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March 3, 2011

Talking about race: New conversations needed, authors say

Events that revolve around race and ethnicity occur every day and are inescapable. “This means we have to talk about race and ethnicity,” said Stanford psychology professor Hazel Markus. “The trouble is most of us are nervous talking about any issue that involves race and ethnicity.”

Stanford University faculty members Hazel Markus, above, and Paula M.L. Moya, below, presented “Eight Conversations About Race and Ethnicity” as part of the Center on Race and Social Problems Reed Smith Spring 2011 Speaker Series. The presentation is based on their co-authored essay that is part of their 2010 book, “Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century,” which features contributions from scholars of race and ethnicity.

Stanford University faculty members Hazel Markus, above, and Paula M.L. Moya, below, presented “Eight Conversations About Race and Ethnicity” as part of the Center on Race and Social Problems Reed Smith Spring 2011 Speaker Series. The presentation is based on their co-authored essay that is part of their 2010 book, “Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century,” which features contributions from scholars of race and ethnicity.

Behind some of that trepidation is that we’re still thinking about race and ethnicity in old and flawed ways, she said. “We need to and we can think about them in new ways. The point is race is not a thing, but instead something that we do. It is a set of processes that we are all involved in every day.”

In a Feb. 23 lecture hosted by the Center for Race and Social Problems, Markus, director of Stanford’s Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and literary critic Paula M. L. Moya, a faculty member in Stanford’s English department, outlined eight common conversations about race they examine in their 2010 book, “Doing Race: 21 Essays for the 21st Century.”

The discussions contain powerful, often hidden assumptions about the importance, nature and meanings of race and ethnicity, Markus said. “These conversations are like stereotypes. We use them all the time without thinking about them, and what they do is recirculate narrow and flawed assumptions about race and identity.”

Most of the conversations dismiss race and ethnicity as legitimate topics for discussion, Moya added, arguing for a change in the conversation by drawing on decades of science and scholarship on the topics.

“We find that eight kinds of conversations tend to float free of the evidence,” she said. “But we actually know a lot about race and ethnicity and how they work and we find that is what is not reflected in the conversations,” she said.

“Race and ethnicity are social processes that all of us do. For that reason, we should be able to do them differently.”

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“We’re beyond race”

The colorblind notion that the only race is the human race, Markus said, “has a heartwarming sentiment, but it causes problems.”

Seeing all people as the same asserts a powerful belief in the ideal of racial equality. However, “We should not confuse that ideal with the reality,” she said.

“We are not beyond race,” Markus said, noting that race still affects many aspects of life, including, for example, a student’s chances of getting a college education in this country.

“Racial diversity is killing us”

Citing as an example Arizona’s recent passage of a law requiring police to ask for proof of citizenship from anyone they suspect might be in the country illegally, Moya said, “This conversation tends to be common among those who imagine themselves as the racial or ethnic gold standard of the United States.” Their goal is to stop people who differ from that standard from immigrating into the country, “or in the unfortunate event that they’re already here, to send them home,” she said.

Immigration is a hard problem, Markus admitted, adding that when such hot political topics are drawn into the diversity conversation, much of the public discussion focuses only on the difficulties.

“It ignores how immigration actually contributes to the economy, seeing it really only as a threat,” she said, adding that economic research shows that “states with a large influx of immigrants produce more, hire more and pay better wages.”

Between 1990 and 2007, Markus said, “immigration was associated with a 6-10 percent real increase in income per worker in those states. While it is true that specific school districts and hospitals struggle with the cost associated with serving immigrants, the increased economic activity overall generated by immigrant labor outweighs the cost of social and government services as a whole.”

In addition, immigrants stimulate investment and promote labor specialization, she said, adding that there is scant evidence that immigrants diminish the employment opportunities of U.S.-born workers. “This is not to say they don’t affect some sectors of the population more directly than others,” Markus said, clarifying that she isn’t denying that undocumented immigration is a problem, but that the conversations tend to focus on the people rather than the effect. “We’re not taking in all of the relevant information.”

The facts about increased economic stimulus of immigration rarely make it into discussions, Markus said. “The current framing of discussions about immigration thus prevents us from addressing its real challenges.”

“That’s just identity politics”

This conversation, Markus said, typically is a favorite of those in the white majority “who think that drawing attention to race is a strategy that’s used by minorities to gain admission to universities, fellowships, financial aid, jobs or promotions that they’re not entitled to. This conversation often expresses the frustration that those who ‘have’ a race or ethnicity are getting some kind of special privilege that will be denied to those that don’t have it.”

People who use this conversation tend to ask such things as ‘When is white history month?” or to argue that discussing race detracts from the real issue of social class, Markus said.

“These conversations are a way of taking race and ethnicity off the table and out of the conversation,” she said.

“Some non-whites might think that every month is white history month and actually it’s whites who are always playing the race card by arranging the world so they always get the best deal, so there are two ways of thinking about this conversation,” she noted.

Regardless, Markus said, “Our society is organized by race and ethnicity so everyone has a race and an ethnicity whether or not they recognize and claim it.” Such divisions affect attitudes, behavior, opportunities and how other people respond.

“Whether or not you decide to pay attention to your race and ethnicity, it is still having a powerful effect on you.”

“Race is in our DNA”

This argument, which has fueled discriminatory policies, is both one of the oldest and most current conversations: That race is an essential part of a person and can be found in the blood or genome. “Recent developments in biology and medicine have really reanimated this conversation,” Moya said, citing advertisements from companies that, for a price, will uncover a person’s ethnicity from a DNA swab.

While the technology is fun and interesting and can reveal significant information about human migration patterns, the tests also can reinforce the notion that race is a biological entity that resides somewhere inside people’s blood or body, as well as the misapprehension that it marks something significant about their character and/or capacities, she said.

