The Student News Site of Rock Bridge High School

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The Student News Site of Rock Bridge High School

Bearing News

The Student News Site of Rock Bridge High School

Bearing News

Questioning racial bias

by+Cassi+Viox+and+Neil+Cathro
by Cassi Viox and Neil Cathro
[heading size=”14″]Racial equality is not as black and white as perceived[/heading] White privilege shapes the very world one lives in — the way people navigate, interact and communicate with one another.
According to an article by Teaching Tolerance, white privilege is not something that white people necessarily create on purpose. Instead, the research stated it is a “right, advantage or immunity granted to or enjoyed by white persons beyond the common advantage of all others.”
World-renowned educator, author and speaker Tim Wise, who is scheduled to speak at the University of Missouri–Columbia (UMC) Tuesday, March 8, argues that this societal privilege provides white people with certain “perks” that people of other colors do not, and cannot, experience.
Wise wrote on his FAQ website page that white people have privileges by design of the societal situations like the criminal justice system and employment.
He asserts this belief in saying, “The concept [of white privilege] is rooted in the common sense observation that there can be no down without an up, so that … people of color are the targets. [They] have more opportunity because those persons of color are receiving less.”
Similar to Wise, senior Gabbi Schust sees the effects of white privilege, particularly in school. She deems white privilege as existent in society for several reasons, such as racial profiling and racial discrimination against minorities in schools and workplaces.
As an older sister to an adopted African American sister, Schust knows what it’s like on either end of the long, divided spectrum.
“Walking the halls at RBHS, I notice that I never get questioned where I’m going or told to get to class by faculty and teachers, but my minority classmates are often told those things,” Schust said. “I’ve also experienced it in the fact that I’m generally treated better and maybe even trusted more based on my [white] skin tone, which is completely ridiculous.”
MAC scholars coordinator Joe Collier refuses to believe his students are victims of white privilege. Also holding the position as RBHS’s home school communicator, Collier says that his job primarily revolves around finding and providing resources for students of all backgrounds.
“[My role] is to make sure that all minorities in MAC Scholars know what’s out there in the schools,” Collier said. “I make sure that they have the abilities to go visit colleges [and] the ability to make sure they know what they want to do by the time they leave RBHS. I make sure they have a plan for post-high school.”
For junior Alli Foster, too many people are not properly educated on the implications of white privilege for her to fully believe in its truth. Caucasian herself, Foster believes white privilege is more than a right implicated by race alone.
“The word white privilege implies that the only way people are prejudiced is when it comes to race, which is certainly not true,” Foster said. “There is also sexism, religious persecution and many other types of prejudice. White privilege seems to ignore all other factors but race.”
Foster believes people colloquially use the term white privilege when speaking of certain institutions and communities. Because of this, Foster asserts the conspicuous prejudice in America to have formed on an individual level.
“I don’t believe American institutions enforce racism, sexism or religious persecution, and saying they do does non-prejudiced individuals a huge disservice,” Foster said. “It is possible for someone to be favored because they are white. I don’t think that our society is oriented to do that, but some individuals just are.”
But at the end of the day, humans breathe the same air and hearts beat the same blood.
“I really feel that a person can make his own weight,” Collier said. “You can have the same privileges that everybody else has. I won’t allow my students to feel like the reason why they’re being held down is because of this privilege that other students get. I want them to believe that they can make their own weight and that they have the resources to do it.”
By Joy Park
[heading size=”14″]Inciting old slurs with new technology[/heading] “Who knew slaves could be so pretty”
“Did your slave owner take this??”
“I bet you are very grateful they let you take a day off from the plantation”
“#abrahamlovesme”
Hate speech or Instagram comments? Sometimes it’s a trick to tell.
One night, as junior Sam Lopez scrolled through her Instagram feed, these are the very comments she saw on freshman Brittany Hayes’ photo. She decided she couldn’t just ignore these words, so she reached out to her friend, freshman Piper Page to help her choose what action to take to fight against these racist comments.
“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘This is a joke,’ because no one would actually just say that,” Page said. “So when I went further and actually went to the page, because originally I just saw screenshots, they kept coming. I thought, ‘OK, now I am starting to see that this is an inside joke.’ So then I sent it to [sophomore] Andrea [Baker] and it just became big.”
Together, the three decided to speak out against this joke gone wrong. Lopez messaged one of the girls who commented ‘#abrahamlovesme’ along with other hashtags such as #oreo, #mixedlovewins and #civilwarover.
“I was basically trying to get it through their heads that posting something like that just isn’t OK, even if it is an inside joke,” Lopez said. “It’s not something you should post out to the public.”
