Resource Links Tagged with "Myths"

American Environmentalism’s Racist Roots Have Shaped Global Thinking about Conservation

by Prakash Kashwan | September 2020
American environmentalism’s racist roots have influenced global conservation practices. Most notably, they are embedded in longstanding prejudices against local communities and a focus on protecting pristine wildernesses. This dominant narrative pays little thought to indigenous and other poor people who rely on these lands – even when they are its most effective stewards.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments] [Slavery] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Economics] [History] [Environment]

Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music; The Field Must Acknowledge a History of Systemic Racism While Also Giving New Weight to Black Composers, Musicians, and Listeners.

by Alex Ross | September 2020
This spring, the journal Music Theory Online published “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” an article by Philip Ewell, who teaches at Hunter College. It begins with the sentence “Music theory is white,” and goes on to argue that the whiteness of the discipline is manifest not only in the lack of diversity in its membership but also in a deep-seated ideology of white supremacy, one that insidiously affects how music is analyzed and taught. The main target of Ewell’s critique is the early-twentieth-century Austrian theorist Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), who parsed musical structures in terms of foreground, middle-ground, and background levels, teasing out the tonal formulas that underpin large-scale movements. Schenker held racist views, particularly with regard to Black people, and according to Ewell those views seeped into the seemingly abstract principles of his theoretical work.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Art & Culture] [Systemic Racism] [History] [White Supremacy] [Myths] [-ing While Black] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Immigration] [Slavery] [Civil War] [Asian]

10 Myths about the Racial Wealth Gap

by Dion Rabouin | July 2020
1. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap through education
2. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap through personal responsibility
3. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap through home ownership
4. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap with individual accomplishment
5. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap through increased savings
6. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap by investing in Black-owned banks
7. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap through entrepreneurship
8. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap through financial literacy
9. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap by emulating “model minorities”
10. The myth of closing the racial wealth gap through “stronger families”
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Myths] [Economics] [History] [Denial] [Racial Covenants] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Housing] [Systemic Racism] [White Privilege]

A Judge Asked Harvard to Find Out Why So Many Black People Were In Prison. They Could Only Find 1 Answer: Systemic Racism

by Michael Harriot | September 2020
When a judge tasked researchers with explaining why Massachusetts’ Black and Latinx incarceration was so high, a four-year study came up with one conclusion. Racism. It was always racism. “White people make up roughly 74% of the Massachusetts population while accounting for 58.7% of cases in our data,” the study explained. “Meanwhile, Black people make up just 6.5% of the Massachusetts population and account for 17.1% of cases.” Of course, that could only mean that Black people commit much more crime, right? Nope. OK, then maybe Black people commit worse crimes. That wasn’t it. What they found is the criminal justice system is unequal on every level. Cops in the state are more likely to stop Black drivers.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Policing] [Systemic Racism] [Prison System] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [White Privilege] [Latino/a] [Myths] [Black Lives Matter] [-ing While Black]

Thirty Everyday Phrases That Perpetuate the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples

by Alex Kapitan | October 2020
Language isn’t neutral or objective. It is a vessel of cultural stories, values, and norms. And in the United States, everyday language plays into the violent, foundational myth of this country’s origin story—Europeans “discovering” a virtually uninhabited wilderness and befriending the few primitive peoples who lived there—as well as other cultural myths and lies about Indigenous Peoples that are baked into U.S. culture and everyday life.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Myths] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Definitions]

Inside a New Effort to Change What Schools Teach About Native American History; A New Curriculum from the American Indian Museum Brings Greater Depth and Understanding to the Long-Misinterpreted History of Indigenous Culture

by Anna Diamond | September 2019
Students who learn anything about Native Americans are often only offered the barest minimum: re-enacting the first Thanksgiving, building a California Spanish mission out of sugar cubes or memorizing a flashcard about the Trail of Tears just ahead of the AP U.S. History Test.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Teachers] [Myths] [Silencing POC] [Immigration]

