About racism and me.

As an academic it is my literally my job to continue learning. I am tasked with engaging students in a research lab that seeks to uncover new information about how the human body works. In this role I am essentially the leader or ‘team manager’ if you will – there to guide the learning process and facilitate critical thinking. I also teach classes of up to 130 students and interact with people from different backgrounds and races, all of whom have their own personal history and many of whom are figuring out who they are at a critical point in their lives. Whether I like it or not my words and actions have impact, particularly as a white, male professor – characteristics that basically put me in a position of power – power I am aware of but have never REALLY reflected on, at least not related to my whiteness.

We were all witness to a terrible event that took place on May 25, 2020. George Floyd, a 46 year-old Black man, was murdered in Minnesota by White police officers. As his young daughter would later state, “Daddy changed the world.” Protests are occurring around the world and a strong Black Lives Matter campaign has taken hold. Coincidently, I had ordered the book “White Fragility: why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism” on May 7th – to be honest I can’t remember why I decided to order that book when I did but I can tell you that given the events stemming from Mr. Floyds death I’m glad I did. I read the book in a couple of days and what follows is not a book review (the book was excellent) but some thoughts/lessons that I would like to share. I highly recommend this book and there is a lot to learn to help you with a personal reflection and insight into your own behaviours and world views related to race.

What does a racist look like?

What type of person or incident(s) do you associate with racism? If I’m being honest, images that come to mind are older white people from the South watching with pleasure as a lynching occurs. I think of ‘Whites only’ signs on store fronts or public drinking fountains. I think of Black people working in the cotton fields under a blistering sun while a White man oversees them on horseback, shotgun in his saddle. But this is where I am different. I am a nice person who would never think of doing or behaving in such a way. But this is also where I am wrong. The images that many people, like myself, conjure-up when racism is mentioned result largely from various forms of media that I’ve seen over the years (my small town had one Black person). This media creates a social structure that has us believe in a false dichotomy – that racism is binary. Either you are racist or you are not, you are a good person or you are not. But if our images of what racism looks like based on what we’ve been lead to believe then we are fooling ourselves into what a racist individual ‘looks like’. Nice people can still be racist. Sounds silly right(?), but one thing I’ve learned in reading this book is that racism is really a continuum and the notion of racism described above is the extreme version. In other words, just because you don’t fit into the ‘bad person’ category doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. And saying that you are racist doesn’t make you a bad person – if that were the case, there wouldn’t be any nice people in the world.

I am colour blind.

Well-intentioned statements, said to try and reduce or abolish racism, can in fact do the opposite. I am guilty of saying a couple of the following things:

1. I’m not a racist
2. focusing on race is what divides us
3. I don’t see colour
4. we are all one race, the human race

Well-intentioned, yes, but ask yourself what purpose they really serve. By saying you don’t see colour, for example, you are saying that the colour of someone’s skin doesn’t matter – but it does. To deny that someone else has a different colour skin is to deny that persons’ lived-experience, the world as seen through their eyes. This is not to say that someone should be judged based on the colour of their skin – but it acknowledges the individual. This is the best example I can think of to drive home this point. If I were to go to a Black friends house for a get-together and every person there was Black except me, would I notice the colour of people? Of course I would. Would I be a little uncomfortable? Yes. Now think about that. When the Black people I know (very few people actually) walk into a party or work or wherever, they are surrounded by mainly White people. How does that make them feel do you think? A certain degree of discomfort I would suggest but the reality is that for a lot of Black people this is the daily norm. Black people have to become comfortable being uncomfortable. So acknowledging someones colour is to acknowledge that they deal with different lived-experiences which provides a different world-view than mine – this is one aspect of White privilege. I don’t have to deal with being uncomfortable in my surroundings because of the colour of my skin.

Educational

Reading White Fragility was an educational experience – I called it ‘transformative’ when I described it to my sister and oldest son. It is not as though I now know everything about racism, indeed I’ve only scratched the surface of even beginning to understand racism and how I am a part of White privilege in a culture based on racist world views. There is so much more I could write here about what I’ve learned – but I am choosing to stick to the main points that I think will stick with me for a long time as I navigate racism. On that note, being married to a woman with Indigenous heritage, I now intend on reading more about Indigenous people in my country and will work towards bettering myself in the name of reconciliation.

I am white privilege. I am not perfect. I have gained insight into unconscious racial bias’s that I have. I am not perfect. I am learning how to deal with my own thoughts on racism. I am not perfect. I am not perfect and neither are you but the ONLY way to overcome ignorance is to educate yourself. I don’t want to sound preachy and I am by no means an expert on race/racism – but I will continue to learn and to better myself because all of the students in my lab and in my classroom deserve a professor and mentor that values diversity and attempts to understand it and how it influences work and life at the University.

Til next time,

Kevin

P.S. If I’ve said anything that is racist in some manner and offends you, please reach out so I can learn what I’ve done incorrectly and how to fix it – I am learning to be more open about discussing racism.