Filed under: Diversity, Uncategorized | Tags: Cultural Stereotype Tags, Silent Racism
Silent Racism is the sort of racism that is unconscious, and often unspoken. It may describe whites who have no sense that they have any racialized conditioning, thus they would back away from thinking about racialized conditioning, as it pertains to their own personal inferences regarding whether they’re suffering from any form of Racism or are in denial. This racialized conditioning was used to found this nation, and has been perpetuated through ongoing generations in people’s minds, and embedded in American customs and laws.
Did you realize that 90% of our nation’s life has been spent living within the confines of slavery and Jim Crow laws lasting up until the Civil Rights Era. This is a huge segment of time, breeding the Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (Joy Leary has written a book by the same title) as an African American disease, with all the trappings of cultural trauma, irrational behaviors, re-triggering and healing.
We can be thankful for having brains and minds that are incredibly maleable, elastic, and resilient. This makes it possible to essentially re-build our brains, within certain limitations. Our self-introspective role is to de-construct our racialized conditioning and to assimilate and internalize new constructions and conversations about Racism. This is hard work, and requires confronting who we really are, and getting a feel for our own racialized conditioning. It means we learn about a varied slate of kinds of Racism that we see prevalent in our culture. It means we have developed coping mechanisms, if we happen to be re-triggered by our own perception of trauma.
Which brings me to a current example: recently a young Latina American, was a contestant in the Miss San Antonio Beauty Contest, and was disqualified. The beauty pageant officials said it was due to the failure of the young contestant to keep appointments, and some other trivial points.
After this happened, one of the officials of the pageant pulled this contestant aside and said to her, ‘you’ve just got to lay off those tacos, …’ The young Latina saw where this statement was coming from, so she decided to sue the pageant. We need to be critical thinkers about these types of stereotypes. Why did the official use the term “tacos,” instead of something else? Was this person so culturally incompetent that she didn’t think at all about how this might affect the young Latina? Or Latinas/os as an ethnicity? Or people we might call Mexican Americans, Salvadoran Americans, or people born in Spain?
The pageant official was making a statement, knowingly or not. She was perhaps voicing a Euro-centric Cultural Racism as an informal statement of the pageant’s operating procedure. White Systemic Racism consists of a philosophical anxiom that white is right; whiteness is the norm of what is beautiful, good, civilized, intelligent, morally superior, etc., and that any other norms are “less than” and inferior. Another way of paraphrasing what the pageant official told the disqualified Latina is this: tacos aren’t good–they’re an inferior food associated with South American or Mexican cultures. “Tacos aren’t good–they’re an inferior food, bad and uncivilized!”
If you are a European American and open to expanding your conscious, cultural sensititivity and competency, observe what you see and hear around you in the culture, to learn what you can about our form of Racism and how you’ve colluded with White Systemic Racism extant in our society. Use others, who may different than you, as your mirrors for growth.
3/20/2011 Copyright Christopher Bear-Beam, M.A., LPCI
* Barbara Trepagnier, Silent Racism
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