Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria Summary

In the first chapter of Beverly Tatum’s, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”, And Other Conversations About Race, the author immediately clarifies that racism is not a thing of the past. People in today’s society are merely raised with racial concepts at such a young age that they do not realize the injustice going on around them. She reinforces her statement by showing an example of a group of preschoolers who were told to draw a picture of a Native American. Most of the children didn’t even know what a Native American was, but after being told to draw an Indian, complied. Recurring elements in all of their drawings were feathers, along with a violent weapon, such as a knife. The reason for this depiction is because of the Peter Pan film, an example of how the media has a say in racial situations and how people of color are portrayed.

The first, was the term White privilege. This term is used often in the media, and while I knew what it meant, I wasn’t able to understand it until the author fully explained not only the definition of it, but also the impact it has. The term, reverse racism, is also used a lot in the media, but there’s a lot of controversy behind it. The author’s explanation that people of color can’t be racist, only prejudiced, sounds similar to ideas the Black Lives Matter campaign try to convey to Americans. Tatum’s analogies were very efficient with helping to convey some of her ideas, such as the example about cultural racism being compared to smog in the air. Another example that comes to mind is the conveyor belt analogy about passive and active racism. Active racism is walking fast with the conveyer belt, while passive racism is just standing on the conveyor belt and letting it move you. Tatum does a brilliant job in exposing the distortions media creates, like the example of the preschool children drawing a Native