WHITE REVERSE DISCRIMINATION: A FANCIFUL FLIGHT INTO IGNORANCE
WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS WHO CAME UP WITH THE TERM “REVERSE DISCRIMINATION?”
This week (the week of April 20, 2009) the Supreme Court heard a case where the plaintiffs claimed ‘reverse discrimination’ in the workplace. I listened to a radio piece on this story, and from a layman’s standpoint, I was incredulous at just how ignorant (this has nothing to do with intelligence) white folks can be on this subject. In this case, New Haven Connecticut fire fighters (about twenty whites) used the ‘reverse discrimination’ ploy in their case.
Apparently a test was given to the fire fighters, and if they passed, they would have a chance at promotion. Now, I’m all for promotions, but not this kind. After they took the test, it was found that the test could produce skewed results inferring that some of the test questions were culturally interpreted. Whites might know the language, but persons of color might not. The city officials determined that this test was bogus, and as a result, promotions based on test results, were declared null and void.
Let’s briefly stop and think on this one (this blog doesn’t have the space to fully elaborate the historical and social premises of what has been termed ‘reverse discrimination” mostly by whites who felt unfairly treated in terms of jobs or education).
Tim Wise has authored a book entitled Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist Reflections From an Angry White Male (Soft Skull Press, 2008). Wise writes on page 203 of the book: “When the subject is race and racism whites and blacks are often not talking about the same thing.” What Wise educates about here is that whites usually think of racism or discrimination from a personal perspective. It’s thought of in terms of an individual act(s) of bias. People of color, however, see racism or discrimination from a systemic and institutional point of view.
Both perceptions have been learned through experiences of history and contemporary products of discrimination and bias. There is also the psychological and social dimension. What many whites are ignorant of, is that the structural aspects of racism and white privilege have become embedded in our social structures and customs that we live in each day. Persons of color are well aware of how these structures have been the outcome of white structures, and that these structures continue to keep racism in its place, keep power and wealth in the hands of the White Male System, and perpetuate the nation’s unique brand of racism. It is these systems that have oppressed people of color, and denied equal access to them down through the generations of more than four hundred years of history.
Wise observes in his book that, according to the Federal Glass Ceiling Report, whites hold over 90 percent of the management-level jobs in the country, they garner about 94 percent of government contract dollars, and hold 90 percent of tenured faculty positions on college campuses. White men with only a high school diploma are more likely to obtain employment than black and Latino men with college degrees, “and even when they have a criminal record, white men are more likely than black men without one (a job-mine) to receive a call back for a job interview, even when all the credentials are the same,…” (p. 187). These facts were chronicled by Devah Pager in her recent book Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration.
It doesn’t take a lot of investigation to find out how the structure of institutional racism is very much alive and revolves around the nucleus of white superiority, privilege and dominance.
Thus, the term of ‘reverse discrimination’ is filled with the leftover baggage of many problems based on white ignorance of how we built our various systems. In fact, the term is a non sequitur, because, although individual discrimination does, in fact, exist, to even suggest that this is some kind of ‘reverse racism’ is a complete oxymoron. The way most whites would think of ‘reverse discrimination’ may be framed as a social de-evolution. In addition, one definition of racism equals power plus privilege. Those with the most power and privilege, in our society, are whites. Let’s be clear: they get the “goodies.” The CEOs and executives who received large bonuses after receiving money in the government bailouts are whites and are the fabric of the White Male System. Getting rid of racial discrimination, racism, and institutional racism would mean tearing down the old structural systems, and starting all over again with a different foundation.
Change will only begin when white Americans of European descent start to exercise true power—the empowerment of truth. This includes the truth about themselves, and they came to be the recipients of power and wealth. This means using a knowledge-based, not assumption-based in a new conversation with others who look like they do in terms of skin color or assimilation.
This means changing the policies and procedures of corporate structures and missions. This means making changes in the educational system including educating white teachers, while in training-to-be-teachers, about white privilege, white institutional structures, context-connected models of teaching, cross-cultural counseling, a knowledge (inclusive of all types of knowledge) of place, race, position, power, class, white supremacist ideologies, the cycle of oppression, unaware racism, stereotypical representations of various groups, in media, textbooks, literature and social conditioning.
This also means understanding the educational system itself in order to be aware of institutional sacred cows that graze in the way of correct, accurate and historical understanding of history or herstory as it really was and is. This begins with a critical view of philosophies, ideas and inferences that under gird contemporary academics and then the hard, dirty work of looking at how structures, policies, procedures, norms, obsolete educational models, and evidence a white-centric mantra of we’ve always done it that way. If it don’t work, don’t try to fix it, get a new one needs to be the new mantra of universal person hood and learning.
© Christopher Bear Beam, MA April, 2009
THE EMOTIONAL PROCESS OF DIVERSITY
By Christopher Bear Beam, MA
There is nothing Wrong With You: Going Beyond Hate, written by Cheri Hube, is a Buddhist psychology on self-hate and self-love. As I read her book, it began to dawn on me how much of our perception of others and difference is based on how we treat ourselves.
In her book, Huber takes a look at the self-hate process that many human beings struggle over within their own minds. This is especially notable in Western cultures where we have the luxury of spending often an inordinate amount of time thinking about self-hate and self-love. For we Westerners this is our perceptual lens by which we see the world.
At one point in her book, she describes self-hate as “internalized battering” drawing allusions to domestic violence. Self-hate is hard on everyone, because we beat up on ourselves, then turn on others to beat them up (emotionally, verbally or physically).
