What Is Internalized Racism

As children, we are taught about racism and physical differences that make us diverse; however, have we genuinely grasped the concept of how we are not different? Outside we may look different, but what is inside has no discrepancies. Coincedently, this belief adds on to what goes on in people's minds. Two reasons; internalized racism and internalized white supremacy. M;l.,m/any people get confused and mix these two reasons and their meanings up. People seem to think that the internalized racism is correlated with whites and the internalized white supremacy is correlated with African Americans. This has become the result of our school systems failures. In this day in age, many people need to understand the differences between these two terms.

Like I said before, there is a lot of internalized white supremacy in the world. One of the biggest pieces of evidence is these settings. Front stage is when someone's behavior reflects society's norm and follows expectations of the behavior. Frontstage behavior is a routine. It is how we talk or go on with our daily lives. An example would be talking to someone about what you did over the weekend. This setting hides what we truly feel. This is not what we believe. Our true beliefs cannot be shown in frontstage settings because it may cause conflict and you could get in trouble. This is where backstage settings come in. Backstage behavior is where whites with bad feelings towards different ethnicities can show their beliefs to close acquaintances without getting in trouble. Many turn towards name calling, racial humor, and stereotypes. They feel safe to express their feeling even though they know it could hurt someone if they heard it.

In “Theories and Constructs of Race”, Linda Holtzman and Leon Sharpe have defined internalized racism as “the process by which people of color take in negative messages of overt and covert racism, superiority, and inferiority, and apply those messages to themselves and others in ways that are self-destructive rather than self-affirming” (600). The main cause of this is not by any physical violence, but the psychological violence that is portrayed through racist meanings and

One being in our school system. Throughout history schools have sugar coated what is right and what is wrong. Many children do not get told that what they are saying could be offensive and the child continues to say it. From a firm belief, schools should train their staff or have programs that teach how to tell children about the racism problem happening around them. Schools also only focus on the large facts that some children might not understand. The information that is going into a child's brain should be told at their education level, because then the child will remember it better. Teachers should not focus on the large idea, but focus on the small ideas that have formed the large one. Take for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. Telling children just that he was a civil rights leader who was assassinated is not doing anything for the child’s knowledge. Instead a teacher should go more in depth of what he was fighting for, his background, and how exactly he made his mark on the world. Another reason schools should inform children better is because, as I said before, bullying. Millions of students are bullied, whether it be how they look, how they talk, or their ethnicities. Schools should have a more hand on approach with bullying so that children can understand that what they are doing is wrong. Now any approach of changing the schools is not going to fix problems right away. But if we start and make a little