A response to ‘Statement of Global Indigenous Identity and Solidarity’

by Rhiana Yazzie (Navajo) | October 2020
The following was written by Rhiana Yazzie (Navajo). It was originally posted on Facebook and is republished here with permission.
I’m responding to the “Statement of Global Indigenous Identity and Solidarity” that Rulan Tangen, the founder and artistic director of Dancing Earth Indigenous Contemporary Dance Creations published online on October 12, 2020. I urge you all to read this masterpiece justifying theft: the stealing of Native American identity, fellowships, grants, leadership, thought leadership, movie roles, and countless other robberies big and small, personal and public. …The letter details how over 30 years Rulan’s identity has evolved, and has allowed people, Native and non-Native to believe she was Native American. She now says, “I am often mistaken for or mislabelled as Native American, and my community kinship ties have possibly added to this mis-association.”
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [Art & Culture] [Assumptions] [Economics]

How to Use Stats to Fight Racial Inequality, Not Support It

by Alex Shashkevich-Stanford | June 2018
Using statistics to inform the public about racial disparities can backfire. Worse yet, it can cause some people to be more supportive of the policies that create those inequalities, according to new research. “One of the barriers of reducing inequality is how some people justify and rationalize it,” says Rebecca Hetey, a psychology researcher at Stanford University. “A lot of people doing social justice work wonder why attitudes are so immune to change. Our research shows that simply presenting the numbers is not enough.” If raw numbers don’t always work, what might?
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [Myths] [History]

Influencers are Doing blackface to ‘show Solidarity’ with BLM

by Brit Dawson | June 2020
One group seemingly still clueless about how to support Black Lives Matter is influencers. First, they were posing at protests for clout, and now they’re doing blackface to ‘show solidarity’ with the movement. In an Instagram post, satirist and socio-political activist Saint Hoax shared screenshots of influencers who had painted their skin Black, along with a brief history of blackface. They wrote: “How can you ‘spread awareness’ about a subject you know so little about? If you genuinely care about a cause, the least you can do is educate yourself about it.” They continued: “It’s infuriating that we still need to educate people about the racist and painful history of blackface. We shouldn’t be having this conversation in 2020.”
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Accountability] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [White Supremacy] [Black Lives Matter] [White Culture] [Myths] [Strategies]

IBRAM KENDI, ONE OF THE NATION’S LEADING SCHOLARS OF RACISM, SAYS EDUCATION AND LOVE ARE NOT THE ANSWER; Founder of New Anti-Racism Center at American University Sees Impact of Policy, Culture on Black Athletes

by Lonnae O’Neal | September 2017
Education, love and exemplary black people will not deliver America from racism, Kendi says. Racist ideas grow out of discriminatory policies, he argues, not the other way around. And if his new center can help identify and dismantle those policies in the U.S. and around the world, he believes we can start to eliminate racism. At least that’s the goal. … “We have been taught that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, lead to racist policies,” Kendi said. “If the fundamental problem is ignorance and hate, then your solutions are going to be focused on education, and love and persuasion. But of course [Stamped from the Beginning] shows that the actual foundation of racism is not ignorance and hate, but self-interest, particularly economic and political and cultural.” Self-interest drives racist policies that benefit that self-interest. When the policies are challenged because they produce inequalities, racist ideas spring up to justify those policies. Hate flows freely from there.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Anti-Racism] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [History]

A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

by Allison Keyes | May 2016
An Oklahoma lawyer details the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood where hundreds died 95 years ago. The ten-page manuscript is typewritten, on yellowed legal paper, and folded in thirds. But the words, an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street,” are searing. “I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [History] [Economics] [Reparations] [Myths] [Silencing POC]

