This issue of Independent School will, by design or by fortuitous accident, arrive within days of Brown v. Board of Education’s 60th anniversary. For schools in particular, and for the United States as a whole, May 1954 marks the beginning of a radical change in our thinking and our experience.
The 1950s and 1960s are indelibly marked by images, events, and names: water cannons, police dogs, sit-ins, boycotts, church bombings; the Little Rock Nine, National Guardsmen, Freedom Riders; Rosa Parks, James Meredith, Emmett Till; Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Earl Chaney; Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Looking back, it seemed then, in the too-obvious phrase, black and white. There were racists and antiracists, heroes and villains, laws to change, doors to open, and battles, both physical and moral, to be fought.
By now, however, we have come to see not only the tenacity but also the complexity of the issues involved, and the almost innumerable shadings of our diverse nation. The challenges have shifted from legal barriers to institutional racism, from lynchings to “stand your ground” killings, from segregation to racial profiling, from passing to covering, and from verbal and physical assaults to microaggressions, implicit racism, and stereotype threats.
I am not saying, nor do I feel competent to suggest, that old-fashioned racism is extinct — Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Renisha McBride are as dead, though not as well-known, as Emmett Till, and the Internet gives racists, anti-Semites, and other haters the biggest platform in history. (Google “Obama” and “go back to Africa” and you will get nearly half a million hits, while “Obama” combined with the worst racial slurs you can think of will give as many as 75 million.) I take my cue from several writers cited here, who unanimously contend that more harm (in total, not to particular individuals) is now done by “well-intentioned people, who are strongly motivated by egalitarian values, who believe in their own morality, and who experience themselves as fair-minded and decent people who would never consciously discriminate.”
Assuming many of the readers of this column fall into the category above, the new insights revealed in these works may be unsettling. Like much contemporary neuroscience, behavioral psychology, and similar fields, study of bias tells us things about ourselves that are hard to accept, as they reveal dissonance between our conscious beliefs and our habitual actions or reactions. Yet I hope that, as reflective practitioners, we “would rather know about the cracks in [our] own minds” than remain in satisfied ignorance.
One striking insight into the omnipresence of prejudice is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which first came to prominence when, in his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell described his experience with the study. Now the designers of the IAT, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, have published Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, placing their work in context, and explaining its implications for everyday behavior. Briefly, the IAT uses our differing response times to images or words that ask us to associate good or bad with numerous variables, from race and religion to age and weight. Studies show two constants: a majority of people who profess lack of bias turn out to have “automatic white preference” — or European, slim, Christian, male, or youth preference — and to exhibit that bias in real-world interactions. (Gladwell, readers may recall, found himself biased against images of black people, even though he is biracial.) A paragraph cannot do justice to this work, so I suggest that readers first try some of the tests themselves, at www.implicit.harvard.edu, then read Blindspot.
If Blindspot isn’t startling enough, Derald Wing Sue’s Microaggressions in Everyday Life will be. The very word microaggression is an invitation to dismiss the concerns as trivial, oversensitive, and similar terms that are often thrown at those who refuse to remain silent about mistreatment. (I recall one case, in which a school required students to have teachers sign off on absences to be incurred for doctor’s visits and other personal issues. The school’s Jewish families objected to the use of these forms for Jewish holidays, and especially noted that the form was called “The Yellow Sheet,” which for those whose ancestors had been forced to wear the Yellow Star was particularly objectionable. Of the large administrative team discussing the matter, everyone but the diversity director and a school counselor dismissed the concern as hypersensitive.)
As Claude Steele does for stereotype threat in Whistling Vivaldi, Sue provides extensive research on the immediate and long-term consequences of the various small assaults, insults, and invalidations that women and people of color experience daily, from verbal slights and false assumptions to stereotypes and dismissals. (“Where are you from?” to an Asian American; traffic stops that target African Americans; “When is the doctor going to see me?” to a female physician, and so forth.) From physical and psychological stress to self-doubt and ultimate hopelessness, Sue catalogues the cumulative weight of small indignities upon their victims, and the consequent loss not only to the victims but also to the society that limits their lives and loses their gifts.
