Race 101 for College Students – Unlearning Whiteness

Adebisi & Tajarie’s Proposal for a Required Course on Race for College Students (Fall 2020)

This course was created to further the understanding of racism beyond the surface level understanding of racism “being bad.” We will explore how racism affects minorities across the country and its ability to evolve with each new generation. This course will challenge the way you view the world and your understanding of it through readings and class discussions. We hope to challenge the need to be complicit and foster the need for empathy during both class discussions and discussions that you will hopefully be having by the end of this course. Our ultimate goal is to be able to identify many dimensions of racism and to be able to find ways to effectively combat it.

Course Objectives

To cultivate a community where cultural humility is present in every conversation. Here, cultural humility entails coming to class with an open mind and a willingness to learn. Having respect for everyone’s lived experiences and being self-critical of your role and power status in our class discussions.
Build and expand upon preexisting knowledge and views of systemic racism
Facilitate critical thinking about the systems you participate in and how they can perpetuate other systems of oppression
Develop an understanding of both the simplicity and complexity of racism and the many forms that it can take

Course Units

Instructor: Our hope is that there will be multiple Black professors on campus who could teach this course.

Whiteness vs. Blackness (VERY general ideas of this topic)
- This unit will touch upon the origin of blackness and whiteness. It is built on the understanding that race is a social construct, with the belief that being white is the norm, and anything that deviates from the aforementioned norm is bad. We are starting with this unit to make sure that all students are learning with the same base knowledge regardless of what they knew coming into this class.
- Readings: Lifting the White Veil: An Exploration of White American Culture in a Multiracial Context by Jeff Hitchcock (read chapter 5 from this book)
Prejudice, racism, and bias
- Bias and prejudice will be taught in tandem with one another due to their similarities. What is prejudice? What is bias, and how do we identify and combat unconscious bias?
- Definitions: Racism = prejudice + institutional power; prejudice: a negative judgment about a group or its members based upon categorization;
Micro/Macroaggressions
- Readings: Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice by Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A. M. B., Nadal, K. L., & Esquilin, M. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.62.4.271
  - Can read the entire article, but reading from page 3 until the end is also fine. This reading was chosen because it explains clearly what micro and macro aggressions are. It also gives examples of some microaggressions that many white people tend to say and how these microaggressions are interpreted by people of color. Also, something that is good about this source is that it acknowledges the many communities that can fall victim to microaggressions.
Aversive Racism
- This unit will allow for an understanding of aversive racism, as in what it is and how it manifests itself. We will discuss how it affects the oppressor and the oppressed.
- Readings: Understanding and Addressing Contemporary Racism: From Aversive Racism to the Common Ingroup Identity Model (Gaertner & Dovidio 2005)
  - Specifically pages 618 (The Nature of Aversive Racism) through page 623 ending right before the Dissociated Attitudes: Explicit and Implicit section
  - This section of the reading was chosen because it gives background on aversive racism without being incredibly overwhelming. While the entire study is useful, this course is aimed towards first years, so we tried to make the information as digestible as possible. Along with this, it has quantitative data that supports the theory and has real-life examples of how aversive racism affects the minority group.
- Definition: Aversive racism: covert, unintentional discriminatory behavior practiced by individuals who would deny being racist and who would be appalled to realize that they were engaging in racist acts
Intersectionality
- In place of doing a reading here’s a Youtube link with the explanation of intersectionality from the creator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DW4HLgYPlA
  - This source was chosen because we wanted Kimberlé Crenshaw, and her words, to get their due credit. Many times Black women will create terms and the term will be used for years later without the Black woman getting the credit they deserve. Also because the topic of intersectionality was created with Black women in mind, it is only fitting that they are centered in the learning of the topic.
Whiteness vs. Blackness (in-depth conversations and readings based on this subject)
- For this section, we will focus on who benefits from whiteness, who participates in whiteness, how whiteness is present in our everyday life, and lastly the disadvantages of viewing whiteness as the standard.
- Quotes:
  - “Imagine a person. How tall is this person? What is the gender? How does this person dress? How does this person speak? Now, imagine the skin color of this person. As you picture this person, was it a white person? If it was, you are not alone. For many, person is synonymous with white person.” (Whiteness is the Psychological Imagination by Dr. Jonathan Lassiter 2014)
    - This quote was chosen to emphasize how whiteness is often viewed as the norm/standard. This thought happens unconsciously because we’ve been socialized to view whiteness as the goal. To the point that we associate whiteness with humanity without even realizing it.
- Definition: Whiteness is a complex, hegemonic, and dynamic set of mainstream socio-economic processes, and ways of thinking, feelings, behaving, and acting (cultural scripts) that function to obscure the power, privilege, and practices of the dominant social elite.