Self-hate is birthed as “internalized battering” and is a form of internalized oppression that we’ve inherited from many conditioning sources in our lives. The most intense source is that of those who are supposed to love us the most—our family.
I started to relate these ideas to human diversity. I believe that an accurate understanding of self-hate and self-love is related to our gratitude (or lack thereof) for the interdependent diversity in the empirical world around us.
There are also connections with our feelings of separation from others, our lack of trust of ourselves, and institutions in our culture.
Humans are similar in that we all are emotional and social beings. We absolutely need belongingness, touch and compassionate care to survive. We’re similar in the need to respect ourselves for who we are, as well as others for who they are, and as this writer believes, we are inherently good. We’re similar, especially in the West, in that most of us fight the inner demons of self-hate and self-doubt.
We have the commonality of emotions and pathos. For example, when we experience fear in ourselves, there are common markers of our fear in non-verbal communication no matter in which culture we originate. Most notably we see common object language and non-verbal reactions on our faces when we feel fear or any other emotion. This is true in what some people define as “civilized societies” and “less civilized societies.” Arguably, this definition of “civilized” is based on our own cultural context, and some would defend the notion of what it means to be civilized or not—this writer included.
This is only one example of our similarities as humans. People everywhere on this planet feel emotions of joy, sadness, pain, anger, pity, fear, excitement, anticipation, mourning, terror, etc.
Differentiation within commonality is one part of our emotional processes under the rubric of diversity. Say, we look at the emotion of anger. Humans express, and perhaps feel internal anger, differently and demonstrate it to the world in a variety of styles. A trigger may spur anger within us—anger may be internalized, a kind of implosion. We drive our emotions out of sight and consciousness. Mixed with self-hate, anger becomes more complex and layered. Homicide has been said to be hatred and anger directed outwardly; suicide may be anger directed inwardly. Many people, on the other hand, direct their anger outwardly in impulsive ways, creating an explosion. This may result in yelling, cursing, belittling with hostility, throwing objects, road rage, giving others the “finger,” contemptuously controlling others, use of violence, etc. Conflict-poured anger that becomes an attitude is more of a habitual way of adaptation, but it keeps the person who holds the anger in a state of fight or flight, and this has health consequences for the one holding onto the anger.
Here, it’s important to recall that societal systems are composed of individuals, and systems are more than the sum of all their parts. They become codified into the fabric of the institutions, and keep the cycle running. They stimulate and perpetuate currents of “internalized battering,” and self-hate.
In the discussions above about anger, the anger siphons off incredible amounts of energy that is basically self-defeating. Anger becomes the first layer of defense, thus keeping the one venting the anger, unable to listen to rational thoughts, and seeing the other side. Many researchers are finding empathy as being a human goal that all of us really seek. When anger solidifies into an attitude or mindset, it’s impossible for us to build any bridges with others. It’s as if our minds create a hardened cell wall that becomes impervious.
It’s been my observation that our emotional similarities as well as contrasts, belies the fact that we can appreciate the huge truism of self-love and self-hate. Self-hate is a form of pathogenic inner violence that we enact against our selves and self-love is the positive energy to defeat inner violence.
For instance, the voices in our head may say to us:
§ “I’m not as competent as she is.”
§ “Why go to the meeting? I have nothing to say of any importance.”
§ “Life isn’t fair. I get all the bad breaks, and always have.”
§ “I always get Cs so why even try.”
§ “I’m the bad seed of the family; I’ve always been the troublemaker. I’m just bad to the bone I guess.”
If we hate ourselves, it will be almost impossible to see the good in others. We simply can’t appreciate our differences and diversity in a positive light, because these factors bring up our own flaws and imperfections. However, loving oneself doesn’t see life from the stance of perfection or imperfection, just what we are feeling in the immediate moment.
Endlessly seeking perfection, we fail time and time again, only to hate ourselves more. No matter how hard we try to fix ourselves, the inner voices of recrimination and feeling as if we are a mistake, dart through our minds like a dragonfly flying in ascending circles.
If any person or group arrives at some deepening degree of understanding self-love, then we are beginning to experience the diversity of emotions and thoughts within ourselves. We may begin to see ourselves as an ever-changing sacred container, that allows and acknowledges all feelings within this space; we can become more comfortable to our serenity; there is a sense of being reconciled to ourselves and to the emotional process of interdependent diversity.
Self-love helps us to value the emotional analogy of our dynamic moods, and to see that all humans experience the same moods that are as variegated as peacock feathers. We may find ourselves more capable of empathy towards those who are very diverse from us. Empathy may then lead to compassion.
Integrating what Cherie Huber suggests in her book and what I know about the connection between appreciation of diversity and our levels of self-hate or self-love, I can summarize the following:
· We are who we are
· We all have inherent goodness
· We all have been conditioned to being separated from each other
· We have no need to fix ourselves because we have nothing to fix
· We don’t have to be obsessed with changing ourselves
· We can own all our own feelings and need not feel responsible for other’s feelings
· If thoughts or feelings keep us stuck in an unhealthy place, we can simply acknowledge them and say to ourselves, “this is me, too”
· We may start to embrace what we think are our mistakes
· We have the human intelligence to look at our own inner violence
· We can learn to love ourselves and know this is a life time process
· Loving ourselves means loving all of who we are
· When we come to love ourselves more fully, we can love others more freely
April 16, 2009
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