A Quick Read for White People Who Don’t Consider Themselves Racist

*Paywall Alert
by Ola Caracola | June 2020
Not all white people are bigots. But all white people consciously or unconsciously benefit from a system, which oppresses people of color. Our indoctrination with underlying racist ideals begins at birth and is so engrained in our culture that we may not even be aware of the biases we hold. Often our perception of people who look different than us is based on incomplete or all-together inaccurate stereotypes. We need to do better. This does not mean that as a white person, you don’t struggle with the realities of life, it simply means that your skin color is not one of the things making it harder.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Myths] [Systemic Racism] [Implicit Bias] [White Blindness] [White Privilege] [Accountability] [History] [Black Lives Matter]

I’m Black and Afraid of ‘White Fragility’; Robin DiAngelo’s Corporate-Friendly Anti-Racist Screed Actually Reinforces Racist Beliefs

by Cedrick-Michael Simmons | June 2020
DiAngelo views racism as a problem to be combated with sensitivity training. The premise of diversity and cultural competency training is that by educating European-Americans on the persistence and consequences of racism, they can be transformed into non-racist (or, ideally, anti-racist) individuals. But diversity training has been shown to be a largely ineffective way to address racism in American workplaces. These lectures and workshops do little—if anything—in the way of addressing the structural tensions that workers must navigate on a daily basis.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [Anti-Racism] [Accountability] [Art & Culture] [Black Lives Matter] [Denial] [Myths] [Assumptions] [Systemic Racism]

The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility; The Popular Book Aims to Combat Racism but Talks Down to Black People.

by John McWhorter| July 2020
“ … herein is the real problem with White Fragility. DiAngelo does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good. What end does all this self-mortification serve? Impatient with such questions, DiAngelo insists that “wanting to jump over the hard, personal work and get to ‘solutions’” is a “foundation of white fragility.” In other words, for DiAngelo, the whole point is the suffering. And note the scare quotes around solutions, as if wanting such a thing were somehow ridiculous. A corollary question is why Black people need to be treated the way DiAngelo assumes we do. The very assumption is deeply condescending to all proud Black people. In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise. Nor should anyone dismiss me as a rara avis. Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [Individual Change] [2020’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [White Defensiveness] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [Anti-Racism] [Myths] [“All Lives Matter”] [Denial]

Textbook Racism; How Scholars Sustained White Supremacy

*Paywall Alert
by Donald Yacovone | April 2018
After reviewing my first 50 or so textbooks, one morning I realized precisely what I was seeing, what instruction, and what priorities were leaping from the pages into the brains of the students compelled to read them: white supremacy. One text even began with the capitalized title: “The White Man’s History.” Across time and with precious few exceptions, African-Americans appeared only as “ignorant negroes,” as slaves, and as anonymous abstractions that only posed “problems” for the supposed real subjects of history: white people of European descent.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [History] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Accountability] [Myths]

In Our Resistance against the State, Black and Indigenous Peoples are Collectively Powerful

by Red Dawn Foster and Miski Noor | July 2020
Though the history books written by enslavers and colonizers would have us unaware, our stories as Black and Indigenous Peoples are threaded together through past and present, and surely, through the future as well. Settler-colonialism is a continuous project that relies on sustained socio-economic policies that perpetuate white supremacy and maintain violence against Black and Indigenous peoples. Both genocide and enslavement built the settler-colonial nation as we know it today. Black and Indigenous history is tied to the colonization of this land and our liberation is inherently tied together, that is why Black and Indigenous solidarity is essential.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Politics] [Reparations] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments]

Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears; America’s Forgotten Migration – the Journeys of a Million African-Americans from the Tobacco South to the Cotton South

by Edward Ball | NOVEMBER 2015
“My grandfather went to the folks who had owned our family and asked, ‘Do you have any documentation about our history during the slave days? We would like to see it, if possible.’ The man at the door, who I have to assume was from the slaveholding side, said, ‘Sure, we’ll give it to you.’ “The man went into his house and came back out with some papers in his hands. Now, whether the papers were trivial or actual plantation records, who knows? But he stood in the door, in front of my grandfather, and lit a match to the papers. ‘You want your history?’ he said. ‘Here it is.’ Watching the things burn. ‘Take the ashes and get off my land.’ “The intent was to keep that history buried,” McQuinn says today. “And I think something like that has happened over and again, symbolically.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Slavery] [History] [Silencing POC] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [White Privilege]

