the_rck

Several years ago-- before Delia-- I took a couple of classes at the local community college. Both classes were taught by black women, and both touched on race in ways that made me think. The introductory anthropology class came first and did more with race because the instructor considered it important and because cultural anthropology (unsurprisingly) deals heavily with the notion of cultural constructs.

The other class, introductory psychology, dealt with race less extensively. I'm not even sure how it came up (it wasn't on the syllabus), but we spent at least one class session talking about it. I still remember boggling when I heard a seventeen year old white boy try to convince the instructor-- a thirty-something, professional, black woman-- that racism no longer existed, that she must be mistaken.

Actually, I still boggle a bit at the idea. I hope that, in the intervening years, he's learned more about the real world. He may not have. He doesn't have to, after all, and acknowledging privilege comes with a certain burden of shame that causes some people to reject the notion's reality.

The reality of race was one of the things that we discussed heavily in the anthropology class. Getting across the idea that 'cultural construct' does not equal either 'imaginary' or 'having no impact on reality' seems to be a large undertaking, but human beings create lots of things that exist only in the intersections of many minds and that, nevertheless, have profound impact on the environment in which we all live. The instructor (whose full name I can't remember now) introduced us to White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack which impressed me and did a better job of explaining things than the mandatory diversity training my former employer had done.

(That training seemed to consist largely of large, verbal hammers carrying the "white people are, by definition, evil" message. Potentially quite satisfying for whoever's wielding them but fairly ineffective at getting anyone white to listen or to do anything except survive the two or three hours and then obliterate them from their minds. Humiliating people once doesn't teach them anything useful unless they're already very much inclined to learn. Humiliating them over and over teaches something, just not always what's intended, but it's not something that can be done in a single, short class session. Admittedly, my perceptions of that class may well be seriously skewed by the fact that I was ill during it and having a reaction to the medication that was meant to help the original problem. They were definitely skewed by the fact that I had to work extra hard all week to make up the lost time so that my weekly stats weren't adversely affected by losing an afternoon.)

Since taking that anthropology class, I've thought a bit about cultural constructs and how they affect us and about how to explain the real impact that these non-physical constructs have in our lives. The rest of this essay is my attempt to do that. I'm not sure I succeeded-- Words tend to carry me away sometimes.

( On Cultural Constructs )

For more (and probably better thought out) posts written for the International Blog Against Racism Week, see ibarw.

(Also, I'm not changing my usual icon because icons, generally speaking, annoy me and make me want to break things when I think about them too much. I use them largely because everybody I know seems to find them useful and because a few nice people have made an effort to make the task less onerous. Still... I'd rather use an icon I dislike than do any work to find one that I like. There's a reason my default icon is two years old.)