5.2.3 Institutionalized Racism & Sexism

Let's go on to another issue that directly affects the forgotten half, especially in the inner city. This is the issue of institutionalized racism and sexism. I am not talking about people who are "flaming racists," I am talking about all of us who just act according to what ordinarily goes on in the implicit discrimination within the status quo. Doing things the way they have always been done props up a racist society.

I want to tell you a story. I have been arrested once in my life and this was when I was Dean of Education at the University of Massachusetts. I was sitting in my office one day and these two gentlemen came up and said, "you are under arrest." So I got up, and they said "we've got to put the handcuffs on," and I was alarmed at how serious things were getting. So they cuffed me, and instead of going out the back door which was right there next to the office, they paraded me down the hall to the front door and the waiting police car. When we finally got to the police station I found out what was going on. It was an unpaid parking ticket in Summerville, Massachusetts. In hindsight it seems almost humorous, but at the time it wasn't very funny.

The bizarre part of the story is that when Brett, a student who had borrowed my car and was responsible for the ticket, got to the police station the next morning the case was dropped. It turned out that the bailiff of the court was the father of his old girlfriend. The actual reason I was arrested and paraded about was that the UMASS police had been really irritated with me because I had "ruined" their lives by bringing black people to the Pioneer Valley. We had more black students in the school of education than the whole rest of the University. This was because of our number
one priority was to combat institutionalized racism.

Relevant to our discussion is the fact that institutionalized racism is still with us. This is why we need affirmative action, and we still need affirmative action if we are going to solve the problems of society. Bad affirmative action has been around too long. Promoting people to do a job that they are incompetent to do is stupid. But cutting someone some slack in terms of gaining the competence, helping them get the confidence or favoring a qualified minority, is the kind of affirmative action that I would like to have. One of the jobs you have as teachers, if you are really going to deal with the forgotten half, is to take on some of the implicit discrimination of the society, and help your students deal with it. While white people have either conscious or unconscious feelings of superiority, minorities have unconscious feelings of suspicion. With these feelings of come various conspiracy theories - theories that ought not to taken lightly because even if though some may seem implausible they are very real to the people who believe them.

If you were to take all the students in a class, and put everyone in a social situation the black students would naturally gravitate toward each other, and the white students would naturally gravitate toward each other. One of the reasons this happens is because you gravitate towards people you think you have something in common with, and you think you have something to talk about. So one of the things we have to do as teachers is to try and create situations that help overcome that remoteness.

	Why do we need affirmative action in education?	Answer Here
	Mr. Clark is the assistant principal at an inner-city school that is predominately black. Mr. Clark is also black, so most of the few white students in the school feel that all of the policies that the school makes are intended mainly for the majority of the school's population rather than all of the school's population. How can Mr. Clark make sure that there is no institutionalized racism in the school against the minorities in the building?	Answer Here