For Local Native Americans, a Reckoning over Hurtful Images Goes Way Beyond One South Philadelphia Statue

by Jeff Gammage and Maddie Hanna | July 2020
James Logan was not just a colonial statesman and Philadelphia mayor. He was an architect of the infamous “Walking Purchase,” a scheme in which he and others swindled the original Lenape inhabitants out of perhaps a million acres of land in 1737. “You see these things every single day,” said Mach, 33, a University of Pennsylvania doctoral student who studies how Native Americans are represented in museums. “This stuff is just everywhere.”
Across the United States, the Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police violence have also ignited new discussions and demands over the use of Native images, symbols and mascots, and the future of monuments to men who harmed and killed indigenous people.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Myths] [Systemic Racism] [Indigenous] [Policing] [History] [Economics] [White Culture] [White Supremacy] [Confederate Monuments]

Haudenosaunee women inspired women’s suffrage movement (Commentary)

by Betty Lyons, Onondaga Nation | August 2020
It was no accident that Central New York was the birth of the American movement for women’s suffrage, but recent commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the formal U.S. adoption of women’s suffrage continues attempts to erase the role that Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) women played in inspiring the first convention in Seneca Falls.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [Myths] [Role Model]

The Long History of How Jesus Came to Resemble a White European

by Anna Swartwood House | July 2020
The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are explicitly called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus’ appearance in the Old or New Testaments.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Faith-Based/Spiritual] [Myths] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [History]

Race of Mass Shooters Influences How the Media Cover Their Crimes, New Study Shows

by Laura Frizzell, Sadé L. Lindsay, and Scott Duxbury | July 2018
If a news report mentions a shooter’s tough childhood, chances are he’s white. On Jan. 24, 2014, police found Josh Boren, a 34-year-old man and former police officer, dead in his home next to the bodies of his wife and their three children. The shots were fired execution-style on Boren’s kneeling victims, before he turned the gun on himself. On Aug. 8, 2015, 48-year-old David Ray Conley shot and killed his son, former girlfriend and six other children and adults at his former girlfriend’s home. Like Boren, Conley executed the victims at point-blank range. Both men had histories of domestic violence and criminal behavior. Yet despite the obvious similarities in these two cases and perpetrators, the media, in each case, took a different approach.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Myths] [Individual Change] [History] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Colorblindness] [Prison System] [-ing While Black]

How the Myth of a Liberal North Erases a Long History of White Violence

by Christy Clark-Pujara and Anna-Lisa Cox| August 2020
Anti-black racism has terrorized African Americans throughout the nation’s history, regardless of where in the country they lived. There is a toxic myth that encourages white people in the North to see themselves as free from racism and erases African Americans from the pre-Civil War North, where they are still being told that they don’t belong. What Langston experienced was not the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 or Rosewood, Florida, in 1923—this was Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1841, 20 years before the Civil War broke out. This was the third such racist attack against African Americans in Cincinnati in 12 years. This article was originally published as the first of a five-part series titled “Black Life in Two Pandemics: Histories of Violence” and provides link to view all parts.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [History] [Myths] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Slavery] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC] [Denial]

Taking From the World Tree: Mythology and Cultural Appropriation

Cultural Appropriation is just that, when one culture appropriates elements of another culture. Mythology and folklore certainly count. … One of the threats of cultural appropriation comes with modifying the original source, often a simplification of the ideas present in the original culture.

