Post by walnut on Oct 7, 2017 22:12:59 GMT
Thank you to everyone who shared your positionality paper here. I enjoyed reading all of them and it seems like there are a lot more classmates who are reading out posts and haven't posted yet (since each of the papers has been read about 50 or 60 times).
My sister, who is a couple years younger than me, once told me about the day she realized she wasn't white. She was about five. I don't think I had a clear-cut moment of realization like that because as long as I can remember interacting with people outside my own family, I remember feeling other. My parents immigrated to the US not so long before I was born and we only spoke their native language at home until shortly before I began pre-school, when they began - too late - to catch me up with English. My parents are very well educated, middle-class people from an industrialized Asian country and they were well-equiped to teach me English, but due to the late start, when I started school I did not feel comfortable with the language, or with the expectations that Americans had for how a little girl should behave (adults always asked why I didn't smile or why I was "so shy") so I felt "other" at pre-school and school.
However, going to school in the 80s on the West Coast, our teachers and textbooks seemed to treat racism and prejudice as something in the past, that was hashed out in the civil rights movement. The general message was that a color-blind attitude was the best approach, even for example during the Rodney King riots and the OJ Simpson trial. My parents, too seemed to either to be oblivious, or in firm denial, that racism might ever affect them or their kids. So despite the clear feeling of being different and on the sidelines, at the same time, I had relatively little awareness of issues of racism in my own life.
As an adult, I've lived in the Northeast, in Germany, and elsewhere, and having seen how different communities talk about, and don't talk about, race, and experienced racism myself in different ways in these different places, it's given me a lot to think about, to say the least. I've tried to talk to my relatives, friends, and strangers who make stupid remarks to me on the street about race in every possible way: with anger, with calm, by listening, by lecturing, by shouting, by explicitly calling them racists, by storming away. At this point I'm not sure whether there is really any good way to talk about racism in everyday situations, but I would still like to find out what others have thought and written about the matter. In my work as a librarian I've become exposed to Critical Librarianship and thus a little bit to Critical Race Theory, so I would like to learn more.
One thing I am only gradually REALLY understanding, and not just understanding on paper, is that society is full of structural racism and learned racist attitutdes and one internalizes that. That I've internalized that. For example, this is what happened when I took the IAT: although I'll argue that I'm American until I'm blue in the face and I even tried extra hard to click faster and associate the Asian faces with Americanness, my results suggest that I'm biased to think that people who Asian - who look like me! - are less American than white people. So, while I often myself thinking that as a woman, person of color, and person living with chronic mental illness, that I've only at the receiving end of prejudice, racism, sexism all around, I'm learning that I've internalized bias against many other people and groups, and I don't know what I can do and what we as a sociecty can do about that.
My sister, who is a couple years younger than me, once told me about the day she realized she wasn't white. She was about five. I don't think I had a clear-cut moment of realization like that because as long as I can remember interacting with people outside my own family, I remember feeling other. My parents immigrated to the US not so long before I was born and we only spoke their native language at home until shortly before I began pre-school, when they began - too late - to catch me up with English. My parents are very well educated, middle-class people from an industrialized Asian country and they were well-equiped to teach me English, but due to the late start, when I started school I did not feel comfortable with the language, or with the expectations that Americans had for how a little girl should behave (adults always asked why I didn't smile or why I was "so shy") so I felt "other" at pre-school and school.
However, going to school in the 80s on the West Coast, our teachers and textbooks seemed to treat racism and prejudice as something in the past, that was hashed out in the civil rights movement. The general message was that a color-blind attitude was the best approach, even for example during the Rodney King riots and the OJ Simpson trial. My parents, too seemed to either to be oblivious, or in firm denial, that racism might ever affect them or their kids. So despite the clear feeling of being different and on the sidelines, at the same time, I had relatively little awareness of issues of racism in my own life.
As an adult, I've lived in the Northeast, in Germany, and elsewhere, and having seen how different communities talk about, and don't talk about, race, and experienced racism myself in different ways in these different places, it's given me a lot to think about, to say the least. I've tried to talk to my relatives, friends, and strangers who make stupid remarks to me on the street about race in every possible way: with anger, with calm, by listening, by lecturing, by shouting, by explicitly calling them racists, by storming away. At this point I'm not sure whether there is really any good way to talk about racism in everyday situations, but I would still like to find out what others have thought and written about the matter. In my work as a librarian I've become exposed to Critical Librarianship and thus a little bit to Critical Race Theory, so I would like to learn more.
One thing I am only gradually REALLY understanding, and not just understanding on paper, is that society is full of structural racism and learned racist attitutdes and one internalizes that. That I've internalized that. For example, this is what happened when I took the IAT: although I'll argue that I'm American until I'm blue in the face and I even tried extra hard to click faster and associate the Asian faces with Americanness, my results suggest that I'm biased to think that people who Asian - who look like me! - are less American than white people. So, while I often myself thinking that as a woman, person of color, and person living with chronic mental illness, that I've only at the receiving end of prejudice, racism, sexism all around, I'm learning that I've internalized bias against many other people and groups, and I don't know what I can do and what we as a sociecty can do about that.