Addressing White Privilege

I recall a conversation from many years ago with a Houston, Texas baseball player (white man) who lived in Houston most of his adult life.  He tried to explain his attitude toward blacks by saying, “I don’t believe they are inferior or should have fewer rights.  I just don’t like them.”  In teasing out why, it boiled down to the general statement, “they are unpleasant”.  But his African-American ball player colleagues “were different” – even though “they weren’t interested in hanging” with him. Can you consider this white baseball player as racist?  Perhaps, in that he has generally an aversion toward black people.  But it gets tricky when we really dig into what it really means to be racist – saying someone is racist has a rather specific meaning in society. The reason that one might easily find oneself labeling this man as racist, may be based in one's own implicit or general attitudes.  A white Texas man must surely have a heritage of racism sin...

There have been few other findings in social psychology that have achieved such quick popularity as the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.  The form of IAT that has given it its publicity is the Race IAT – and consequently, a desirable measure to bring up in civil rights discussions.  It has even been used to accuse white people of being unknowingly and even secretly racist.  An accusation that is incorrect and unwarranted, and has no evidence trail to support it. IAT measures how fast you respond to what it poses as associations (through a cognitive-heuristic process called priming) between two stimuli such as words and pictures.  The theory is the faster you respond the more automatic an association exists within your mind between the two stimuli.  For instance, if you respond faster to the association of a black face to a negative word than you do a black face to a positive word, you may hold what is called an implicit negative attitude toward bla...

In this post I just want to talk about the term Institutionalized Racism itself.  If you take a look at the denotative definition in the dictionary and also its connotative definition in general and colloquial use, and its use in literature and academia, it speaks to a deliberate, explicit and formalized system.  To say racism is institutionalized as a means to describe our implicit social networks operating beneath our awareness is to grossly misuse the term.  Moreover, it incorrectly presents a view that posits this aspect of our nature as totally dominant and its response to simply skin color as its only problem. I can understand its use for its shock value, but shock causes backlash, and that hinders progress.  Moreover, such a use is political in nature, which is to impose one person’s (or group’s) way of looking at it on another.  No man or women on the planet is above fallibility, and when I see the work of experts in the field – even those admired with...

I want to offer some discussion on this term.  I still marvel at how confident people who use this term are, and how little they can concretely explain not only what it is but also fail to offer concrete evidence for it. This does not originate from believing it does or does not exist -- as if I believe there is no widespread problem.  This is coming from the frustration that so much energy and resources, and resulting public discourses, are centered around this concept - yet no realistic and concrete statement of the problem with directly corresponding solutions are proffered.  It is almost as if it seems people want to just exercise rhetorically for the social deference or to justify their activity traps.  Regardless, either not knowing concrete features of the problem and solution or simply keeping them secret, deserves stout reproach. Solid Ground defines Institutionalized Racism as “the systematic distribution of resources, power and opportunity in our society...