Education

At the end of class on Tuesday we discussed a scenario of a sheltered white person going up to a person of color with the clear intentions of learning more about a member of a different race. The initial response to the scenario was that of perturbation, anger, and the suggestion to “go read a book”. What is this person to do? The direct approach may be troublesome, but those situations were created through a far more troublesome hegemony of white supremacy. This white person may or may not want to become the friend of the colored person; however, there is a clear and important desire to learn. Surely we have all engaged in conversations with people who we have less desire in befriending than in learning about their beliefs whether it is religious, cultural, political, racial, etc. We all need to be willing to engage in conversations of race if we are to awake from, to quote Michelle Alexander, our “colorblind slumber”. Instead of shutting the inquisitive white person out, that moment would be far more productive if it were informative and open to conversations about the realities of race within our society.

On Wednesday night, Michelle Alexander closed her powerful speech calling for a movement based on the injustices done to all people of any color who are impoverished by the hegemony of white supremacy. The path towards rectifying the oppression within our country has to be led chiefly by education. There are a multitude of racist reasons (white flight, exclusionary zoning to name two) why the sheltered white person from the middle of nowhere suburbia has never had an encounter with a person of color. With our current colorblind attitudes, this person is most likely unaware of the unspoken mechanisms that create and perpetuate white supremacy, thus they should be educated on them. While reading books is definitely helpful, human interactions tend to be far more impactful and would result in more education on current issues. We need change, and that change is only going to come from an inclusive movement that can be bred through education and open dialect.