Institutionalising Racism

Session Objective: to acknowledge how political, social, economic, linguistic & environmental structures marginalise communities

Week 2 continues our introductory unit. “Orientation” can also refer to “a person’s basic attitude, beliefs, or feelings in relation to a particular subject or issue”. The set of materials below is meant to be a disorientation as much as an orientation, as we question what we know about racism in the United States and around the world. “Institutionalising Racism” is about understanding the wider context in which we exist and environmental racism plays out. Class this week will examine three related concepts: systemic racism, intersectionality, and white-as-default.

Finally, the word “orientation” is also used to mean “the determination of the relative position of something or someone (especially oneself)”. Your major assignment for this introductory unit asks you to consider how you impact – and are impacted by – environmental racism due to your own identity, values, and interests.

As reminder, your Learning Log is due by the end of the day each Wednesday. If you are feeling overwhelmed or can’t get through everything, though, you can submit the Google Form with a note of “I will come back to this” for any of the questions, and edit your submission later - but your experience in class will be much more meaningful when you review materials in advance.

Examine: queer Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson’s American History canvas featuring a quote from Black playwright and novelist James Baldwin:
“American history is longer, larger...more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

American History (Mixed Media on Canvas, 2015)

Jeffrey Gibson is a queer Mississippi Choctow-Cherokee painter and sculptor who spent his youth in Germany and Korea. His artwork draws on everything from rural pow-wows to urban raves while incorporating media as diverse as Iroquois beadwork and Everlast punch bags. A 2019 MacArthur Fellow, Gibson’s work prompts a shift in how Native American art is historicised.

Skim: the “History of Racism in America” by Meilan Solly for the Smithsonian.
While you’re looking through it,
Identify: something you did not previously know about the timeline, impact, or extent of racially based oppression in the United States. Note it below to raise in class.

158 Resources for Understanding Systemic Racism in AmericaThese articles, videos, podcasts and websites from the Smithsonian chronicle the history of anti-black violence and inequality in the United States

Meilan Solly is a journalist and designer who has covered everything from dollhouse crime scenes to student mental health. She is currently an assistant digital editor at Smithsonian magazine; she has previously written for Kiplinger, The Saint, and The Flat Hat. Based in Washington, D.C., Solly is an alumna of William & Mary as well as the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is a World War II buff and a lover of the Renaissance, modern art, and dogs.

Learn: about the problem of white-as-default. Becca’s mini-lecture introduces the concept; the accompanying “Theory at a Glance” guide captures key terms and links to other resources if you would like to dive deeper.

click for transcript and lecture notes

As we dive more into theory in this class, you’ll probably notice that we’re borrowing ideas from gender studies, disability rights activism, and the queer liberation movement as well anti-racist work. This is because all of these fields are fundamentally about power relations. There is a long history of minority groups ‘fighting’ for attention, unfortunately, but there is also a long history of shared struggles, learning from each other’s strategies, and building on successes. Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s well-known words “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” are true not only in geographic terms, but also in regards to the type of injustice and which group is being marginalised. We’ll explore more about this in next week’s examination of intersectionality. For today, as we consider just how widespread racism is in our world, we’re going to take a look at reference group categories and feminist critiques of male as norm.

A reference point is something we use to start with. When you’re giving directions and you say “it’s down the road from the gas station”, the gas station is your reference point. We use reference points because they are things we expect everyone to know. They’re the common, well-known, baseline. They are what we measure from.

A reference group is a collection of people used as a standard. In scientific studies, they are the control group.

Reference categories are the default. They are the ‘normal’.

Now, there are a lot of reasons that we have reference points. We have to start somewhere! But when we’re thinking about people, instead of buildings and how close they are to a gas station, the reference categories we use really matter.

Because as soon as we have named a reference category, we have created a central point. And when we name a particular group of humans as the default, we make some humans the ‘others’. They are immediately less central, and, in a quiet way, less human.

Feminist scholars identify masculine as a common reference category that creates inequalities. Male, masculine, and man are the default: we see this with phrases like “all mankind”, and we mean all humans. But we don’t say “all womankind”, and mean all humans. When we use one category of people as a stand-in for everyone, we center that group, and everyone else becomes an ‘other’. Thinking of the male-as-norm phenomenon, Sandra Bem explains:

“All members of a category do not have equal status in the mind of the human perceiver; some members are instead perceived as ‘more equal’ - or more prototypical - then other members...the male is taken to be the cognitive reference point, the standard, for the category of human being...the female is taken to be a variation on that prototype, a less representative example of the human species”.

Taking men as the default has very real and dangerous consequences. Women in car crashes are more likely to be seriously injured than men, because the entire design is built around the ‘standard’ male body. Crash dummy tests are performed - and safety rankings made - based on the male average. But the male average is not actually the human average, even though we have created an entire system designed as though it is.

There is a very clear parallel between the male-as-norm problem and racist structures: white is the default reference category for race. White is considered ‘normal’. (Emirbayer and Desmond: “Whiteness often functions as a standard against which all other categories are (implicitly) compared.”) White-as-default is built into everything: from the yellow cartoon shade of standard texting emojis, to the fact that Western grocery stores have an “ethnic” hair care section. And again, this creates life-and-death inequalities, in addition to the millions of ways it devalues non-white persons in everyday life. Medical textbooks use white bodies in illustrations; this leads to misdiagnosis and delays in treatment, and contributes to horrific disparities in health outcomes.

We live in a world where white men, as a reference category, are the default for ‘human’. And by consistently placing them as the central reference point, every system is designed around whiteness and maleness as the baseline. This creates structural inequalities in everything, no matter how much we as individuals are or are not actively biased, racist, or sexist. Because when a particular group of people is always the reference group, that group is preferenced, in a million different little ways, that add up to massive amounts of privilege for them and major barriers for others.

Male-as-norm and white-as-default is why it isn’t enough to be “not racist”. We have to be actively anti-racist, because white supremacy is so pervasive in so many quiet ways that it is the default: so much so that inaction becomes patriarchal racism. That’s why we’re studying structural inequality and systemic oppression: so we can recognise that individual bias and interpersonal discrimination are far from the only problems we face when it comes to racial disparities.