Week 2: White Supremacy Culture

*NOTE: image adapted/expanded by Ellen Tuzzolo from an original graphic published by the Safehouse Progressive Alliance for Nonviolence

1. In Against the Dark, Dumas makes an interesting argument about the capitalization of Black vs. white. He says that whiteness is a negation of others, and that whites do not have common experiences outside “acts of colonization and terror.” This really struck me, and provided some insight into the complexity of “whiteness.”
2. I agree with Dumas’s comments on the “afterlife of slavery” (i.e. police brutality, mass incarceration, segregation, redlining, etc.). I find that explaining the ways that slavery has shifted and re-manifested itself in modern systems is the most challenging work when confronting racism today. Resources like The New Jim Crow and the documentary 13th have made explaining these concepts a bit easier, but it is still challenging to explain to many people.
3. I appreciated Tolentino’s term “legislated racism.” As she mentions earlier in her article, racism is often perceived as manifesting itself in individual and interpersonal interactions when really it is entrenched in every system in which we take part.
4. Tolentino’s reflections that anti-racist teaching is about following the students’ lead and exploring where they take the conversation. I thought that her explanation of her inner monologue during the “n” word discussion in her class were so real. There are so many moments where it would be easier to redirect and move the conversation in the direction you had planned, but being student-centered and truly anti-racist requires meeting students where they are and investigating their questions and reflections.
5. This article, White Supremacy Culture, has been fundamental to my understanding of the ways that white supremacy is entrenched in our daily lives and in our institutions and organizations. It is critical to fight back against the values of white supremacist culture in order to dismantle it in each of the spaces we inhabit.