Diversity Certificate Program Seminar: Racism 101

Presenters: Debonair Oates-Primus, Derrick Perkins
Audience: Faculty, Staff, Administrators

Location: W2-48
Program Description:
“Is this racist, professor?” “Deb, can I ask you about an incident with a student where I absolutely did not intend to be racist and the student took it wrong?” “Derrick, can you talk to this student who misunderstood what I said in class?” As scholars of color who teach about race, black identity, and intersectionality, students of color and white colleagues often ask us to analyze and interpret their lived experiences and to determine if they have experienced or perpetrated racism. White colleagues formally and informally inquire about whether or not they have committed a racist act. Some of these retold experiences are the examples of racism that most people are most comfortable with--overt racism. Most people believe that racism looks one way: ugly, hateful, often violent or hostile, and consciously perpetrated. However, most racist acts, and the ones our students are asking us to analyze, are the microaggressions, the macroaggressions, the institutional racism, and the “everyday racism.” Everyday racism is not about one individual being racist, but about the normalization of racist practices in our “societal behavior” (Paul 447).

So, what does racism look like in the 21st century? What are the ways it operates within existing structures, institutions, and our everyday lives? In this instructional workshop, participants will learn about the various forms of racism that exists and their definitions, the historical origins of racist practices in the U.S., and the ways its shapeshifted and persisted throughout time. Racism is all-encompassing. It includes blatantly racist remarks and actions, as well as unconscious bias, belief in stereotypes, and racially biased institutional barriers. Racism’s coding is sophisticated because it has been designed and redesigned over centuries. In this workshop participants will not just learn about racism, but also confront the reasons they have not expansively learned about a complex system that has shaped our lived experiences, before now.