Naturalization of Racial Achievement Patterns - Essay Example

'High school is one of the key spatial sites in our life where we learn a racialised performance of difference.' "Racism" almost always conjures up visions of white suppression of non-white people. There is a long history of "racism," Racism refers to discriminatory practices by the predominantly white social majority against Maoris in New Zealand, against aborigines in Australia. Latin America also has its own share of racism toward Blacks. Africans suffering drought, famine, plague and war have claimed that racism obstructs U.S. aid, most recently in the matter of AIDS vaccinations. One of the most important and significantly influential phases of life when an individual is exposed to racialised performance of difference is high school because an adolescent tends to be more sensitive to the difference in attitudes and opinions of people around him or her. Patterns of racism keep transforming over time and a more universal definition of racism is "Prejudice or discrimination by one group toward others perceived as a different 'race', plus the power to enforce it." Groups of students may be almost identical physiologically, yet be divided against each other on the basis of culture, language, religion, nationality, or any combination of the above which is not an uncommon experience in schools. Teachers tend to pay more attention to "white" students in the group because subconsciously they relate "white" to etiquette, opulence and high society even though it might not always be true. Prolonged influence of racialised opinions from families and society in general results in preconceived notion which shows up as an attitudinal bias. Whatever the roots of racism may be, it tends to perpetuate itself. A group of students are defined as "lesser" and denied access to resources, then the results of such denial is used to justify defining them as "lesser." "Racism" is never shrugged off. For example, when a White Georgetown Law School student reported earlier this year that black students are not as qualified as White students, it set off a booming, national controversy about "racism." The dogma has logical consequences that are profoundly important. If blacks, for example, are equal to Whites in every way, what accounts for their poverty, criminality, and dissipation Since any theory of racial differences has been outlawed, the only possible explanation for black failure is White racism. And since blacks are markedly poor, crime-prone, and dissipated, the global society must be racked with pervasive racism because nothing else could be keeping them in such an abject state. Racialisation is not a natural concept, rather it was born and perpetuated within the society and the feeling of "color-bias" has been passing over along with genetic material over the generations ever-since. It is argued by socio-biologists and some schools of psychoanalysis that our instincts are programmed to hate those different to us by evolutionary and developmental mechanisms. As the world is turning into a global village, the inter-mixing of cultures is inevitable; hence, the population of children with a mixed ethnicity is on a rise. Racial identity becomes more a matter of concern than it was ever before and the new generation is not paranoid about accepting and even experimenting with different cultural factors like language, food, music and attire. This has been aptly demonstrated in Helen Wullff's research ( South London, 1980) on inter-racial friendships in which a group of teenage girls from different and mixed cultural backgrounds were observed for relationships and peer acceptance and bonding. On the other hand, any scan of urban or suburban school districts and classrooms will demonstrate that students are still kept unequal along racialized lines; private conversations between teachers, administrators or students clearly demonstrate that race does still factor in to how people treat, fear and relate to each other. It is virtually impossible to fix racial inequality and improve race relations without talking about how race matters. The concept of color muteness suggests that rather than not seeing people in racial terms, people are actively suppressing race labels when talking about people in their schools. It is observed in everyday moments that people choose not to label people around them in racial terms. Overlooking facts may have effects like: naturalization of racial achievement patterns, the submersion of valid anxieties about race relations, and missed opportunities to analyze the complexities of contemporary inequality. The most basic race talk dilemma is that we don't belong to race groups, but we do. Race groups have no genetic validity; they were first created to facilitate slavery and colonialism, to classify people and distribute privileges and freedoms using visible but genetically insignificant traits (skin, hair, noses, etc.). Since then, we have continued to make race groups socially real, by organizing job opportunities, resources, marriages, and friendships around them. We do this in all sorts of everyday ways. Indeed, every time we use a race label to describe someone, we reinforce our own tendencies (and the tendencies of those around us) to see and classify people in genetically bogus racial terms. The strategy of "race-bending" in schools involves questioning the validity of race categories to describe human diversity even while keeping race categories strategically available for the analysis of local and national racial inequalities. This is a strategy young people use all the time. While we must guard against the tendency to racialize everyone we see, we must also continue to grapple with the social formations and inequalities in schools and districts that do pattern out along racial lines, that often means using simple race labels when we talk. Racialisation refers to the process of placing people into racial groups and involves an assortment of everyday actions, one of which is racial labeling (racial identification). Labeling people racially is really the most basic act that makes people racial. Other acts of racialization include giving relevance to physical characteristics such as hair type or nose shape; selecting certain friends; living (voluntarily or involuntarily) in specific neighborhoods; choosing to listen to certain music; distributing resources