Combating Racism, One Class at a Time

By Matthew L. Donohue

Mel Gibson goes on an anti-Semitic rant. Michael Richards spouts racist venom at a comedy club. Don Imus makes racist and misogynist remarks about Rutgers’ women’s basketball team. Media reports of the Virginia Tech massacre irrelevantly highlight the Korean ethnicity of the shooter.

America is still a racist country.

English professor Angela Bodino, anthropology professor Stephen Kaufman, and history professor Kevin Reilly aim to change that. Together, they teach Global Patterns of Racism, a class in which students learn about the causes and history of racism — especially racism in America. The three RVCC professors argue that there is no scientific basis to the concept of race. It is a social phenomenon, they say; people use race to organize the world into groups.

“The point we make in class is that ‘race’ is a social construct,” Professor Reilly said. “It is a term that is used differently by different people to mean different things. It’s not a hard and fast scientifically measurable reality, but an idea in people’s minds.”

Racism emerges when we assume that someone’s biological, ethnic, religious, or physical characteristics identify a person as a member of an inferior group. Class discussions analyze particular instances of racist behaviors and racist acts, like European colonialism, slavery, apartheid, anti-Semitism, segregation, as well as contemporary conflicts like those in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

Liberal arts major Brooke Andrews finds the class interesting because each professor brings a different perspective to the topic. The professors make a convincing argument that racism is a current issue in society today – one that deserves public acknowledgment and public debate.

“Racism has a lot to do with stereotypes and hatred of groups of people that are perceived as different,” she said. “I think racism really manifested itself when Jewish people were expelled from Spain by Catholic Christians because they had different religious beliefs.”
Janice Allan, another liberal arts student, said, “I realize that a lot of people are afraid to speak their minds because they’ll be perceived as racist and that people think racism no longer exists in the 21st century.” But Allen, who is an Arab-American, said that people of Middle Eastern descent are regularly discriminated against in this country, especially since 9-11.

The class has taught Allen to recognize that she and her family have experienced prejudice; they’ve been profiled and looked at with suspicion because they are Arab-American, she said. “President Bush has been profiling Muslim Americans since September 11. When we went to war this country became overly patriotic and it became okay to pick people out based on appearance and profile them.”

She thinks people should see one another as human beings and “fight for equality for all people of different ethnic backgrounds and stop classifying people according to the color of their skin and religion.”
Professor Reilly said students definitely can benefit from taking the course, learning that regardless of its various historical causes and patterns, racism is not universal or inevitable.

“We end racism,” he said, “by first understanding what it is and what causes it,” he said.

“Once people understand what it is, they can do something about it.”