Seeing White Podcast - "That's Not Us"
S2, Ep6
We recently listened to several episodes of "Seeing White." It is not a project by African descended women but its goals impact our work. Because "thinking about race" is often a necessity for people of color, the ability to interrogate the way racial hierarchies are determined, function and are empowered is often central in the work of scholarship by people of color in various disciplines including the study of religion.
What happens when people who are socialized as "White" are able to provide reflective and thoughtful insights into the way race functions in western societies? Can these contributions become an asset to the overall discourse? We include a study guide summary from the website for this podcast and a hyper link.
We will periodically share other episodes which can provide greater insight into race as a social category of performativity meaning, how "Whiteness" shows up, performs and is evaluated in various situations.
How does this impact our understanding of God and of our religious standards? We liked this episode, "That's Not Us, So We're Clean." This episode evaluates the statement that "it's not us" when people of color speak about oppression.
What does it mean to feel the weight or burden of sins you didn't actually commit? How can you sit with those who say that you are culpable - and what they raise questions that you've never before considered? Do you have the courage to sit with that discomfort and learn?
We hope you will find this both fascinating and informative. Please read below.
The Misogynoir to Mishpat (M2M) Research Network (c) 2023
On one level, it seems Americans talk about race and ethnicity all the time. The news media always seem to be reacting to the latest racial “incident,” while pundits ponder “race relations” year in and year out. And yet. The premise of this series is that the American conversation about race, and the stories we tell ourselves about race and ethnicity, are deeply incomplete and often misleading. We need new stories and new understandings, about our history and our current racial and ethnic reality.
Host and producer John Biewen set out to take a different kind of look at race and ethnicity, by looking directly at the elephant in the room: white people, and whiteness. White supremacy was encoded in the DNA of the United States, and white people dominate American life and its institutions to this day, and yet whiteness too often remains invisible, unmarked, and unnamed.
In embarking on this journey into whiteness, past and present, Biewen sought guidance from an array of leading scholars, and from professor, journalist, artist, and organizer Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika.
A caution: Race and racism are sensitive subjects, as we all know. It’s important to create an environment of safety in your classroom or discussion group. Our advice is to say something like this:
The subject of whiteness is potentially uncomfortable for people of any race or ethnicity. People of color may react to the topic of whiteness by thinking: Really? We live in a world dominated and controlled by white people. Whiteness is our often-uncomfortable reality. Do we have to have a discussion about whiteness? For folks feeling that way, please understand: This is not about celebrating whiteness. We’re here to take a critical look at whiteness and how it functions in the life of our society, how it affects us all. Because it does, and we usually don’t talk about it directly.
White people, on the other hand, may react with unease: Am I about to be attacked? Is the point of this discussion that all white people are bad? To those people we can say: The point is not to attack every individual of European descent. None of us chose our “race,” nor did we create the society that we were all born into. In this class or discussion group, we’re in this together, trying to understand how we all got here. A conclusion of the Seeing White series is that white people must own and take responsibility for the advantages that come with whiteness, but that is not the same as saying that you as a white person are to blame and need to feel ashamed.