The hurtful words of children can be frightening. Even more so are the physical acts of violence committed by adults. The hijab, the traditional head scarf worn by Muslim women in public, makes them easily identifiable for those who would target them. Less than a week after the election, a Muslim student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, was forced to remove her hijab by a man who threatened to set her on fire if she didn’t.200 Two Muslim women were attacked in New York City, just two days apart. In one case, a man pushed a transit worker down a staircase at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, yelling, “You’re a terrorist and you shouldn’t be working for the city.” In another, a Brooklyn man threatened an off-duty police officer and her teenaged son, both American-born, with his pit bull, telling them to “go back to your country.” The first man escaped, but the second was arrested and charged with a felony hate crime.201
In response to these and other incidents, New York governor Andrew Cuomo and mayor of New York Bill de Blasio both spoke forcefully about them. Said Governor Cuomo, “This is the great State of New York—we welcome people of all cultures, customs and creeds with open arms. We do not allow intolerance or fear to divide us because we know diversity is our strength and we are at our best when we stand united.” Mayor de Blasio held a news conference with the Muslim police officer, Aml Elsokary, at his side, saying: “This is Officer Elsokary’s country. She is an American. She is a New Yorker. She’s already at home. We cannot allow this kind of hatred and bias to spread.”202
Civil rights advocates called on Donald Trump to demonstrate his own leadership and speak out against the harassment and denounce extremist groups, but his response seemed slow in coming, particularly given his propensity to send messages quickly on Twitter, as demonstrated throughout his campaign. In his 60 Minutes interview that aired on November 13, 2016, President-Elect Trump claimed that he was “surprised to hear” that some of his supporters had been using racial slurs and making threats against African Americans, Latinxs, and members of the LGBT community. He took the opportunity to look into the camera and send a message to his audience, saying, “Stop it!”203 On November 21, Hope Hicks, a Trump spokesperson, said, “Mr. Trump has always denounced these groups and individuals associated with a message of hate.… Mr. Trump will be a president for all Americans. However, he totally disavows the support of this group, which he does not want or need.”204 Are those statements sufficient to undo the damage of his campaign rhetoric? Probably not. The authors of the SPLC report called for more demonstrable leadership from Donald Trump. They write, “Rather than simply saying ‘Stop it!’ and disavowing the radical right, he must speak out forcefully and repeatedly against all forms of bigotry and reach out to the communities his words have injured. And rather than merely saying that he ‘wants to bring the country together,’ his actions must consistently demonstrate he is doing everything in his power to do so.”205
His early personnel selections left many wondering if that kind of consistent anti-bias action was likely to come from his administration. Following the controversial choice of Stephen Bannon, he nominated Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama for the role of attorney general. In that role, Sessions would be responsible for enforcing civil rights laws, but his record in Alabama as a US attorney is one of wrongly prosecuting Black voting-rights activists and opposing the Voting Rights Act.206 More recently, as a member of the Senate, Sessions was the first to endorse Donald Trump’s candidacy and is described as “one of the most strident anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-L.G.B.T. voices in the Senate.”207
Donald Trump campaigned on the promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants right at the beginning of his administration, a promise that has left a whole generation of young people and their families worried about their future. Some children, born in the United States, are citizens but worry what will happen to their undocumented parents, and to them, if family members are deported. Others arrived in the US as young children and, though they grew up in the US, don’t have the protection of citizenship. Through executive action, President Obama implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy in 2012. The policy allows young people who entered the country without authorization before the age of sixteen and have lived in the US continually since 2007 the opportunity to work and go to school without fear of deportation. Young people protected by DACA must seek renewal of that legal protection every two years. Because the policy was created by executive order, rather than through the legislative process, it can easily be reversed by a new president with a different executive order. During his campaign, Trump indicated his intent to do so. Those who registered for DACA status are now part of a government database and consequently will be easy to find if the new president moves forward with his threats to engage in mass deportations. Their fears for their future are real.208
Fear and anxiety on the part of some White people may have been a key driver of the election results. The election outcome has created considerable fear and anxiety among communities of color and their White allies. How will the new president of the United States address the concerns of all of the people? In December 2016, as I write these words, the answer to that question remains to be seen.
What we do know is that leadership matters. How the leader describes who is in and who is out matters on a college campus, and it matters in our nation. Living in a time of rapid social change, one might ask, well, how am I supposed to manage my anxiety and my fear—by lashing out? Earlier, in reference to the election of President Obama in 2008, I spoke of “birthing pains” because something new was emerging, and perhaps it still is. But let us be clear: the moment of birth can be a dangerous time. And I think we are living in a dangerous time and should take that danger seriously.