Frank Wu’s Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White exemplifies the breadth of America’s diversity issues not only by illustrating the ways Asians and Asian Americans are subjected to bias but also by proposing the Asian experience as a means of moving beyond a bipolar discussion. (Let me apologize here for the failure of this column to cover several other forms of diversity, from Latino and Native American to Middle Eastern and LGBT. Would that there were space to do so.)
Wu’s goals are multiple: to reveal the kinds of prejudice that have affected Asians of all types (and still do), to delineate the negative effects of even so-called “positive stereotypes,” and to seek new ground, where Asian Americans will provide a bridge between whites and other minorities, rather than a tool to help further denigrate African Americans and others. One of his most moving chapters is his last, “The Power of Coalitions: Why I Teach at Howard,” which begins with the simple phrase, “My parents were once Chinese,” and which details his belief that “civil society either founders on factions or is founded on coalitions.”
These works offer insights from scholars into diversity issues. But as research also shows, stories from particular persons are more likely to move us than reams of data or watertight arguments. And the available narratives, both fictional and otherwise, far outnumber the theoretical studies. From Invisible Man and Farewell to Manzanar through Black Ice and The House on Mango Street, schools have included such documents for many years. One might think there is, so to speak, nothing new under the sun.
Suggested Reading
Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald
Microaggressions in Everyday Life, Derald Wing Sue
Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, Frank Wu
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race, Debby Irving
Readers of this magazine should also visit their school library and look back at 45 years of articles and reviews on the subject of diversity, as I did in preparing this column.
— Richard Barbieri
Not so — every month offers us stories we have not yet heard, perspectives we have not taken. Two very different examples must suffice for the richness of innumerable personal experiences.
Take the opening lines of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah: “Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly. But she did not like that she had to go to Trenton to braid her hair.”
The character Ifemelu — Nigerian-born, American-educated, author of the blog “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black” — provides a vantage point few of us can even have dreamed, decades ago, would be part of the American experience. As we follow her from Nigeria to America and back, and enter the lives of her family and friends, we can experience a new complexity, and realize what Adichie has brilliantly explained in her TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story.”
Finally, there are people with the courage to reveal their own journey from complacency to commitment. One such person is Debby Irving, author of Waking Up White: and Finding Myself in the Story of Race. The child of successful post–World War II parents, Irving grew up oblivious to racial issues, later assumed she could solve the problems of others through sincere effort, and finally discovered that “stumbling block number 1 was that I didn’t think I had a race, so I never thought to look within myself for answers.” Learning that she did indeed have a race, Irving began to listen to people of other races and other experiences.
Reading Peggy McIntosh’s essay “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (published in these pages, among other locations, in the Winter 1990 issue) was a seminal experience for her, as was a graduate course in racial identity taken when she was nearly 50. For one thing, she learned how she herself had benefited from unfair privileges. While watching Race: The Power of an Illusion, she found that the GI Bill, which her parents pointed to as proof of the American dream, was, in fact, so skewed toward whites in housing and education that it, in fact, “turn[ed] America’s golden opportunity to right its racially imbalanced ship into an acceleration of its listing.” (For example, 4 percent of black soldiers were able to attend school on the GI bill, as opposed to nearly 50 percent of white soldiers.)
As she notes, it is disappointing that white voices are needed to validate the experiences of people of color, but the fact that Irving consistently echoes the findings of the academic writers in this column is important. So is her ability to capture the issues in pithy language that defies her childhood training to avoid all controversial subjects. I will not soon forget her description of white skin as “an epidermal gold card.” In fact, one comment of hers will serve as my prime takeaway from this quarter’s reading: “Wanting is not enough. Intent and skill are our swords and shields in the war to dismantle a system with a life of its own.”
I hope these books will develop both desire and skill in their readers.