This post is the perspective of one individual. My views do not represent those of The College of Saint Scholastica or the Sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery.
I am proud of our College today. It took the difficult stance not to participate in a local campaign against racism – and I think they made the right choice.
Un-Fair Campaign Flyer
A consortium of local agencies, and most colleges & universities in the area, are supporting an anti-racism campaign in the region. We need it: Duluth is an unrelentingly white city (90%). People of color report that it’s not very friendly to them – and that white people are oblivious to the problem.
But how do you design a campaign to make people aware of privilege? This is different than the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, which focused on public policies as well as bias incidents. It tries to generate a change of awareness, a change of heart. Delicate business, making people aware of their privilege.
Peggy McIntosh‘s article “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” inspired the campaign. I use her article often in my sociology classes, teaching about white privilege in a classroom where most students are white and middle class. I know just how tough it is to get the conversation going in a way that’s effective. This campaign isn’t it.
Racism: Engage the Head and the Heart
Any time race is the topic, the heart – the emotions – are engaged. Feelings can swamp cognitive processing – people don’t even take in the information. If the first message is received as “You’re a racist!” it’s likely to evoke defensiveness, not introspection. The image of photos defaced with writing evokes strong negative emotions. But not emotions in the service of inclusiveness and awareness.
The genius of Peggy McIntosh’s article – and her talk at UMD a decade ago – is her personal journey. She was unaware of white privilege: she was aware of male privilege in the English department where she taught. A colleague – a person of color – pointed out that she also had privilege based on her white skin.
Her first reaction was to say, “No, that’s not true.”
But then she went home and thought about it, and made a list of 50 forms of her own white privilege. Some of them state a subtle aspect of cross-racial interaction. Some of them are very factual statements “I can buy Band-aids that, to some extent, match the color of my flesh.”
In my sociology class, we read the list aloud, each person reading one item slowly and pensively. Then we talk about them. The setting, the conversation, the mixture of messages provide an opening to consider the reality. Students recognize the concrete reality of some of the items, and usually relate them to times when they experienced discrimination for being young. Awareness opens slowly and in dialogue with others.
But what can I do about it?
This class session is uncomfortable and unsettling. Students complain that they end up feeling guilty but they didn’t ask for the privilege – how can they be guilty? We shift our gaze to the future: Can we be aware of who was before us in line and make sure they are served first? Can our understanding of white privilege be the platform for equalizing voice or access with people who experience the downside of privilege? Can we refrain from exercising privilege even when the structure of a situation gives it to us? What would that look like?
This is a conversion of the heart and the head: awareness and willingness to change. It is slow. It is painful. It is never complete. New awareness springs up all the time, and with awareness comes new hunger for justice or compassion. Having a campaign is a good idea. But not this one.
The Undefended Stance
Dialogue that brings about change is most likely to occur when people are undefended and open. If a campaign causes discomfort immediately – as Mayor Ness predicts it will – it will be hard to get to that place of openness when the defensive barriers come down. People do not open their minds or their hearts when they feel criticized, berated, or attacked.
Someone told me that the Un-Fair campaign was designed to be “white people talking to white people about white privilege” and thus would not raise defensiveness. Just because the message comes to a white person from a white person doesn’t reduce its power or ability to elicit defensiveness.
For a real conversation to happen around the topic of white privilege, people – of all points of view – need to be able to listen to each other openly and in an undefended way. So far, that’s not what I’ve seen as the result of this campaign.
Privilege Happens in Relationship, Not in Isolation
The flyers and posters show only white people – it’s amazing how even the discussion of white privilege is determined largely by white people.
Distributed Graduate Seminar at National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
The Un-Fair campaign lists the impacts, but doesn’t show them. The scribbles on the white person’s face simply deface it.
The same lines – with different photos – might open a conversation. Imagine the talk-bubbles that could contrast what a white person and a person of color might be thinking in a group like the one above. Then find a catchy – even edgy – thought bubble to portray it.
Privilege and Racism – Next Steps
Is the College of St. Scholastica dropping out of the discussion about privilege and racism? Not at all! But they made the choice – the wise choice – not to let the tone and tenor be set by a campaign that is, after all, designed largely (but not exclusively) by white people.* There are other ways to have the conversation, and our College hopes to find them.
*A colleague gave me better information than I had initially; there seem to have been several people of color involved in the planning group.
Related articles
- Twin Ports coalition launches anti-racism campaign (duluthnewstribune.com)
- Edgy anti-racism posters, billboards debut in Duluth (minnesota.publicradio.org)
- “I wonder if white people even know how lucky they are to be white” (atransparentlife.com)
- Unpacking the invisible knapsack (boingboing.net)
- White Privilege (gameofroles.wordpress.com)
- White people need to acknowledge benefits of unearned privilege by Robert Jensen (indigenist.blogspot.com)
Very interesting – this is my first time hearing about this campaign. From watching the video, it seemed the campaign is making some good points…but I do agree with the point that putting people on the defense, or making them feel guilty about themselves, rarely helps, it just stirs up other demons that prevent any real changes from happening – in fact it can cause a backlash. Not sure whether this campaign would make people feel alienated that way or not.
