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25 Section 1 Toward a White Discourse on White Racism James Joseph Scheurich We are deeply concerned about the increasing incidence of racial and ethnic tensions in our country and the lack of focused attention being paid to this issue (U.S. Civil Rights Commission, quoted in “Civil Rights,” 1991). My intention in this essay is to “talk” as a white academic with other white academics about racism. In my opinion, this is an unusual kind of effort. There is a considerable amount of work by people by color1 that addresses racism and its numerous collateral topics, such as equity, multiculturalism, and af¤rmative action policies. There is also work by whites that addresses these same issues. I have read extensively in both of these domains, but what I have not found are efforts by white academics to talk among ourselves about our own racism, even though prominent academics of color, such as hooks (1990) and Spivak (1988), have repeatedly said that one of the most important efforts white people could undertake to address racism would be to examine self-re¶ectively how white racism works. Few educators will disagree that racism is one of the major social problems in this country. DuBois, perhaps the most widely and deeply respected AfricanAmerican intellectual (West, 1989, p. 138), in his seminal work The Souls of the Black Folks (1903/1989), concluded that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” (p. 29) and that “the white man, as well as the Negro , is bound and barred by the color-line” (p. 129). Unfortunately, Dubois’s conclusion continues to be as accurate at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning. For example, Pine and Hilliard (1990) recently wrote: Every time we are almost convinced that the nation is rising above the muck of racism, there are reminders of how little headway we have made—even at eliminating the most vulgar and conspicuous manifestations of the disease. Blatant, crude, egregious, and overt racism has come out of the closet again and into our schools. (Pine & Hilliard, 1990, p. 593). The recent candidacy of David Duke for governor in Louisiana, the Clarence 26 James Joseph Scheurich Thomas hearings, and the numerous episodes of racism on university campuses and in our neighborhoods and schools are but a few examples of the continuing hold that racism has on our society. The Issue of Racism in the Academy In over 20 years of experience with the academy, I have known very few white professors in education who would disagree that racism continues to be a deep and serious social problem. All of those with whom I have become familiar were against racism. Many of them even became visibly saddened when the topic was raised, as if they had just been reminded of an ongoing tragedy they had temporarily forgotten. This picture of the white professorate, though, is not meant to dispute contentions by people of color and by some whites that the academy is racially biased. In fact, I have had African-American friends who provided speci¤cs of racist behavior by the very same white faculty who had expressed anti-racist sentiments to me. Even more importantly, I have had African-American friends point out my own racist thoughts and behaviors. So I do not mean to give the impression that white faculty’s opposition to racism means that they are not racist or that my own opposition to racism means that I am not racist. In fact, it is this contradiction between the conscious anti-racism of white faculty, on the one hand, and the judgment of some people of color, on the other, that the academy is racist that is the central issue of this essay.2 This contradiction creates a confusing and dif¤cult dilemma. One side of this dilemma, the conscious anti-racism of white faculty, is founded solely on my own experience and my judgments of that experience. It is not based on a random sample of respondents to a survey, nor is it based on conclusions drawn from an experiment. It is founded only on my interactions with my own colleagues. Yet I feel reasonably con¤dent that a high percentage of white faculty, even under conditions that would erase social desirability response effects, would judge that they themselves do not support racism and are, for the most part, not racist. I would even go so far as to say that...

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