When I listened to the polarizing rhetoric of radio and TV commentators during the long 2016 election campaign season, full of “us-them” language, I was reminded of a book I read a few years ago, Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. She wrote about the hostile rhetoric that was on the radio airwaves before and during the genocide, demonizing the ethnic minority to which she belonged. That rhetoric was made especially powerful because it came from the country’s leaders.209
I do not mean to suggest that what we are seeing in the US today is on par with what was happening in Rwanda. But I do want to make clear that what we say matters, and leadership matters. The expectations and values of leaders can change the tone of the community and the nature of our conversation. Fundamentally, we know that human beings are not that different from other social animals. Not unlike wolves, we follow the leader. Yes, we have an innate tendency to think in “us” and “them” categories, but we look to the leader to help us know who the “us” is and who the “them” is. The leader can define who is in and who is out. The leader can draw the circle narrowly or widely. When the leader draws the circle in an exclusionary way, with the rhetoric of hostility, the sense of threat among the followers is heightened. When the rhetoric is expansive and inclusionary, the threat is reduced. It sounds simple, but we know it is not.
The leader has to ask the question, how is the circle being drawn? Who is inside it? Who is outside it? What can I do to make the circle bigger? As Martin Luther King Jr. once said, we are caught in a “network of mutuality,” and that means our collective fate is intertwined. We will thrive or fail together.
And here’s what we must also consider: If a person is twenty years old in 2017, born in 1997, all the critical issues I have written about in these pages thus far are the coming-of-age hallmarks of their generation. Having been born in 1954 in segregated Florida and raised in Massachusetts as part of the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South, I—and others of my generation—have a long personal history with social progress. I saw Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on television in real time. I heard his and others’ speeches and watched the March on Washington on the nightly news. I saw people who had been denied the right to vote exercise that rig
ht for the first time on television. I have seen the colleges and universities at which I was educated and at which I have worked grow more diverse over time. That sense of racial progress is part of my generation’s lived experience. Yet for those born in 1997, all of that is something in their history books. Their perspective is shaped by a very different set of events.
If you were born in 1997, you were eleven when the economy collapsed, perhaps bringing new economic anxiety into your family life. You were still eleven when Barack Obama was elected. You heard that we were now in a postracial society and President Obama’s election was the proof. Yet your neighborhoods and schools were likely still quite segregated. And in 2012, when you were fifteen, a young Black teenager named Trayvon Martin, walking home in his father’s mostly White neighborhood with his bag of iced tea and Skittles, was murdered and his killer went free. When you were seventeen, Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, and his body was left uncovered in the streets for hours, like a piece of roadkill, and in the same year, unarmed Eric Garner was strangled to death by police, repeatedly gasping “I can’t breathe” on a viral cell phone video, to name just two examples of why it seemed Black lives did not matter, even in the age of Obama. When you were nineteen, Donald J. Trump was elected president and White supremacists were celebrating in the streets. How would a twenty-year-old answer the question posed to me, “Is it better?” The answer to that question would probably depend a great deal on the social identities of that twenty-year-old.
We have lived through a political campaign season in which we heard the president-elect and his campaign surrogates saying things like, “We’re taking America back.” Back to what? Back from whom? What is their definition of “better”? What is yours? We have a lot of work to do if we are to truly move forward together as a nation.
I hope that, in the chapters that follow, readers will find tools that help them better understand themselves and other people and how we are all shaped by the inescapable racial milieu that still surrounds us and that, in some ways, has grown more opaque and seemingly more impenetrable. Twenty years after I first wrote these chapters, how we see ourselves and each other is still being shaped by racial categories and the stereotypes attached to them. The patterns of behavior I described then still ring true because our social context still reinforces racial hierarchies, and still limits our opportunities for genuinely mutual, equitable, and affirming relationships in neighborhoods, in classrooms, or in the workplace. For that reason, this twentieth-anniversary edition will be quite familiar to those who have read earlier editions. The opening chapters of the book (Chapters 1–3) have updated citations but remain essentially the same in content. Chapters 4–9 have been completely rewritten, with new reference material and expanded discussion. Chapter 10 remains much the same as in the original edition and is followed by a new epilogue, “Signs of Hope, Sites of Progress.” The epilogue is offered as a remedy for despair, my effort to highlight people and places that are making a positive difference and, in doing so, point us in a direction that might change our current trajectory, so twenty years from now, we can say without hesitation, “Yes, it is better.” Shall we begin?
