2 Race & Ethnicity
Activities
Discussion Prompt: Race Preference Test
Go to Harvard’s Project Implicit website. (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) Take the Race or Skin-Tone IAT. Next, read this article from the Washington Post about the assessment and patterns in scores across the United States.
What were your IAT results? Were you surprised? How did this make you feel? Do you think it is an accurate assessment of your racial preferences? Provide some examples from your background that you think either support or negate your score. How do you score in comparison to others in Georgia? Overall, what are your impressions of this assessment?
*Note that preferences are just that, preferences, and not a summation of personal prejudice.
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Discussion Prompt: White Privilege Response
For this module, you should have read both Beverly Tatum’s article, ‘Defining Racism’, and Peggy MacIntosh’s, ‘White Privilege’. You should also have listened to the ‘This American Life’ episode, “512: House Rules”, and completed the Privilege Scavenger Hunt.
Post the top three things you think you have learned from your exploration of privilege. Which aspects of privilege stood out the most to you from the different manifestations you have discovered? What can you do to help reverse some of these inequalities moving forward?
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Written Response: Reflection Paper Topics
Go to Harvard’s Project Implicit website. (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/) Take the Race or Skin-Tone IAT. Next, read this article from the Washington Post about the assessment and patterns in scores across the United States.
What were your IAT results? Were you surprised? How did this make you feel? Do you think it is an accurate assessment of your racial preferences? Provide some examples from your background that you think either support or negate your score. How do you score in comparison to others in Georgia? Overall, what are your impressions of this assessment?
*Note that preferences are just that, preferences, and not a summation of personal prejudice.
External Readings & Resources
‘Defining Racism’ – Chapter 1 in Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
Beverly Tatum uses this chapter to redefine racism in the context of institutionalized racism and privilege. While somewhat extreme, her writing is important as it calls attention to many of the institutionalized policies and procedures that are beneficial to whites in dominant culture.
Tatum, B. D. (1997). ‘Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?’. New York, NY, US: Basic Books.
McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, 49(2), 31.
One of the key ideas to this module and the course is privilege. In this piece, Peggy Macintosh lists different privileges she feels she receives that many other white people in the United States may not see or notice. Part of the idea of privilege is that those who have it are blind to it, and this piece helps to illuminate examples of white privilege.