in small and systemic ways, etc. And while the basic process of labeling comes under the scope of racial identification, all the other experiences of racialization also help make up any individual's racialized identity. In many ways, racial identification is the most important process in creating racialized identities, because using a small handful of race labels to classify each other is the most obvious way in which we make the overwhelming complexity of human diversity extraordinarily simple. Young people, who usually considered themselves "mixed", also used single race categories to define themselves at strategic moments. In doing so, they demonstrated that while racialized identities are infinitely complex, racial identifications are shockingly simple. People often tend to use race labels to describe themselves even when they feel that their identities are far more complicated. They do so in part to counter a system that has used the same simple race categories to distribute resources unequally for centuries. That is, even though their identities are infinitely complex, young people reproduce a system of simple racial identification in order to find a place in various already simplified (and often unequal) racialized orders. Young people are constantly challenging the very idea of race categories. Students describe themselves as "mixed". There are six simple labels that they called racial: Black, White, Latino, Chinese, Samoan and Filipino. Even though a number of these labels are often called ethnic or national in social science, the kids called them racial to negotiate in a system of power relations, a system of inequality, not because they thought they were biological. In the hybridity of young lives today, a young person who calls himself Nicaraguan, who sometimes says he's from Los Angeles, who often calls himself Latino, is the same one who grabs a simple race category to use it in an equality argument. Defining one's identity as black was not related to social class or the racialized composition of family or school. It was linked to holding more politicized ideas of racism (Racialized Identities, Chap 6). The way that these youths define themselves is significant, revealing much about their social attachments (and detachments) as well as how and where they perceive themselves to "fit" in the society of which they are its newest members. Self-identities and ethnic loyalties can often influence long-term patterns of behavior and outlook as well as inter-group relations, with potential long-term political implications. The concept of racialization has undergone a substantial change over time, underscoring the malleable character of ethnicity. The magnitude of the change, however, is moderate. Experiences of racial-ethnic discrimination, among other factors, will be accompanied by changes in the character and salience of ethnicity ranging from "linear" to "reactive" forms, from "thick" to "thin" identities and hence by divergent modes of ethnic self-identification. "fixed" characteristic, then, neither is it so "fluid" as to fit what E.L. Doctorow's character, Billy Bathgate, called his "license-plate theory of identification," the idea that "maybe all identification is temporary because you went through a life of changing situations." The story of the forging of an ethnic self-identity in the second generation, however, plays out on a much larger stage than that of the family in reference to social forces outside the family that shape both the creation of racial-ethnic categories and of ethnic self-definitions, particularly those involving discrimination and the politics of reactive ethnicity and not only those involving acculturation and the psychology of linear ethnicity. Ethnic identity is, in part, a way of answering the question "where do I come from" The answers given are often expressed in a metaphorical language of kinship (e.g.,"homeland," "fatherland," "mother tongue," "blood ties") with reference to a "birth connection" to nation and family or to an imagined common origin or ancestry. Thus, while ethnic identities may be socially and politically constructed, they are experienced and expressed as "natural." In this regard, nativity variables (where one was born, to whom one was born, where one's parents were born) are clearly important to ethnic and national self-definitions. For children of immigrants, they are also variables that can significantly complicate a clear-cut answer to basic questions of ethnic self-definition, particularly when the parents' country of birth differs from that of the child and (in cases of interethnic marriage) from each other. The extent of such differences in the nativity patterns of our respondents and their parents is broken down by national origin groups. Regional location and the type of school youths attended (inner-city or suburban, public or private schools) are two such extra-familial contextual factors. They delimit the youths' exposure to different social worlds, shape differential associations with peers in those contexts, and influence attendant modes of ethnic socialization and self-definition. Ethnic identities are not inevitable outcomes, but complex products of people's ongoing efforts to interpret, understand and respond to the social structural, cultural, and historical situations in which they find themselves, within their sets of resources and vulnerabilities. With reference to facts, figures and personal observation and experience I feel that the concept of racial discrimination in schools is solely existent because of the existence of an older generation which is seasoned to believe in it. It is likely to wane of as a new generation of teachers and administrators start taking over. Globalization and culture mixing has bred a generation of youngsters who don't give any importance to difference in color or anatomical characteristics because most of them have grown up in an environment which supports cultural diversity. Though they identify and acknowledge differences, they also accept, appreciate and experiment with them. For example a British teenager may love to listen to hip-hop as much as a Jamaican would love country music. It is thus apparent that unless the racialisation is perpetuated by direct or indirect means by authorities , it will gradually fade out and a more healthy and dignified relationship between ethnicities will blossom. Read More