Module 5: Anti-Black Racism (Part 2)

Definitions by Michael J. Halloran

Cultural Trauma

• “A condition or syndrome that occurs when a collective has been subject to an unbearable event or experience that undermines their sense of group identity, values, meaning and purpose, or their cultural worldviews.”

Terror Management Theory (TMT)

• “The psychological importance of cultural worldviews…[they] provide people with a sense of meaning and value; thereby assuaging existential anxiety.”

“…racism is ordinary and normal in contemporary society, indeed perhaps integral to social practices and institutions. Critical race theory can thus be understood as a study of ‘hegemony’: how domination can persist without coercion. It can also be understood as a study of collective denial.” - Angela P. Harris

“Challenges ahistoricism by stressing the need to understand racism within its social, economic, and historical context.” “Particular emphasis on the experiential knowledge of people of color and challenge common assumptions about ‘meritocracy’ and ‘neutrality’ as camouflage for the interests of dominant groups.” - David Gillborn

“White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.”

- White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo

Four major themes (Patricia Hill Collins)

1. Black women “empower themselves” to create and establish positive representations of Black women; exercise “epistemic agency in the face of epistemic oppression.”
2. Deconstruction of “domination in terms of race, class, and gender oppression,” intersectionality is key.
3. Praxis: intellectual thought and political activism; “you empower yourself when your particular freedom struggle is part of a broader social justice project.”
4. Black women have a “distinct cultural heritage that gives them the energy and skills to resist and transform daily discrimination.”

• Geographic spaces provide historical and cultural “anchors” and that one’s Black identity is “embedded in the person and how racism, sexism, homophobia and classism are experienced.”
• Black Canadian Feminist Thought is rooted in historical context; lived and shared experience; and the heterogeneity of Black people in Canada.

  • “The complexity of this phenomenon is the heterogeneity of these voices that resonate their diasporic origin.”

  • “Blackness should therefore not be collapsed into ‘race.,’ but should be examined in relation to Black people’s indigenous knowledge, philosophies and epistemologies.”

• A theory that is based on deconstructing colonial ways of knowing.

- Njoki Nathani Wane

• “You’ve got to show that the kind of discrimination people have conceptualised is limited because they stop their thinking when the discrimination encounters another kind of discrimination,” “I wanted to come up with a common everyday metaphor that people could use to say: “it’s well and good for me to understand the kind of discriminations that occur along this avenue, along this axis - but what happens when it flows into another axis, another avenue?”
• “Intersectionality is a concept that enables us to recognize the fact that perceived group membership can make people vulnerable to various forms of bias, yet because we are simultaneously members of many groups, our complex identities can shape the specific way we each experience that bias.”
• “For example, men and women can often experience racism differently, just as women of different races can experience sexism differently, and so on.”
• “As a result, an intersectional approach goes beyond conventional analysis in order to focus our attention on injuries that we otherwise might not recognize . . . to 1) analyze social problems more fully; 2) shape more effective interventions; and 3) promote more inclusive coalitional advocacy.”

- Kimberle Crenshaw

• “How multiple forms of inequality and identity inter-relate in different contexts and over time, for example, the inter-connectedness of race, class, gender, disability,”

- David Gillborn

“When a powerful oppressor has directed oppression against a group for a  period of time, members  of the oppressed group feel powerless to fight back and they eventually turn  their anger against  each other.”

- Jane Middelton-Moz