12 What is racism?

“A belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”The origins of white supremacy and racism are linked to projects of colonization, imperialism, and capitalism, where Eurocentric efforts to expand white ruling and sovereignty across physical spaces were informed by naturalist claims of white superiority. For example, Johann Blumenbach, an 18th century German physician and anthropologist, devised a “racial hierarchy” on a pyramid that placed “Caucasians” at the top, where he claimed that “other” races were “degenerative” from the pinnacle white standard of God’s creation. Other prominent white figures in history, including Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Morton, furthered this rhetoric by making violent claims about the inferiority of racialized persons on the basis of unethical, faulty, and false “science.”

Here, we see racism as inherently linked to projects of eugenics (which refers to Francis Galton’s theorizing around breeding and reproducing “good genes” in an attempt to create an “ideal” white, able-bodied society), colonialism, imperialism, and indentureship, where racialized persons have been violated, oppressed, marginalized, violently displaced, abducted, murdered, tortured, and forced into violent practices of white supremacy (e.g. genocidal institutions, slavery, etc.) based on claims that race is a “science” or a product of inherent, biological differences. However, ongoing work from racialized scholars, activists, theorizers, scientists, and their allies have disproven these claims and pointed to the ways in which race is a social construct. For example, research from Richard Lewontin, a geneticist from the 1970s, indicates that 85% of human variation can be found within any local population, meaning that the human species is much more similar than we appear. In other words, perceived differences on the basis of race are informed by social construction, not by biological difference.

Although race is a social construct, the impacts of racism are real, tangible, historical, and ongoing. Beliefs about white superiority continue to govern social institutions, structures, and spaces that we work and live within as they are built on foundations of white supremacy and racism. For example, many common practices in our western educational upbringing, including standardized testing, “IQ,” what counts as “real” or “reliable” knowledge, and the ways in which learning is facilitated (e.g. in classroom structure and lecture formats), were built on beliefs about naturalized intelligence, whiteness, and Eurocentric epistemologies. Here, racism extends beyond “belief” into material actions and ideologies that continue to shape our contemporary experiences.

While there are numerous definitions and attempts to visually represent racism and its various levels, it is important to note that these understandings are dynamic, contextual, and evolving. Race, itself, is a social construct that was historically designed to justify practices of white supremacy and in an attempt to depict white people as inherently superior to Black, Indigenous, and racialized persons. While race is a social construct, we must also recognize that it maintains tangible and material implications for how people are able to move and gain access to a multitude of rights, privileges, liberties, spaces, and places, which is due to the centralization, protection, and power of whiteness

How Whiteness Operates

Part of what makes whiteness so difficult to identify, name, and challenge within academia is its ability to remain invisible to white educators, practitioners, and students, thus permeating physical and intellectual spaces and utilizing its normative structure to protect itself from redress. Yee and Dumbrill (2003) refer to these dynamics as:

1. exnomination, or the ability of whiteness to go unnamed,
2. naturalization, or the ability of whiteness to name the ‘Other’ and not itself, and
3. universalization, or the ability of whiteness to ingrain a western, Eurocentric understanding of a given problem as the only true perspective.

In predominantly white institutions (PWIs), where the majority of faculty, instructors, senior administrators, and – in some cases – students are white, where the curriculum is structured and approved by other PWIs, and where the majority of course content is authored by white academics, whiteness becomes further entrenched, thus leading to “colour-blind,” spatial and curricular walls protecting and reinforcing a pedagogy of whiteness. Here, while white folks can see themselves represented in curriculum, many racialized students cannot.

Pyramid of White Supremacy

While it can be difficult to recognize and understand, racism can be perpetrated intentionally and unintentionally and can appear in both explicit, identifiable ways and implicit, invisible ways. The Equality Institute’s Pyramid of White Supremacy attempts to depict the ways in which the normalization of racism can actively facilitate and justify white supremacist violence in its most extreme forms.