Why Reverse Racism is a Myth

by Noshin Jannat | September 2019
In today’s society, the term ‘racism’ has been for the most part, incorrectly used. The term is not interchangeable or synonymous with ‘prejudice’. Prejudice describes having irrational and unreasonable feelings or attitudes towards a group of people. Racism occurs when people act on their prejudice — it is action, not just internal feelings. To go further, racism is a system that disadvantages groups based on race. Therefore, people of colour simply cannot be racist as they cannot benefit from it.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2010’s] [Myths] [“Reverse Racism”] [Systemic Racism] [White Privilege]

Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong

by James W. Loewen | July 2015
“As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists—which is why a presidential candidate can suggest, as Michele Bachmann did in 2011, that slavery was somehow pro-family and why the public, per the Pew Research Center, believes that the war was fought mainly over states’ rights.”
TAGS: [Assumptions] [History] [Confederate Monuments] [White Supremacy] [Civil War] [Slavery] [2010’s] [Myths]

Quakers, Social Justice, and Revolution: NNA [National Network Assembly], Race and Community Building

by Jeff Kisling | August 2019
It is not enough to talk about racial injustice. White people must experience, live it. We can only be authentic when we speak from our own experience. I am so grateful I was given the opportunity to spend significant amounts of time in the Kheprw Institute (KI) community, a black youth empowerment organization. That taught me that white people must spend significant amounts of time, in a variety situations, with black people to even begin to understand racial injustice. Developing friendships is essential, before any real work can be done together.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [Quaker] [White Supremacy] [Tips-Dos/Don’ts] [White Privilege] [Accountability] [Myths] [Faith-Based/Spiritual]

Confronting White Supremacy in the Work Place

by Caroline Taiwo | Date 2010’s
Two years ago, I started work as a recruitment and retention specialist for a small Minnesota nonprofit. The organization’s mission was to serve youth in crisis and their matriculation rate was 90 percent poor Black kids. I was hired on to replace a woman they fired a month prior, a Black woman, for reasons unresolved. She had been telling people that she was pushed out for challenging racist policy. Our department had tripled the number of volunteers coming in for weekly shift rotations but incredibly, the entire pool was white. When I brought it up, and offered to lead an effort to all in more volunteers of color, the more outspoken of the bosses interjected with, “Well we could look for more Black volunteers but I don’t think they would pass our background check.”
TAGS: [Strategies] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism] [Silencing POC] [Accountability] [Employment] [Denial] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Economics] [White Privilege] [White Defensiveness] [White Culture] [Assumptions] [Myths]

The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap

by Amy Traub, Laura Sullivan, Tatjana Meschede, Thomas Shapiro | February 2017
Issues of racial inequity are increasingly at the forefront of America’s public debate. In addition to urgent concerns about racial bias in law enforcement and the criminal justice system, activists highlight deeply connected issues of economic exclusion and inequality. No metric more powerfully captures the persistence and growth of economic inequality along racial and ethnic lines than the racial wealth gap. According to data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, the median white household possessed $13 in net wealth for every dollar held by the median black household in 2013. That same year, median white households possessed $10 for each dollar held by the median Latino/a household.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Colorblindness] [Economics] [White Privilege] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [Racial Covenants]

Adoption Is A Feminist Issue, But Not For The Reasons You Think

by Liz Latty | April 2017
Mainstream feminism — feminism by and for middle and upper-middle-class white women — has historically gotten behind adoption. Feminists have supported the rights of single people and same-gendered families to adopt, the rights of adoptive families in contested adoptions, and policies intended to get children into adoptive homes faster. What’s missing from mainstream feminism is any explicit support for families of origin: the parents who have to lose their children, the families that must be dismantled in order for adoptive families to be built. The adoption industry is a business. It generates billions of dollars each year and requires other people’s children in order to stay profitable. Here’s the toughest truth yet: Those children are almost always the children of poor and working class people.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2010’s] [White Privilege] [Economics] [Accountability] [Systemic Racism] [Myths] [White Supremacy]

Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments are Wrong

by James W. Loewen | July 2015
The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public monuments and our history books. With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about, and our Army honoring Southern generals, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until recently.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments] [Civil War] [Slavery] [History] [White Supremacy]