INTRODUCTION
A Psychologist’s Perspective
AS A CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST WITH A RESEARCH INTEREST IN BLACK children’s racial identity development, I began teaching about racism many years ago when I was asked by the chair of the Black studies department of the large public university where I was a lecturer to teach a course called Group Exploration of Racism. None of my colleagues, all of whom had been trained in the traditional lecture style of college teaching, wanted to teach the course, which emphasized group interaction and self-revelation. But as a clinical psychologist trained to facilitate emotionally difficult group discussions, I was intrigued by the experiential emphasis implied by the course title, and I took on the challenge.
Aided by a folder full of handouts and course descriptions left behind by the previous instructor, a copy of White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training,1 and my own clinical skills as a group facilitator, I constructed a course that seemed to meet the goals outlined in the course catalog. Designed “to provide students with an understanding of the psychological causes and emotional reality of racism as it appears in everyday life,” the course incorporated lectures, readings, simulation exercises, group research projects, and extensive class discussion to help students explore the psychological impact of racism on both Whites and people of color.
Though my first efforts were tentative, the results were powerful. The students in my class, most of whom were White, repeatedly described the course in their evaluations as one of the most valuable educational experiences of their college careers. I was convinced that helping students understand the ways in which racism operates in their own lives and what they could do about it was a true calling that I should accept. The freedom to institute the course in the curriculum of the psychology departments in which I would eventually teach became a personal condition of employment. Beginning in 1980, for more than twenty years, I taught this course, eventually called The Psychology of Racism, to hundreds of students at three different predominantly White institutions—a large public university, a small coeducational state college, and an elite private college for women.2 I also developed a similar course especially for elementary and secondary school teachers and administrators, which hundreds of educators have taken.3 These experiences, along with the countless parent-education workshops I have led and my research about the experiences of Black adolescents in predominantly White settings, have taught me a lot about the significance of racial identity in the lives of children as well as adults. In fact, my deepening understanding of racial identity development theory greatly informed my thinking about how best to teach these courses and lead these workshops.
After about ten years of teaching, I decided to share some of what I had learned in an article, “Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: An Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom.”4 Published in the Spring 1992 edition of the Harvard Educational Review, the article has been read widely by my academic colleagues in the field of education, many of whom tell me that reading about the theoretical framework of racial identity development triggered an “aha” moment for them. Suddenly the racial dynamics in their classrooms and within their own campus communities made sense in a way that they hadn’t before. Those who were parents of adolescents of color suddenly had a new lens with which to see the sometimes sudden shifts in their children’s behavior both at home and at school. Cross-racial interactions with colleagues took on new meaning. Just as it had for me, an understanding of racial identity development gave them new ways of thinking about old problems and offered them new strategies for facilitating productive dialogue about racial issues.
What concerns me is how little most people outside my particular specialty know about racial identity development. Even those who have studied child psychology are not always well informed about the role of racial or ethnic identity in young people’s development. Perhaps given the historical emphasis on the experiences of White, middle-class children in psychological research, this fact should not be surprising. Most introductory psychology or developmental psychology textbooks include limited discussion of racial or ethnic identity development. Because racial identity is not seen as salient for White adolescents, it is usually not discussed in depth in the texts.
One consequence of this omission that should concern all of us is that educators all across the country, most of whom are White, are teaching in racially mixed classrooms, daily observing identity development in process, and are without an important interpretive framework to help them understand what is happening in their interactions with students, or even in their cross-racial interactions with colleagues. Although educators are hungry for this information, too often it has not been made accessible to them, instead confined to scholarly journals and academic volumes.
And if my colleagues in ed
ucation have limited information about racial identity development theory, the general public knows even less. Yet whenever I talk about this concept in workshops and public lectures, the response is always the same: “This is so helpful. Now I have a better understanding of those interactions, now I see why talking about racism is so hard, now I know what I can do to make it easier.”
Kurt Lewin, a famous social psychologist, once said, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” A theoretical framework that helps us make sense of what we observe in our daily lives is a very valuable resource. What I hope to provide with this book is a helpful understanding of racial identity development from the perspective of a psychologist who has been applying the theory in her teaching, research, clinical, consulting, and administrative practice for more than thirty-five years.
It is a perspective we need now more than ever. Daily news reports tell us of the rising racial tensions in the United States. As our nation becomes more diverse, we need to be able to communicate across racial and ethnic lines, but we seem increasingly less able to do so. New tools are needed. While the insights of sociologists, economists, political scientists, historians, and other social commentators have much to offer, a psychological understanding of cross-racial interactions has been noticeably absent from the public discourse. In the absence of such an understanding, many questions important to our daily lives go unanswered.
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Page 9
