Multicultural Psychology. Jennifer T. Pedrotti
and spatial segregation were again on display with the national coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. Soon, we became aware of places like Standing Rock and Ferguson, names like Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tanisha Anderson, Philando Castille, Melissa Ventura, Tamir Rice, and Jason Pero; and, most recently, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery; and we became aware of movements like #ICan’tBreathe, Hands Up Don’t Shoot, Say Her Name, and Black Lives Matter. Despite the expansive coverage of the deaths of people of color at the hands of police, our views on those cases often split along racial lines.
In 2014, The Pew Research Center surveyed residents of Ferguson, Missouri, following the death of Michael Brown and found that 80% of Blacks felt the grand jury made the wrong decision in the Brown case, where only 23% of Whites thought the same. Where 64% of Blacks felt that race was a major factor in that decision, only 16% of Whites saw race as a major force (Table 2.1).
Table 2.1 Blacks and Whites Divided in Views of Police Response to Ferguson Shooting
Source: Pew Research Center (2014, August 18). Stark Racial Divisions in Reactions to Ferguson Police Shootings. https://www.people-press.org/2014/08/18/stark-racial-divisions-in-reactions-to-ferguson-police-shooting/.
In analyzing these differences, Bouie (2014) argues that when you consider racial segregation, it makes sense that our views of the world around us would also break along racial lines. How and where we live impacts how we view the world. Most of us live near people of our same racial category.
Work notwithstanding, there’s not much overlap between [those] worlds. “Overall,” writes Robert P. Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, “the social networks of whites are a remarkable 93 percent white.” In fact, he points out, “fully three-quarters of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence,” a level of social homogeneity unmatched among other racial and ethnic groups. (Bouie, 2014, p. 1)
We imagine that most of us feel as if we live integrated lives, and that racial segregation is a thing of the past, but the reality is not only the pervasiveness of our residential and social segregation, but how much many of us do not even realize it is occurring.
Defining Race
My brother went to a middle school that had recently begun bussing in students of color to desegregate the school’s population. As an African American, he was keenly aware of the school’s policy that did not allow Black and brown kids to gather in groups of more than three (a rule that was explained away as a prevention of gang activity). Nevertheless, my brother was also a big teaser, who thought he was funny. In class, one day, he took a White female classmate’s Garfield pencil and was waving it around to tease her. Not amused, she told the teacher. My brother gave her back the pencil and was sent to the principal’s office. My mother was called to the school that afternoon to talk about his conduct and hear the punishment. When she arrived, my brother was sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car near the school’s entrance. Right before calling her, the school administrators had called the police and reported my brother for theft.
To fully understand our racial divide, our racialized social context, and their impacts on individual psyche and identity development, we must understand the term race, the historical context, and its contemporary manifestations. Race is, first and foremost, socially constructed. It is the meaning given to an arbitrary list of physical characteristics or phenotypes: hair texture, hair color, skin tone, bone structure, and facial features (Blumenbach in Bhopal, 2007). Creating hierarchical racial categories and projecting racial meaning onto the body worked to obscure the sociopolitical and economic intentions of the constructions, and gave these ideas a seeming scientific weight. Race is the social, disguised as the biological; it is the produced made to seem “natural.” As Omi and Winant (2015) state, “Race has been understood as a sign of God’s pleasure or displeasure, as an indicator of evolutionary development, as a key to intelligence, and as a signifier in human geography” (p. 4).
Though race is often thought of as a set of attitudes, beliefs, and feelings, it has always operated in structures and systems. These produced racial meanings do affect how we feel and think as individuals and thus impact our behaviors and social interactions, but they were created to impact the institutions, structures, and ideologies that form the foundation of our society. How we feel about ourselves and each other, racially, is a product of just one part of the way racism and racial inequality are at work.
Some of your parents (and one of the authors of this text) grew up in the era of the “afterschool special.” It was a TV show where each episode featured a dramatization of different issues teens faced. (It was better than we’re making it sound.) It, and most every other children’s series we have seen, had a particular “special episode,” the one where someone new comes into an established social setting or group, and the new person is different from everyone else. You have likely seen enough similarly themed shows to know how the story ends. Whether it’s in a TV show or movie or book, once everyone realizes that they are more the same than different and that difference is nothing to be afraid of, social harmony is reached, the big game is won, or the play is a success or the group wins first place or everyone goes to the school dance (you get the point)—and everyone lives happily ever after. Sometimes, in TV and movies, this classic story is portrayed as a bit more complicated, and those who are different have been the victims of social inequality. In those cases, there is the cinematic hero, the lone teacher or popular kid or coach, who endures ridicule and sacrifices to make a difference, and the hero saves the day.
That story is a social narrative, a commonly shared belief or idea, but not necessarily a true one. In this case, it is a narrative where “difference” is a stand-in for race or another element of social inequality. The pervasiveness of that story has led many to see our problems around race as an attitude, as a natural, human response to difference. From that narrative frame, the solution to racial inequality is simply the need to accept differences and love one another, or for a savior to step up and fight for what’s right, opening the eyes of others along the way.
Racial classifications
iStock/Usagi-D
These stories can be inspirational, even life changing for some, but they also work to obscure the structural nature of race and racism, which can make something embedded in institutions (e.g., educational inequality) into something we think we can fix on an individual level, armed only with “good intentions,” a good heart, and determination. A successful tutoring program in a low-income area can help a lot of individuals, but unless there is an understanding of, and an attempt to address or transform, the inequitable educational system that helped create the need for the tutoring, the program will never serve as an effective solution to the real problem. That purely individualized approach may also limit our ability to gain insight into the myriad impacts our inequitable system has on various groups or its broader social implications. To understand and successfully address the life and mind of an individual, we must understand the institutions, systems, and structures in and through which they were formed.
Part of the misconception of seeing race and racial inequality as natural and expected elements of the human experience is thinking they have always been around, but that story belies the actual history of the concepts of race and racial formation in the United States. The idea of race, as we know it today, is relatively new; most historians trace its emergence to the late 1600s or early 1700s. For centuries, socioeconomic class was the great social divide, but with the development of a racialized classification