This might be surprising to others, but when I first saw that photo (“Is white skin really fair”? – I didn’t think of it as a campaign aimed at making white people more aware of racism. I immediately thought how important it is for many people of color, particularly of Asia and the Middle-East, to see that photo! Because I didn’t see the word “fair” as meaning “just”, but rather as meaning “beautiful”, desirable. I have seen lots of prejudices in these cultures based on who has “fair” skin (white or not) and who has darker skin. That photo needs to have some of the text modified appropriately and go worldwide…it’s not about white people, this is a global phenomenon that needs to be addressed.
You make an interesting point. The campaign was designed for a specific geographic region – one where 9 out of 10 people are white. But what is the meaning of white skin in a place where it’s 1 out of 10 or less? I wonder if anyone has written about this.
Hi Sister,
Great article and thank you for writing it. I’m a staunch supporter of the campaign, but I do respect and encourage the opposition to speak the concerns and welcome the back and forth.
When I say the “opposition”, I mean the good, well intentioned people, not the white supremacist people who have been infiltrating their ranks.
The college of St. Scholastica has opted out of this campaign in favor of their “in class” curriculum.
However, in my view, we need to bring this conversation outside of the colleges and into the public’s eye. When this conversation is only in the classroom, you’re pretty much “preaching to the choir” who already understand concepts behind it.
From what I’ve gathered through friends and colleagues is the stance of this campaign seems to be in two camps:
(Note: this is MY observation of people I know and may not reflect the populous as a whole)
Supporting: College Educated and / or liberal
Opposing: Lower income classes and / or conservative
Anti-racism campaigns have been around for decades with the classic “Stop Racism Now” campaigns. Nobody notices them anymore.
So, my question is… If you were to bring this conversation outside of the lecture halls and have the public actually notice the campaign, what would you have done differently?
How would you word / organize it to bring it to the public’s attention?
Thanks!
Troy
(p.s. Go Saints! :)
You ask a great question, and one that I plan to devote a future post to. But I’ll toss out a couple of ideas.
American culture loves to tackle (notice the violence!) problems head on. If something is wrong, let’s try to make that thing right, by direct means. I see this campaign in that light. We often forget to ask a different question: where is it right already? In this case, what sorts of things do we know reduce racism? How can we make more of those things happen?
So, for instance, one of the most effective paths to reduce -isms in general is empathy: people get a sense of what it is like to be (Black, old, disabled, or even rich, over-educated, etc). And one of the ways that empathy occurs is when people meet each other across the -ism line. That’s when it stops being about people who are Black or White and begins to be about Rob or Jessica or Kim.
Duluth is having tough times economically. Imagine if we had a campaign to volunteer for your neighborhood – for maintaining parks, shelving books at the library (I love the library!), in senior centers, and all sorts of neighborhood pick-up/clean-up activities. Perhaps we could include box-lunches for everyone who showed up to, say, maintain the Lakewalk. If we carefully designed activities that might be attractive to folks across lines of race or culture, and offered some benefits for the folks who are suffering in the community – unemployed, etc – we would be likely to get a more mixed crowd than usual, and that crowd would be working together toward something they all consider important. Rob and Jessica and Kim would have a chance to encounter each other with something in common – and that can build a bridge across who is Black, Native, Asian, White.
There’s some pretty solid experimental evidence that telling people it’s not good to have ideas about other races actually raises prejudice. There’s evidence – experimental and also correlational – that people become less prejudiced when they figure out for themselves that their prejudiced ideas are wrong. So an overtly anti-racist campaign stands a good chance of increasing racism – a sad paradoxical result. A campaign or a community-building focus that selects community-focused activities likely to draw people of different races together – so long as it doesn’t advertise that purpose – might be more effective.
I do see a place for dialogue directly about race and racism, but only where people have expressed at least curiosity. The evidence is just so strong that, when the message comes uninvited, resistance and even reactive entrenchment is the result. So, for instance, if there was a neighborhood improvement group of the type Joel Best describes in his Social Problems book, that group could – after tackling problems that drew them together – address questions of race and culture “head on” because they had a history. That could be the goal of the community organizer or facilitator.
If we’re going to use billboards to try to make a conversion of heart, we have to find images that evoke people’s nearly-instinctive positive emotions. Pro-life pictures of cute babies are like that. We need to find the empathy-evoking images across racial lines to have an impact with public relations campaigns. That’s not my area of expertise – but those posters with the scrawled words seem to be the opposite. Some of the same sentiments, shown in the video with placards, are a lot easier to take.
