Reflection Precis 3: The Invisibility Of Racism

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Reflection Precis 3, The Invisibility of Racism (February 27-March 1, 2018) 108788 Part I: In these two lecture sessions, Dr. Jendian talked about the invisibility of racism in the United States and how we have not been trained to recognize racism. To give an example of this, Dr. Jendian showed us a few minutes of the movie Dumbo. Although this movie seems to be innocent, it shows racism against black people. For example, the people who are putting the tents are black people, and they do not have a face. The song that the “workers” are singing, only has racist phrases such as “harry apes.” On the other hand, textbooks also hide facts about the United States history. According to Loewen, the authors write how slavery affected African Americans; however, they minimize white complicity in this cruelty. For example, Loewen (146) explains that, “[Textbooks] they present slavery virtually as uncaused, a tragedy, rather than a wrong perpetrated by some people on others.” In fact, Dr. Jendian and Dr. Cornel West explained that textbooks try to justify and not recognize that slavery was a crime against humanity. For example, Loewen mentions that nine of eighteen books do list racism, racial discrimination, or race prejudice in their indexes. However, Dr. Jendian explained that in several books these concepts never appear in their text. As Loewen explains, we have molded our concepts on African Americans to justify our actions. Inclusively, Dr. Cornel West explains