If you stop someone on the street, and ask them about what it means for something to be racist, it’s pretty likely that they’ll tell you that racism is what racist people do, and that racist people are people who consciously hate everyone of some race, or, perhaps, everyone of every other race. Racists are evil, deliberately evil, intentionally evil. Racist acts are acts that are done by people who intend to be racist.
If you’re reasoning from within this (inadequate) understanding of racism, as long as you do not consciously hate every single member of some race, or if you don’t intend to do them harm, or you do not intend to be racist, you aren’t racist. And, therefore, you didn’t do anything racist. You are not evil. So, whatever you did that someone is saying is racist is now off the table of consideration, since the real issue is whether you’re a mustache-twirling racist who gets up in the morning and thinks about how to harm people of other races. You aren’t. You don’t even have a mustache.
Therefore, anyone calling you racist is engaging in defamation of character, since they’re saying you’re deliberately evil, and, if someone calls you racist, your losing your temper is justified, since what they did to you is so offensive.
That’s a little muddled, but it’s how far too many arguments about racism play out:
Chester: “You did a racist thing.”
Hubert: “You’re calling me a racist. And here are all the ways I’m a good person (and therefore not racist). You’re the real racist here for making it an issue of race.”
I’ve seen this flawed understanding of racism, and then the same domino effect of fallacious reasoning (I didn’t do anything racist because I’m not a racist because I sometimes do non- or anti-racist things) all over the political spectrum, and on scholarly mailing lists, at meetings of scholars, at faculty meetings—so, this problem isn’t just something They do.
This common notion of racism is wrong because the issue of a racist world is not usefully reduced to the problem of individuals who consciously feel hostility to members of other races or intend to be racist (nor is racism bad just because racist words “offend” people). There isn’t some binary between racist and non-racist, and, therefore, that a person has done something non-racist doesn’t mean they can never do anything racist. That you hate racism doesn’t mean you are magically immune from doing anything racist. In fact, you can be trying to do something you think is anti-racist, and unintentionally be making things worse.
Take, for instance, the deficit model of education. The deficit model of education says that some students struggle because they lack things that good teachers should pour into their heads. Rather than presenting students as people who are bringing a lot of knowledge and skills, it describes them as little jars of absence.
Often, that absence is described as a consequence of their coming from a deficient culture. Their cultural (racial) background is inferior to the dominant culture, and so we need to pour into their brains (or drill them on) the things they don’t know, the habits they don’t have. This model means that teachers work with their students from an assumption that they need to pull some students up to the mean, and, too often, that assumption is racist, even when the teacher is trying to do the right thing. I’ve seen teachers respond with so much enthusiasm to the contribution of a student of color that I wanted to crawl under a table and hide.
Basically, the “deficit model” appears to be anti-racist insofar as it’s saying that students of color who are underperforming (or not—they might be performing just fine) need extra care from a white teacher because they lack certain things the (white) teacher can pour into them. The white teacher is trying to save them, so isn’t racist (racists hate people of other races). The white teacher feels compassion for these students and is trying to save them.
But it is racist in so many ways. For instance, it reinforces the racist cultural narrative that all important stories about reducing racism are about how white people use their agency to save POC, and POC are (or should be) grateful subjects of how good white people use their agency. A narrative about people of color who succeed is about the white people who helped them.
A racist act is one that reinforces the racist hierarchies of a culture or society; and racist hierarchies are hierarchies that are socially constructed categories that claim to be essential and inherent in groups.
As the Encyclopedia of Educational Psychology(Vol. 1. ) says,
[T]he deficit model asserts that racial/ethnic minority groups do not achieve as well as their White majority peers in school and life because their family culture is dysfunctional and lacking important characteristics compared to the White American culture. […]
Criticisms of the deficit model are numerous. First, the deficit model is unfair to minority children and their families, focusing the blame on their culture. The deficit model is also inaccurate because it deemphasizes the powerful effects of poverty on the families, schools, and neighborhoods, which synergistically affect academic achievement and occupational attainment. It also strongly implied that White middle-class values are superior. Fourth, the deficit model became equated with pathology in which a group’s cultural values, families, or lifestyles transmit the pathology. Finally, the deficit model has limitations for scholarship because it is too narrow as an explanatory model (i.e., rigidly blames the family) for the academic underachievement of poor minority children. In short, the deficit model’s negative effects are that children were narrowly viewed as “deprived” and their families became “disadvantaged,” “dysfunctional,” and “pathological.”
The deficit model is racist in impact, and not intent. It implies that good teachers would identify students whom they think are deficient (likely to be POC) and try to save them by pouring into their heads the things they lack. Those teachers would mean well, and still be engaging in actions that reinforce our racist culture. Does that mean they’re racist? Yes. Does that mean they wear a hood and burn crosses and intend to be racist? No. Is it useful to identify the problem as their being racist people? No. Does it matter that they’re (unintentionally) promoting a racist narrative about students? Yes.
Are some students lacking important skills important for success in college? Yes.
In fact, students should be lacking the skills we intend to teach in our class—otherwise, why are they in the class? Every person, including the teacher, walks into a classroom deficient. A good class makes everyone in that room better. Every person, including the teacher, walks into a classroom with an excess of gifts, skills, and knowledge. Assuming that the deficiencies map onto (or are explained by) race or culture is inevitably going to put white students at an advantage. But teachers with the deficit model are likely to pay more attention to “grammar” errors on the part of students of color (or multi-lingual students) than white students; they’ll over-identify errors (noticing ones they wouldn’t notice in a white student’s paper, identifying as “grammar” errors things that are orthographic, stylistic, or rhetorical). They’ll also explain the errors differently, as the consequence of gaps in knowledge (whereas they’re likely to explain white students’ errors as typos). By conveying the expectation that POC students will perform badly, and need saving, they deny students something all students need: confidence.
Racism isn’t about intent, or whether people have their feelings hurt. Racism is about actions, policies, structures, practices, systems, institutions that reinforce the racial hierarchies of a culture. A narrative that students from certain cultures are deficient reinforces the very narratives and tropes central to our current racist world.
Interesting. Thank you.