It’s imperative that we recognize that race is not in our DNA, Moya said. “Who we are and who we become is never attributable to genes alone.” DNA tests merely uncover bio-geographical ancestry groups and don’t reveal the social aspects of race, she said. “Those two are not the same thing.”

Citing recent social psychology research, Markus said, “When race is understood as biological … there’s significantly less motivation to be friends with people of another race, as if somehow this idea that race is in our biology makes some distance between us and others that’s just too great to traverse. When race is understood as an ongoing social and historical construction, which in fact it is … there is more motivation to engage with others, to cross what seems, in some people’s minds, a divide.”

“Everyone’s a little bit racist”

“This conversation grows out of frustration or resentment with how to realistically negotiate a diverse multicultural society without offending someone at every juncture,” Moya said.

She said it’s evidenced when, after reacting to a racially insensitive remark someone is admonished, “Don’t be so sensitive.”

The concept that everyone is a bit racist is true in part, Markus said. “We’re all a little ethnocentric because we’re all part of this society. As a result of that we all carry with us negative racial associations.” But recognizing our ethnocentrism and implicit biases “should be the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it.”

“It’s a black thing —

You wouldn’t understand”

More common among people of color than among whites, “This slogan is a sound byte for a set of attributes and beliefs about how race works in U.S. society,” Markus said. The main idea is that as a result of one’s racial identity, one’s life is different in significant ways that can’t be understood adequately by outsiders.

“This conversation is often intended as a rebuke to non-black people who assume, maybe too quickly, that they could understand what it’s like to be black or that they could easily be accepted into a black community,” she said. “The problem here is, in fact, race and ethnicity do profoundly shape individual experience and people associated with different races often live in very different worlds.”

On the one hand an inter-ethnic conversation stopper, “at the same time, there’s something very right about this conversation that needs to be recognized,” she said, citing as an example the divergent responses to survey questions on racial issues.

When asked whether more changes are needed to give blacks equal rights with whites, 81 percent of black people agreed, compared to 36 percent of whites. Fifty-five percent of blacks agreed that racial discrimination is a very serious problem, compared to 17 percent of whites, and 33 percent of black people agreed that the standard of living gap between blacks and whites has grown over the past decade, compared to 16 percent of whites, she said.

While this conversation fails to acknowledge the degree to which people of different races are able to communicate with one another, Markus said that changing it must involve uncovering why people of different races have such different answers to these questions. “What is it about people’s experience that leads to these very divergent answers?”

While the first six conversations denote negative racial attitudes, two are more positive about race and ethnicity, Moya noted.

“Variety is the spice of life”

“People say, ‘I love ethnic food,’ or ‘I listen to ethnic music’ or ‘I buy ethnic jewelry,’ but of course since everyone is ethnic, all food, music and jewelry are ethnic at some level,” Moya said. “We don’t just differ in our taste for food or music or jewelry. We also differ in substantial ways — in how something matters to us, what matters to us, how we live our lives.”

Human diversity can be creative and constructive, “but that deep, rich understanding is not what we’re talking about in this conversation,” she said. “People who use this conversation tend to mark their appreciation in the way I said before — that everybody’s basically the same, they just have these superficial differences.”

The idea fails to address the very real diversity of social experience, Moya said, “diversity in ways of thinking, feeling, acting that often are associated with different races and ethnicities.

“Nor does this conversation register what scholars of race know: that there is the important role of power in assigning meaning to difference.”

Differences are not always superficial or fun, she said. “Racial differences can be quite consequential,” she said, citing statistics that show a disproportionate percentage of blacks and Hispanics in the prison system compared to their percentage of the nation’s population. One can conclude that blacks and Latinos are more criminal, or — as research data on arrests, policing and sentencing policies show — “that the current judicial system is unfair by design,” she said.

“I’m ___ and I’m proud”

Also more common among racial minorities, this conversation comes in many ethnic variants and represents a more positive view of race and ethnicity, Moya said. It has its historical roots in the 1960s and ’70s, when ethnic activists rejected what they viewed as assimilation by their forebears to demand recognition and respect for their particular racial and ethnic identity.

“What these activists did was to take previously denigrated identities that had been imposed on them by others — like black or Chicano — and claim them as positive. This very important conversation reflects the fact that race and ethnicity are not always perceived negatively. They are not only a source of prejudice and discrimination but also a source of pride, identity, motivation and belongingness,” she said.

Positive pride that implies nothing negative about others can be good, Moya said, but the conversation can reflect a racist form of ethnocentrism when, in claiming one’s own identity, others are put down. “In this society we all have to learn to navigate the very slippery slope between having pride in who we are on one hand, and denigrating those who are not like us on the other,” Moya said.

In conclusion, Markus said the eight basic conversations create problems because they dismiss race and ethnicity as legitimate topics, they fail to represent all the facts and existing research  and they convey negative and inaccurate information.

However, they represent the way that people currently discuss race and ethnicity. “If we’re going to do anything about it, they’ve got to be our necessary starting points for more productive conversations,” Markus said.

“What makes these conversations into barriers rather than bridges is that they all conceive of race and ethnicity as things people have or are,” she said. “It’s directly at odds with what has emerged from the last 40 years of scholarship on race and ethnicity, which understands race and ethnicity as social systems.”

Underlying any change in conversation is a broader understanding of what race and ethnicity are, Markus said.

“Race and ethnicity are not things inside people. A more accurate and more productive understanding of race and ethnicity is that they are ‘doings.’ It’s only when we begin as a society and a culture to understand that race and ethnicity are ‘doings’ and that we are all part of the social systems that are creating and maintaining the social distinctions of race and ethnicity that we’ll be able to change them.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow


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