why zenify racism

Coming from classes where we are encouraged to speak our minds and truly listen to the experiences others have had I am unhappy with the way in which our class has been structured. I dont want to see a green, yellow, or a red card when I have said something someone deems worthy of response. I want to hear their response. Why do you agree with me? what do agree with? I want to hear what you dont agree with most. It is important for all people involved in a class like this to get out their frustrations with racism, their ignorance about whiteness and privilege, and their emotions for the ways things are structured in our world. we need more people being aggressive and emotional and less people being passive and guarded. YOU CANNOT HAVE A CLASS ABOUT RACISM AND NOT HAVE PASSIONS AND EMOTIONS ARISE! I am tired of being in institutions where we are only made to be comfortable as if there is such a thing as "safe space". If safe space is a space where emotions, experiences and true passion are not welcome, than that space is NOT safe for me. we are told to not be the devils advocate but then, in a class where we are supposed to be studying whiteness, we are shown in a positive light how whiteness and gentrification are "bettering" communities. WTF? really. a bunch of portland hippies holding hands around a street they painted in order to have a better community moral is doing what for the children of color going to the sunset elementary school just two blocks away? providing a better cultural competence fort the teachers? uh no. what about the Latino community that is less than five miles from that intersection, is anyone helping them to get citizenship so they can get the public assistance they need to feed their family, or more spanish in their classrooms, or, god forbid creating tests they can take in their native language so as not to be determined "under achieving". 

what are the people who set up farmers markets doing to bring poor people of color to their markets? why is it that these markets are set up in predominantly white areas of town and when they do come to the areas of town that have a higher percentage of people of color it is only when they have been gentrified? sure we are practicing a culture of sustainability but who are we sustaining? white people! access to things like community gardens, farmers markets, bike stores, independent book stores, vegan bars, and coops solely depends on your financial ability to live in areas where those things are located as well as your knowledge of the existence of such things. I live in 14th and alberta and probably am the only renter in the neighborhood who pays rent to a Black women. I have grown up here. Gone to church on Ainsworth, had my t-ball practice in what is now the Kennedy school's parking lot and took swim lessons at peninsula park. I cant afford to shop at the coop so I walk an extra ten blocks to the store Jeffery owns. This is what the people of color in this neighborhood do as well. I have never seen a Black person in the coop. Probably because things like nutritional yeast, tempeh and meatless jerky do not apply to Black people who live in this neighborhood but also because one small thing of juice is 4.69$. who can afford that? middle class white folks thats who. The Black people in my neighborhood as well as myself walk the ten blocks to get a half pound of chicken, a half pound of jo jo's and some juice for 5.00$ so that we can eat and maybe have some left over for someone else who may be hungry. 

why haven't we delved into studying words like accountability, standards, normal, identity, power and control? why are we looking at gentrification and what it can do for communities but not looking at what it is doing to the existing communities? gentrification is just colonization within a country. It is no different from stealing land from the American Indians. 

I am wondering, are we looking at racism and the effects of whiteness or are we perpetuating whiteness?

Racism

when I was in 5th grade I found a book of slaver narratives. Because i wasn't taught the truth about the terrors of slavery when being taught about the civil war I was astounded to read the narratives in which the truth was very different than when I read in my "history" book. The story that tore my heart apart was about twenty slave women who were all mothers of infants. they were to place their children into troughs, work down one row and back and then feed their infants. about half way down the cotton row it began to rain, then pour with monsoon qualities. In the face of this storm the women pleaded with overseer to go and get their babies. After a couple were whipped they all fell back in line with their slave duties. By the time they got back to the trough all of the babies had drown. after reading this I became as depressed as an empathetic ten year old can and thus distrusted everything I was taught out of a history book up until college. I was kicked out of every history class I attended for "being disruptive" when actually i was just calling out the lies my teachers were perpetuating in their instruction and with their texts. 

There are four traditional problematic ways in which history in the US is taught. 1. Omitted-information 2. Distortion 3. fabrication 4. the academic treatment  Within these there are sub categories which are; Historic disrespect, Interpretive absurdity, Interpretive blindness, scholarly  dismissal, and the impulse to cleanse history.

Basically we have taken out and put in information that will in turn show us (white folks) in a great and respectful light. we've created heros out of slave owners, given credit to those who do not deserve it, hidden our vast amount of wrong doings, completely "left out" huge parts of our past and blatantly lied to cover our asses which we are still doing very much to this day. 