Thank you Sister Edith. You have truly “spoken” my exact feelings about this campaign. I have shown this article to a neighbor of mine who couldn’t understand why there has been such a lash back against this campaign. We were finally able to have a real discussion about a more constructive way to learn and understand racism in our community.
Thank you for the supportive comment. I wrote the blog piece as a way of sorting out my thoughts; I’m glad it helped you do likewise.
Interesting, I appreciate your point of view as I’m trying to sort out racism in my life. For the first time in my life I participated in the MLK walk and rally. I must say that it helped me realize that I can not, nor ever will be able to understand how a minority person feels (unless I’m the minority). I do wonder though, how successful has CSS been in enrolling people of color? Isn’t it the most “white” of all the colleges in the area? If so, why?
I haven’t seen exact enrollment proportions for students of color at the various local colleges. A lot of factors would affect whether people of color choose to attend a school – including the mix of majors that are offered, the college entrance requirements and standards, cost, etc.
When considering students enrolled at CSS, it’s important to think of all of our programs, not just those on the Duluth campus. For instance, our social work programs on the Bois Forte reservation and at Fond du Lac TCC enroll almost entirely people of color.
CSS is not less concerned about issues of racism than the other colleges that decided to participate in the Un-Fair Campaign. It has a variety of programs and ways that it addresses it, including the Office of Institutional Diversity. Choosing not to be part of that campaign is not a message that no action is needed.
Sister, nobody likes racism, but this campaign IS racist. It fosters the belief that if one is born white they are inherently racist even if they have black friends, asian inlaws, or American Indian coworkers who share their paygrade. It is a way of saying that if you have different color skin, you cannot escape racism, that it is around every corner, and that the “white devil” is behind it. MLK is probably rolling in his grave, as his “dream” is reversed to promote a culture where people are judged based on skin color rather than character.
Does Duluth even have a single White supremacy group in it’s limits? No, because if it did, we would not tolerate it–not because of this campaign, but because it is wrong. It would be a target of some true “campaign” not this made up mess.
Why is it that Asian immigrants suffer little in economic elevation? They outrank white students and become highly paid via hard work. Will we at some point have a campaign against them saying they are also “racist” because of “inequity” in result?
The truth is that if one has a mindset of belief that they can succeed, they can succeed. If they work hard enough they can go to college and get good grades, attain a good job, buy a good home and raise a good family, and share in the American dream. But it is campaigns such as the “unFAIR” campaign which basically say that this is untrue, that there is everyone holding them back, that if they don’t get a job it is because of race, not because of anything else, despite the fact that perhaps another person of color may have gotten it over them.
This campaign is a shame upon a city with little racism, and that is the only “shame” that we should have in our community.
The language of debates often gets people into either/or categories, but it usually doesn’t match reality. And it doesn’t help people reach understanding.
So I don’t think it helps to label something as “racist” or “not racist” especially when it is a message that will be understood differently by different people, and people will have different definitions of racism. I prefer to say: this is a campaign that raises the issue of race, and it’s worth talking about how people are likely to receive it.
Similarly, people talk as though EITHER a person’s outcomes in life are the result of their own efforts OR they are due to external forces, of which any kind of discrimination or privilege would be one. In fact, when we think about our own lives honestly, we know that both things come into play. People inherit businesses or the skills of hard work from a family member. They have access to tools or a computer or a good library where they get information that isn’t available elsewhere. A teacher takes you under her wing – and that might be more likely in one school system than in another. IF there’s a pattern in the way those micro-influences are distributed – and social science tells us clearly that there is – then there is a pattern that affects life outcomes beyond a person’s own effort.
For instance, I sure worked hard to earn my degrees, and other people who were equally smart didn’t make it through the graduate program because they made other choices. On the other hand, I had the privilege of attending some of the best schools in the country from kindergarten all the way through. From an early age, I was trained in academic thinking, taught to love to read, given all sorts of academic resources. In sociology we often speak of the “micro-skills” of a situation. In academics, things like knowing (it feels like instinctively) which parts of a lecture are important enough to write down, or how to construct an argument. I had a different set of skills when I got to graduate school than some of the other students – and the social class privilege of all those elite schools meant that I probably was a little more effective in my work, and had a little easier time figuring out what was required.
It’s not a matter of either/or. My effort did make a difference: without it nothing would have happened. The advantages of my social class background did make a difference: without them, it would have been much harder to get through graduate school – and I might not have persevered.
What does the campaign hope we’ll do? Take notice of those patterns – and work to make sure everyone has a fair shake at receiving the advantages.
Will you publish my comments, Sister? I hope you will.
A Catholic Nun teaching Critical Race Theory?
What other forms of Cultural Marxism are taught in the Catholic Universities of the Upper Midwest, I wonder? Is it meant to propel the students towards acceptance of a sort of Conflict Theory Cathechism?
