
As rebellions against the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and, last weekend, Rayshard Brooks, shake the country,
education is once again being prescribed as racism’s cure. Anti-racist reading lists are bouncing around Twitter and mainstream
publications, pushing books on racism atop bestseller charts and fueling months-long wait-lists at local libraries. Celebrities like the
Golden State Warriors’ coach, Steve Kerr, have called for a better education in African American history, and many white people
have decided now is the time to reach out to their black friends, seeking absolution and education.
Nothing warms our nerdy professorial hearts like seeing people buy books, and we understand the need for knowledge to attack
entrenched social problems (please keep borrowing, exchanging and buying books, everyone). And we are deeply committed to
popular anti-racist education. We hope anti-racist education can play a part in eradicating myths about causes and consequences of
racial inequality. And black women theorists of abolition have unquestionably contributed to the current global mass movements
calling for defunding the police.
But as educators, we also are aware of the limits of the education-as-cure-for-racism trope when it is uncoupled from commitments to
redistribute resources. Education detached from concrete, measurable changes, such as protesters’ calls for defunding the police
departments, is the “thoughts and prayers” of anti-racism. It allows people to feel like something is being done without committing to
actual changes that might upset broader patterns of privilege. Prescribing education as the cure for racism often confuses individual
bigotry with a system of domination. As a system of domination, racism can be manipulated, because it is bigger than any individual.
Highly educated people, who sometimes know better, contribute to systems of racial harm on a regular basis.
The architecture of American racism is not an unfortunate accident: It was created intentionally to acquire and keep power. The highly
educated designed America’s system of segregation and America’s prison system. Highly educated lawyers devise arguments to
protect police who kill black and brown folks, highly educated prosecutors decline to bring charges, and highly educated judges
assign light sentences. There is no good evidence that educating police about implicit bias works to lessen harm. And whites with
high cognitive ability are no more likely to support practical policies that lessen racial inequality. But their education does allow them
to offer more sophisticated justifications for privilege.
The trope of education-as-cure also presumes a kind of unwarranted racial innocence, assuming if the poor souls just knew better,
they would not call the cops on a birdwatcher, defend segregated schools or shoot a black jogger. For example, white women who
call the police on black and brown people for barbecuing, selling bottled water, or simply existing show a keen awareness of racism’s
operating system. When Amy Cooper called the police in retaliation for being asked to leash her dog in New York’s Central Park, she
was not showing an irrational fear of black men. Calling 911 was a calculated manipulation of a system that has historically harmed
black men. Using knowledge of a system to your advantage is not ignorance, it is the act of someone educated in the nuances of
institutionalized racism.
For some, the caricature of an uneducated backwoods racist may be comforting. This caricature safely places the taint of racism on a
different group and immunizes the middle-class from accusations of bias. By placing the problem of racism on the poorly educated, it
allows those who are aware or racial inequality to feel like they have done nothing wrong and can therefore safely continue to do
nothing.
Most students are taught about the Jim Crow-era efforts to keep schools separate and unequal, but fewer probably know
contemporary education shows levels of segregation not seen since before the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education
decision. For example, a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute found that black children are five times as likely as white
children to attend racially and ethnically segregated schools and twice as likely to attend “high-poverty” schools.
Furthermore, continued use of admissions screens for elite public high schools yield racially exclusive results, as do supposedly
desegregated schools that employ racialized tracking. As sociologists Amanda Lewis and John Diamond show, even “best case
scenario” integrated schools in highly educated, liberal enclaves maintain segregation in nominally integrated buildings. All these
processes happen in the United States’ most educated and often most liberal cities, where those who know about the causes of racial
inequality lack the political will to intervene.
Or imagine a highly educated, anti-racist teacher working in a segregated school who has a personal commitment to equal education.
As many teachers from underfunded predominantly nonwhite schools will readily admit, no amount of personal heroism can
overcome the racially segregated educational system America seems to accept. These individual commitments to anti-racism, while
meaningful and commendable, do little to change the system that disproportionately condemns nonwhite students to schools with
poor resources in the first place.
The problem of racial inequality is not just a lack of knowledge; it is the lack of a willingness among many white people to commit to
an equitable distribution of resources.
What movements like those currently in the streets recognize is that systemic problems are not solved by education in the absence of
collective action. Solutions to racial inequality require a reorganization of what creates inequality in the first place: unequal access to
social and material resources. Seeing education as a necessary but insufficient condition for challenging racial inequality is not
pessimistic. It recognizes that knowledge used to confront, rather than accommodate or legitimate authority, can lead to a more
equitable distribution of power.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The Washington Post
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
“Racism isn’t about ignorance. Some highly educated people have upheld systemic inequality.” Washingtonpost.com, 18 June 2020.
Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints,
https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A627109467/OVIC?u=ccsf_main&sid=OVIC&xid=fefbd6b6. Accessed 1 Nov. 2020.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A627109467
Hill 1
Kyle Hill
Professor Hill
ENGL 1A & 1AS
3 February 2021
Sample Unit 2 Reading Journal: “Racism Today is Subtle, Insidious, and Systemic”
● Dr. Quist-Adade’s thesis or central claim is that racism is even more a problem
today because people are scared to talk about it for fear of being labeled racist or
losing privilege, so they silently participate in a system that advantages some
and disadvantages others; he also emphasizes that racism is a social construct
that people have created to signal insiders and outsiders and that behaviors can
change – this is not a hopeless situation.
● Dr. Quist-Adade’s paper seemed logical and well presented to me. The one thing
that I did not observe Dr. Quist-Adade do in the paper was handling opposing
viewpoints. While Dr. Quist-Adade does cite sources in his paper, he mainly uses
his sources to support and illustrate his ideas, not necessarily challenge them.
It’s hard for me to imagine what those opposing viewpoints might be since I tend
to agree with Dr. Quist-Adade. For this reason, I think it would have been helpful
for me to see how others might argue against the idea that racism is subtle and
systemic just so I have a better idea of what the opposition might say.
● “For example, racism in the USA has ceased to be the avowed commitment of
Southern white supremacists. Now its INSIDIOUS form is an unconscious habit
corrupting legions of Euro-Americans, including some well-meaning ones among
them” (Quist-Adade).
Hill 2
○ Adjective: operating or proceeding in an inconspicuous or seemingly
harmless way but actually with grave effect.
○ My cousin was ready to divorce her husband by the time she realized how
INSIDIOUS their daily quarrels and disagreements had become.