When I learned about my great great grandfather fighting for the north in the civil war and being abolitionists I thought " Thank god. I am so proud". But not that have I learn the truth of the North I am a little more skeptical of my family's actual motivation for wanting to abolish slavery. They may have been a part of the christian movement who thought slavery was wrong but probably they were part of the poor white who did not want competition for work and just wanted Black people out of the country. Just because they hated the institution of slavery doesn't mean they were fighting for the rights of slaves. 

I feel like knowledge can be power but i think you can know a lot and still have no idea. I think it is knowing the truth that gives power. My power comes from when I am in the world and hear false statements about history, people of color, prominant people etc. I am better able to battle the racist comments I hear when I know more than the person making them. 

No you cannot say that american history is white history because you cannot have american history without the black experience. every single economic stride we have made in the last 600 years has been built on the backs of Black people and the strides we are making now are built on the backs of all brown people living in this country as well as abroad. Now we are exploiting children as well. 

why white studies?

why take white studies?

I am taking this course to dive into and study the many structures of whiteness, how white people throughout history work to maintain their privilege and power, how our government time and time again has persecuted the african american community and found ways to enslave people of color over and over again, each time calling it by a new name (slavery, sharecropping, crack, prison)etc. Now I know about a lot of this and was hoping to have this class teach me something new. Unfortunately I have found that our class is seemingly part of the structure of whiteness. We have learned that race is not biology, as I have learned in four other black studies courses (we really need to have some prereq's for the 400 level BS classes). Race is a socio-historical and political construct used to create a hierarchy based on color. this was done to better one group of people (euros) over another (everyone else). Race has been used as the justification of the most horrific terrors in history. The need of whiteness to keep itself superior has resulted in many forms of genocide, the institution of slavery,the intended breakdown of the african american family structure, the intended degradation of the african american community by the introduction of crack cocaine and then Reagan's war on drugs which has now created the multibillion dollar franchise better know as the prison industrial complex. We have disparities in health care, education, and housing. Most of all there are great disparities in the opportunities presented to the people of color in this country. Based on the color of your skin (as well as your gender and class) you have a predetermined set of advantages and/or disadvantages. Because whiteness has control over everything we see and are able to do we have no power or control. at least that is what the structure, the government, the top one percent want us to think. One of whiteness' strategies has always been divide and conquer, separate the slaves so they cannot revolt and have no family ties to "rowl them", disintegrate the community so the people within it in turn go after each other (black on black crime and violence), create no opportunities for rehabilitation so we can recirculate the addicts (whom we created) over and over etc.

These disparities and injustices are what I had hoped we would already be talking about. I have had a hard time paying attention in class because I feel as if our conversations are stunted from growing into conversations that could lead to the dissection of these realities. we know that people assign meaning to the way we look but why haven't we talked about what that means for us, in the way of privilege or oppression? why haven't we truly talked about what whiteness gains from assigning morals to our physical appearance? instead of spending so much time on race and biology we should be talking about the power and control of whiteness, where it comes from, how we contribute to it and how we can begin to break it down. who is working to free the hundreds of thousands of Black men in prison for non violent crimes? who is working to get proper health care for Black mothers and their children? who is creating culturally competent testing practices and providing more opportunities for children of color to attend college or even let them know that college is an option? why are we not talking about whiteness' power to create definitions and how those definitions shape all of our mobility through this society? Why haven't we talked about the insecurity of whiteness and how this insecurity has been shown through all of our history; through colonization, patriarchy, the creation of race as a classification of human and not human etc. and what happens when this insecurity is tapped by anyone but especially a person of color? 

These are the issues I have deemed important in the struggle against racism and patriarchy. There are so many more because the structures of whiteness and racism as an institution are complex and entangled in every nook and cranny of our society. No matter where we are in the world the effects of whiteness are felt, seen heard, and lived through. Race has been a source of anger for me since I was very small. I was never able to come to terms with treating someone differently because of how they looked instead of how they treated you. I grew up the only white girl in a Black neighborhood and the people who took care of me the most were my neighbors. The people who have offended me and my loved ones have been white people. whether they have been friends of my mothers, cops, the grocery store clerk or the pastor at our church. It has been shown to me time and time again that there is not one trait an entire group of people have and as a child I didn't understand why my friends were persecuted for things they had never done and why I wasn't. why my best friend thought he was "Black" when I saw brown. why we weren't atght about the realities of slavery and how our history has been bound by white historians only to make themselves look like heros instead of terrorists.