Napa wine train and spatial racism [View all]

[gollygee]

I think the Napa train incident is an example of spatial racism. Many white people expect some places and experiences to be completely white. I think a $125 minimum wine train through Napa would be a place where white people might assume they'd only, or at least almost only, encounter other white people. Segregation doesn't just happen in housing, schools, and public space. There are ways, some subtle and some not subtle, to make private spaces more segregated as well. My opinion is that this was an attempt to make this private space more segregated.

There's another racist issue on top of this. I think that many white people become anxious around people of color who are displaying emotion. I need to think that part of it through. If anyone has any articles about that element of racism, I'd appreciate reading them.

Anyway, I'm going to put up a couple of articles about spatial racism. I'm not sure why, but I'm unable to copy and paste from the first article. The second article is from a Catholic perspective, so there is religious talk, but it's a very good article regardless.

http://racism.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=397:whiteness15a&catid=69&Itemid=165

http://www.loyno.edu/jsri/race-racism-and-whiteness

White Americans tend not to be aware of the chasm of spatial racism that Cardinal Francis George addresses in Dwell in My Love. If they are aware of it, whites tend to view the chasm as natural and normal. The problem, of course, is that there is nothing natural and normal about white physical, social, and moral separation from people of color. The problem of this chasm is that it has been created by, and contributes to, the inability of whites to understand or feel compassion for people of color, much less practice the solidarity called for by the Church. This inability is termed “social alexithymia” by social scientists. This “white frame of mind” has difficulty understanding where people of color are coming from and what the racialized experiences of people of color are like. Most simply put, social alexithymia is the “significant lack of cross-racial empathy.”[34]

Lack of cross-racial empathy becomes apparent in the everyday assumptions by which whites live.[35] White “folk theory” or common sense knowledge takes things for granted as the way things are. Three key assumptions are held by white common sense thinking on race. First, white folk theory holds races to be biologically valid. This assumption persists, even though biological anthropologists and geneticists long ago demonstrated that there is only one race, the human race. An example of how this nonscientific, white common sense assumption persists is found in the argument that racial intermarriage will erase racial difference and conflict. In other words, the common sense assumption advances a genetic solution to a non-genetic, social construction.

This erroneous biological view also persists in the “one drop rule,” which held that any trace of African ancestry made a person African American. Whites enforced the “one drop rule” during the Jim Crow period between 1865 and 1965 to prevent interracial marriage and to segregate whites from blacks legally, politically, educationally, and culturally. This “one drop rule” assumption can be seen in the way that Barack Obama was described as the “only black in the U.S. Senate” and the “first African American” president even though he describes himself as the son a white, Kansas mother and a Kenyan father.

A second assumption of white folk theory holds that racism is entirely a matter of individual belief and that the ignorance of this individual view can be corrected by education. This view is commonly communicated in blog or newspaper opinion pieces that rightfully desire an end to racism and decry the use of racial epithets. While the anti-racist intention is good, the commonly proposed solution of educating individuals who are ignorant is completely inadequate to the task of addressing the institutional and systemic racist practices. Moreover, this individualist assumption fails to attend to the way that U.S. culture cultivates white folk theory of race.