Reflective Essay On Systemic Racism

My journey so far in the class of racism and oppression has been eye opening and this is not only my perception. The first part of my recording is the greatest evidence of how far I have come along in this class. When I listened to the recording I was completely astonished at how lost I was. With every question there was a silence of about a minute, which actually seemed like 10, where it was evident that I was thinking of an answer for the question or of how to answer the question. Likewise, I had a difficult time appropriately defining terms like bigotry, white privilege, and institutional racism, just to name a few. I have to admit that there were quite a few questions that I was not able to answer. When it came to the ones that I answered I would definitely change some of them …show more content…
In one of the Courageous Conversations my understanding of racism was challenged because now I was not to see it as based on individual’s point of view but an issue stemming from society, it was systemic. Peggy McIntosh (1989) wrote a paragraph that aided me in my attempt to understand systemic racism which read as follows: “I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitudes. [But] a “white” skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate, but cannot end, these problems” (p. 5). This was the most important and eye opening truth about racism that I was taking away; if the systems do not change their way of operating based on the white dominance racism will not be abolished. In my recording my understanding of racism came from an individual standpoint; I thought that every person had the choice to be racist or not. However, now I understand how racism is much more complex, to a certain point inherent, and sometimes part of unconscious