Seeing Beyond Peach

If you haven't guessed by now, today I would like to talk to you about racism. Now I know we are all familiar with blatant racism, such as KKK movements and Hitler's Nazis from the twentieth century, but today I would like to take a deeper look at the covert racist policies and institutions in place that are well hidden from public eye. I am talking about issues such as speaking in public to a powerful group without putting your race on trial or doing well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to your race. 

Or a personal moment that I just realized after our class discussion about racial institutions, was me drawing people when I was younger. At first, when I use to draw a person as a child I use to draw people and colour them brown. Then I would think that it did not look nice, and I started to colour all my people in peach and think it was pretty. As an eight-year-old child, I did not think this was a problem. I just did not think colouring the figure brown looked good. I mean everyone I saw on television and my favourite cartoon characters were not brown coloured, and the people beside me in class were all colouring their people peach. So it seemed natural that the brown looked odd, and instinctively I started colouring my fictional characters peach. 

As a person coming from an Indian culture, I can clearly see the problem with these actions today. I knew I was a coloured person, there was no denying that. But when I use to draw myself I never use to colour the person brown, I use to see myself in a different light. The problem here is the underlying institutions that portray one dominant race and one accepted custom. The all white barbies, the lack of roles for coloured actors, except the traditional roles such as the Indian taxi driver, or the comedic African-American, the list goes on. 

An interesting topic that came up in class in relation to racism and how to fix it is tokenism. Tokenism is the notion that minorities get the role they desire on the basis of their minority in order to fill the space and be diverse. For instance, if there was a hiring process for teachers and a regulation comes into play that staff at a school need to have a small percentage of coloured people in order to better suit student needs and fight institutional racism, a coloured person would get the job because of their skin colour. Instead of getting the job based on merit and skill, the person is getting the job because they are more likely to be discriminated against in other areas of life. In this light, you are now being discriminatory against other people applying for the same job and this is where the debate begins. 

I think the best way to defeat racism and other aspects of it is not to create policies demanding for an appropriate split in staff or other areas, but instead to instil empathy in a person's life so that they can better understand the perspective of minorities. As a future educator, a great article I will be using in my future classrooms in regards to racism and privilege will be Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh. In it, McIntosh provides a list of things people can read through and begin to think critically about whether or not they are privileged in certain everyday situations. By using this in the classroom, I hope to spark a sense of empathy in all my students regardless of race and promote respect and equity in the classroom.

References

McIntosh, P. (1992). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Race Class and Gender, 73-80.