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Session 2: Socialized into Whiteness
Objectives:
- To identify and begin to understand the manifestations of internalized racial superiority.
- To understand how and why “white” was socially constructed.
Reflection:
“We are what we know. We are, however, also what we do not know. If what we know about ourselves-our history, our culture, our national identity-is deformed by absences, denials and incompleteness, then our identity-both as individuals and as Americans-is fragmented.” William Pinar
Check-in
Interactive Exercise: “A Collage of White Identity”
Looking at the Manifestations of Internalized Racial Superiority
Family of Origin Stories:
In small groups, share the stories that you created this past week related to your racial socialization.
Large Group Discussion:
• What were your feelings as you wrote your stories?
• What did you hear in other people’s stories?
• Were there commonalities in the stories?
• How does this speak to the collective experience of whiteness?
Please keep your stories with your folders as we will be returning to them in a later session.
Closing Reflection
“We need help to look at ourselves. We need help to understand how we as a people through history have used others for our own ends. We need help to understand that our own worth and power is not lost in a just distribution of power. The emotional weight that racism produces in whites blinds us from a vision of the fundamental changes we must work for and which will, in fact, free us all.” ~ Frances Kendall
Homework:
Read:
- Membership Has Its Privileges by Tim Wise, and
- A Long History of Racial Preferences – for Whites by Larry Adelman
Posted in: Cracking the Shell of Whiteness