Читать книгу Multicultural Psychology - Jennifer T. Pedrotti - Страница 33

 Identify examples of racial segregation today, and analyze the role of our historical context in creating and maintaining contemporary segregation.

 Define race, and utilize that definition to discuss its implications on personal identity and our social context.

 Explain the historical frameworks that established the foundations for today’s racial inequality.

 Describe the racial history for American Indians, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx populations.

Years ago, a White friend of mine told me the story of the day she began to see herself as White and realized that race was at work all around her. It was a surprising story, because my friend was famous for believing racism was a thing of the past, or would soon be, with people like her who treated others with fairness and respect and ignored race. Everything changed for her when her car broke down in what was considered the “bad part of town.” She had been driving through the Black neighborhood of our city, despite having been taught by her parents and friends to take the interstate (a longer route) to avoid it. The car was able to make it into the parking lot of a liquor store and then just died.

Though it was in the middle of day, she had never stopped in the Black neighborhood alone before, and she found herself surprised by her growing fear. A Black store employee came out and brought her a bottle of water and offered to call someone if she needed. While she waited for help, two young Black men approached her. Afraid, she turned away from them and did not speak. Much to her surprise, they came up and said they had seen her car in distress and wondered if they could help. As they were checking out the car, the police pulled into the lot. The officers got out of the car, put their hands on their guns and ordered the men to the ground. The gentlemen were handcuffed and pushed to the sidewalk to sit on the curb. At that point, the police turned to my friend and asked if she was okay. She explained the situation and then watched as the officers gathered identifications and information from the two men and called in on their car radio before letting them go.

In 2009, historian Bill Rankin released a project called “Radical Cartography,” central to which was a map of Chicago that used colored dots to represent the racial makeup of the city. Using the categories of: White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Other, Rankin’s dot mapping revealed not only the racial segregation of the city, but the clear and stark lines that divide us.

Soon, others developed similar maps of various cities in the United States, and in 2013, Dustin Cable, of the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, published a map of the entire United States with a dot for every individual counted in the previous census. That work became part of a renewed national discussion on racial segregation. Despite the fact that the segregation reflected in the maps is historically entrenched, and that we have long examined the policies and social ideologies that created it, and that countless present-day studies reveal the various manifestations of it (from an increasing racial wealth gap to continued, and in some cases even worsening, school segregation (Orfield, Ee, Frankenberg, & Siegel-Hawley, 2016)—for some it felt like the maps presented new or unrealized information. The strong concentration of colors, the clear segregation, and the stark separations had a visceral impact, for some sadness and anger, for others shock and surprise.

It was as if the expanded awareness and opportunities our contemporary technology and global marketplace provided (designer patterns purported to be “Indigenous,” the popularization of sushi, our love of guacamole, the commercialization of hip hop, etc.) had obscured the reality of the racial segregation that marks our social world and our day-to-day lives. It is a segregation not simply about space and place, but about how we see ourselves, others, and the world, and how and why we, individually and collectively, function as we do in society. The role of multicultural psychology is to assist in understanding those relationships between individuals and their personal, as well as social (culture, class, race, gender, etc.), structural (systems, institutions, ideologies, policies, etc.), and historical context.

The reality and implications of that psychological, social, 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).

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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.