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Health & Fitness

What do we say to children regarding race in the light of the Trayvon Martin case?

This week on the “Ask Dr. Annie Abram” radio show, I had an incredible, eye-opening conversation with Dr. George Yancy, co-editor (along with Janine Jones) of Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics. Dr. Yancy is a professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, where he specializes in Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Philosophy of Race, and African American Philosophy. In our discussion of the Trayvon Martin case, we spoke at length about the insidious racism in American society.

Particularly for white people who consider themselves non-racists, it is painful to confront our cultural legacy. Immanuel Kant equated blackness with stupidity. Thomas Jefferson proclaimed the black body to be incapable of creativity. Hegel insisted that blacks do not have souls—an assertion entertained in Europe and America for hundreds of years. Black bodies were, in a not so distant past, considered part of the landscape, property to be handled.

This racism, embedded in our cultural and psychological DNA, is largely invisible to the white population that continues to perpetuate it. As the title of one of Yancy’s books–Look! A White!–underscores, to be white is to be normalized, to enjoy automatic legitimacy. Yancy argues that the very state of American Whiteness is inherently racist because, as whites, we occupy a space of inarguable privilege which is sustained by our unconscious bias against the black body. Yancy calls this psychological state the white gaze.

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The remedy for this, says Yancy, is mixed communities that engage in critical dialogue, where blacks can teach their white neighbors the meaning of whiteness, which is quite visible from the black perspective: racism that is invisible to whites is the daily experience of the black community. W.E.B. DuBois called this ability of blacks to see whiteness “the second sight.” Yancy called it a gift. If we, as whites, want to confront the inherited racism we unknowingly enact, we must accept this gift. We must listen—fearlessly.

In the Trayvon Martin tragedy, Yancy pinpointed 2 separate acts of violence—the first more invisible, yet more alarming: Zimmerman’s language in his call to the police, during which he defined Trayvon, who was walking with skittles and iced tea, as suspicious. Why, Dr. Yancy asks, didn’t Zimmerman see Trayvon as a potential neighbor in need? As someone young and vulnerable, who possibly needed help? The answer is that Zimmerman, as a product of American Whiteness, was out patrolling a criminal that he saw very clearly in his mind long before he laid eyes on Trayvon Martin. And that criminal was black.

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Let’s all speak to our children openly and honestly about racism. Let us teach black children, lovingly, about the way the world views them. As white parents, let’s be clear about our cultural legacy, and let us recruit our children in an effort to become more aware of the racism we have inherited and that we will hopefully, someday, overcome.

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