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March 01, 2005
Letter to the Editor: The Golden Rule is a nice idea, but it fails in practice to fight racism and white privilege
I read with interest Jenna Witt’s letter in last week’s Oracle about her belief that the Golden Rule is the best route to achieving equal opportunity for people of all races. I must admit that I’m a big fan of the Golden Rule; I try to live by it and try to instill it in my daughters. To argue as Jenna does, however, that race should not matter in hiring new professors or in white people’s daily actions toward others is to deny that race has almost always mattered in this country’s history.
If we pay attention to the past, we see that white people have a history of unąGolden Rule like behavior č from forcibly taking Africans from their homes and brutally subjecting them to slavery to corralling Native Americans onto desolate lands and forbidding the practice of their sacred rituals. These legacies (and many others) perpetuated by whites against people of color seem the very antithesis of the Golden Rule; they did unto others as they would never do unto themselves.
A common response to our racist histories is to acknowledge that some horrible racist acts did happen during this country’s history, but these wrongs have been righted through laws and changes of heart. The past is the past, dead and buried.
I’m not so sure. If racism exists no more, why aren’t minority groups in this country č and at this university č adequately represented in positions of power? If we have a level playing field for all races, why are people of color much more highly represented among the impoverished and those in prison than their percentage of the population?
Many scholars argue that white people have unearned privilege in our society and within many of our institutions (such as institutions of higher education) because societal and institutional structures were created primarily by whites. Is it an accident that the vast majority of people in power at Hamline (myself included) are white? When we take an historical view, I would argue that it’s not accidental at all.
In Jenna’s letter, she argues that if white people are called upon to become more aware of our whiteness
and to move outside our comfort zones that we could become victims of reverse racism. While individuals of any color can have particular biases and prejudices toward people not like themselves, the enactment of racism against whites would require not only the support of structures that work against whites, but also widespread support of such structures by people of color who are in power over whites.
At Hamline, and frankly in most aspects of our society, I see no such structure or no such critical mass of people of color to enact such racism. Therefore, I find accusations of reverse racism hard to accept. While the Golden Rule is a great motto to put into practice, I’m skeptical of its effectiveness to alleviate or overcome white privilege either within or outside of Hamline’s walls.
Instead, I argue that in committing ourselves at Hamline to making the diversity vision a reality rather than just a dream, particularly we whites at Hamline need to work diligently at exposing and remedying the ways in which white privilege still exists and flourishes in our classrooms, residential halls, and administrative offices. Unaccompanied by institutional change, this motto is greatly limited in its effectiveness and power.
Deanna Thompson
Department of Religion, CLA
Posted by msveum at March 1, 2005 07:32 PM
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