RACISM – DEFINITIONS AND TERMINOLOGY
March 7, 2009
Prepared by Marian (Meck) Groot

I don’t know how much time you’ve had since Tuesday night to consider how you would define the words

* race
* racism
* culture
* ethnicity
* multiculturalism
* interculturalism
* whiteness
* blackness
* Eurocentrism
* ethnocentrism
* ethnorelativism
* American

but I’m wondering how that’s going for you. I mentioned on Tuesday that it feels important that you know what you mean by the terms so sorting that out promotes healthy conversation about race. I also said that it isn’t so important that we all agree on definitions – but for the sake of conversation it is important that we know the range of means that are out there. Our conversation about the word racist bears out how emotionally charged this can be for us.

I also promised then that I would point you to a sampling of the range of definitions that are out there, and while I don’t have an easy way to do that for all of them, here are a couple of links that make it easy for the first two words on the list. Please click on the links that go with each and have a look at what comes up for each:

* race
* racism

Both of these links point to a website for an organization called “Center for the Study of White American Culture,” an organization founded to “de-center” white culture which is one approach among many intended to promote racial equality. You might want to poke around the site (even though it does not seem to be maintained much currently) to find other gems. I noticed, for example, on one of the home page links there is an interesting quote by Toni Morrison on the far right in which she summarizes how perspectives on blackness and whiteness are held in the literary imagination of white US writers.

For more responses to the question, go to “What is Whiteness?” Scroll about half way down the article and you will find a gray box with three quotes from different writers on the subject. While you might not have time to read the entire article, you might want to check out some of the paragraphs in the vicinity of the gray box, too. For example, definitions given by Patti De Rosa are just to the left of the box. Scroll around. See what you see.

For an interesting exploration on “blackness,” check out this audio commentary with George Cook host of the show “Let’s Talk Honestly” in which he asks both: What is blackness? and Who gets to decide what blackness is?

That’s a lot for one day. I’ll leave it at that for now…We’ll continuing exploring terminology and definitions as we go.