But as students have a tendency to brush off chastisements from peers, the girl said Hayes was OK with the joke and the words weren’t a big deal.
“If they don’t have a consequence, how are they supposed to know that they are in the wrong? Because obviously they didn’t listen to us,” Baker said. “They aren’t going to listen to kids, so they have to hear it from an adult.”
What enables white students to feel like it is acceptable to make public comments disparaging to others because of their race, joking or otherwise?
Privilege, specifically of the white persuasion, Dr. Jason Cummings claims. As an assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at the University of South Carolina, he uses a working definition of white privilege in his classroom to get all students to the same understanding on this pervasive cultural form of oppression.
“When I discuss white privilege in my courses, I offer the following definition: benefits and/or advantages to being white in a largely white dominated society,” Dr. Cummings said. “The difficulty many people have with white privilege is that [whites] generally view racism/discrimination through the lens of ‘individual acts of meanness,’ [as said by] McIntosh [in] 1989.”
Baker, a Caucasian student, agrees with Dr. Cummings, saying a large amount of white people who deny privilege don’t have the capacity to empathize because they themselves have never been oppressed.
“People think that if it’s not affecting them personally that it doesn’t exist,” Baker said. “If people who are being oppressed tell you that they’re being oppressed, if you’re not being oppressed you can’t be like, ‘No, you can’t find that offensive.’ That’s not how it works.”
There are a plethora of negative implications of this denial, Dr. Cummings said.
“The consequences of denying white privilege will only lead to growing racial inequality,” Dr Cummings said. “Today Republicans and Democrats alike have proclaimed the War on Drugs, including mandatory minimums and three strikes laws, a massive failure that led to the swelling of American prisons largely at the expense of black and brown communities of color.”
He pointed to many statistics such as the 40 million extra arrests for drug related offenses since 1971 and the fact that blacks are ten times more likely to be incarcerated for drug crimes. Additionally, Dr. Cummings cites other issues as contributing factors to the era of white privilege following slavery and so-called freedom for blacks.
“As legal scholar Michelle Alexander, [author of] The New Jim Crow, highlights: there are more blacks under correctional control, in prison, probation or parole, today than were enslaved in the U.S. colonies in 1850. White privilege allows one to ignore this reality,” Dr. Cummings said. “I use the analogy in class of a car that needs an alignment. If a car has an alignment issue, denying that there is an issue or [refusing] to fix the problem will only give room for the problem to worsen on its own if ignored. You have to take the car to a mechanic, jack it up to see what the problems are and do what’s necessary to get the car in working order.”
A lack of knowledge can be blamed as a part of the “car’s un-alignment,” following Dr. Cummings analogy, Lopez said. She believes education can help break down these barriers.
“I think they should teach us both sides of the story,” Lopez said. “Just try to incorporate everyone so that people … don’t have just this one mindset and be so close-minded.”
Page agrees with Lopez, saying if teachers are more emphatic and direct when discussing heavy topics, students will be more mindful of their comments and the words they use in public.
“One way that I think teachers can go about it is overwhelming. I know that definitely worked for me in middle school. We were studying World War II and we were studying Hitler. [My teacher] overwhelmed us with that to get the point across. We left middle school knowing that those situations were bad,” Page said. “So if they overwhelmed us with different cultures and ethnicities people will leave high school thinking, ‘These [parts of history] are definitely real; we aren’t going to joke about it.’ People don’t normally walk around joking about the Holocaust, so I think if we overwhelm them with racial profiling and racial selection that they will finally get the point that it is not a joke.”
She worries, though, that parents might stand in the way of this process.
“That’s the scary part, too. There is the part where you are overwhelming them about black history and it’s a white girl who goes home and tells her mom. They go home and cry, ‘Oh my gosh, my teacher is just teaching about bad things that are happening.’ Then that parent complains to the school board. That does happen,” Page said. “Then the teacher is the one at fault there when you know if that had been reversed and it was white culture that was being brought upon another ethnicity they would not go home and say, ‘This is too much. I can’t handle it.’ This is what we grow up with, so why is that they have to sit through that and a white girl or a white boy can’t sit through our culture and listen to what went on with our story?”
By Abby Kempf
photo illustration by Cassi Viox and Neil Cathro

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    Emily ObaMar 13, 2016 at 9:35 pm

    It’s so sad and frustrating that people are treated differently based on the color of their skin. The fact that the majority of Americans are white is part of the reason racial bias happens. Caucasians are the majority and the people of color are the minority, but that doesn’t give people an excuse to be bias,rude, and racist towards certain groups of people.

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