Liberation Theology is, to me, evidence of the influence of the Secta nefaria (and, by extension, the still-living remnants of Cultural Marxism) intellectually and politically on a Church that is doing so much to further White Genocide worldwide. I hope you’ll consider the source of what you teach, how you came by it and what it means for your Faith and the faithful.
http://theopeningeye.blogspot.com/2012/01/white-privilege-genealogy-of-concept.html
Thank You and God Bless You. Really.
What a leap of assumptions, to think that teaching students to make careful observations about how social systems operate to the conclusion that one is teaching all of Critical Race Theory! By that measure, whenever I teach about the forces that bind the family together and make it an important institution of society, I’m teaching all of structural functionalism – bad and good together. One cannot decide about the truth and usefulness of a concept simply from the context in which it came into being.
An example: Modern statistics. Most of the things you will use or do today have, somewhere, the use of statistics. Finding this blog to comment on the article probably involved a search engine: statistics. If you take a medicine or treatment, drive a vehicle or ride an elevator, you’re trusting your life to statistical testing that predicts you have a high chance of being safe – and helped. Traffic control, business decisions – all grounded in statistics. But most people know nothing about the ideological framework in which they were developed. Karl Pearson, the founder of modern statistics (many of which bear his name, like the Pearson correlation coefficient), was a believer in eugenics. He himself was a Marxist socialist, but his eugenics beliefs – promoting the use of sterilization and the development of contraception to prevent the “unfit” from populating the earth – were picked up as foundational by the National Socialist (Nazi) movement. Our modern methods of hypothesis testing and the like have just about the worst ideological pedigree one can imagine.
But it would certainly be foolish and wrong for me to refuse to teach these methods to the many health profession students in my class – to keep them from being able to determine whether one or another treatment is more effective or the likelihood that a particular patient will have a negative reaction. I wouldn’t want to drive across a bridge that wasn’t built using statistics to compute its ability to hold a particular load in particular weather conditions. I’m even reluctant to give up the luxury of weather forecasts.
The Church has long recognized the existence of social inequalities and of privilege that perpetuates itself through social structures. Pope Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate is clear – and draws on centuries of Catholic teaching – in delineating the structures that generate inequality, with privilege for some and poverty for others. The Holy Father makes the argument – as have the Popes before him – against purely secular ideologies like Marxism as a source of change. He makes the argument against other secular ideologies – including unregulated free market capitalism – for failing to carry out Christ’s mandate to care for the poor and vulnerable. He quotes a surprising number of social scientists – left and right – not to adopt their viewpoints wholesale, but to glean from them the wisdom that corresponds with the teaching of the Church.
So teaching students about inequality and about the mechanisms and structures through which it is perpetuated is providing them with the foundation they need in order to read and understand the teachings of the Church. In fact, when I had the students in an upper-level sociology course read all of Caritas in Veritate to experience a theoretical perspective that did not sign on to either a socialist or a capitalist agenda, they were skeptical that it would be interesting to them. It was not easy going – they are not as well-versed in philosophy as Pope Benedict – but, in the end, they took away a very different perspective. And this in a class where the majority of students were not Catholic.
Do I consider what I teach in light of the Faith? Certainly. A major practice of the Catholic intellectual tradition, from St. Augustine to the present, has been its willingness, even eagerness, to use consider and use the results of secular philosophies – but not to adopt those philosophies wholesale.
Thank you for your comment, and for the link to your longer work.
If you don’t approve my comments, then you are a reality-ignoring coward.
This is one of several comments submitted by the person who doesn’t use a name but is registered as unfairisracist@yahoo.com.
The point of my piece is that the current Un-Fair campaign tends to promote angry and defensive styles of communication about race, privilege, racism, and racial bias incidents. This does not move the issue forward. This comment from an anonymous source seems to support that viewpoint.
The other comments are news stories related to attacks against white people. Some include a link, but also the entire text of the original news story, generating a tremendous amount of verbiage to wade through. Instead, I am copying the titles and links and pasting them below for anyone who would like to follow them.
This “unfair” campaign encourages anti-white violence.
Are Detroit and Camden New Jersey “unrelentingly black”?
I haven’t been to Camden.
Detroit is 82% Black inside the city limits – still 10% less mono-racial than Duluth – but much more multi-racial in its metropolitan area, which is 22% Black. Thousands of people of lots of races and cultures commute all over the region. It’s not “unrelenting” because many people will encounter folks of other races where they work, shop, or go for recreation.
In contrast, the towns around Duluth that constitute the metropolitan region are even more White than Duluth (except for the Fond du Lac band’s lands). It is “unrelentingly” White because one has to travel more than 2 hours by car to find any kind of multi-racial location.
We need to have more discussions on white privilege not just in sociology classes but all over the US.