How Racism Gets Started and Doesn’t Stop

This infographic is my attempt to simplify how racist ideas get started and then become embedded in culture. They work to justify injustices such as slavery or mass incarceration and to support White dominance. The ideas here came from Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning and Robin Diangelo’s White Fragility.

Racism is a social construct, which means that ideas about Black inferiority and White dominance are not rooted in empirical fact or measurement, but as part of a society’s conversation conventions and internal story-telling.

Kendi, a historian, has shown that racist ideas tend to follow situations where one group exploits another. These ideas are usually cooked up by society’s intellectuals and then are passed among themselves and down through successive generations.

A vivid example is the writings of 15th century Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara. Zurara was Henry the Navigator’s nephew and he wrote about his uncle’s sailing adventures. When Henry began exploring the western coast of Africa he was seeking gold, suppressing pirates, and seeking the legendary kingdom of Prester John. He didn’t find gold but he did sail home to Portugal with a number of captive Africans who later became slaves.

Zurara, who was never an eye-witness to his uncle’s exploits, recorded his uncle’s adventures in fantastic narratives. Ironically, Zurara envisioned the African coast in fantastic mythic imagery. He described the African peoples in lurid prose projecting upon them vivid degrees of barbarism and backwardness.

This written description, though unpublished, circulated and imprinted itself on the imaginations of Europeans who took Zurara’s descriptions as accurate.

The enslavement of African-descent peoples received an endorsement from the notion that African’s were a class of people uniquely deserving to be chained and forced to work.

This pattern has repeated itself and is still subtly active. As a social construct, racist ideas are repeated, believed, handed down, and supply justification for the continual oppression of dark skinned peoples, despite the fact that these ideas are completely free of evidence that would warrant their existence.

Robin Diangelo, a diversity trainer, academic, and consultant helps her clients become aware of how the racist ideas continue to influence attitudes and social roles even though most whites want to think that they have long ago gottten rid of mean-spirited dislike of people of color.

Diangelo’s main teaching is that racism exists today as a unconscious socially-held assumption rather than as a character flaw which resides in individuals. Though Whites benefit by living in a society that finds ways to exclude Blacks jobs, capital, and positions of leadership, they are loathe to admit that they cooperate with the racism that has benefited them.

The best way for Whites to come to grips with how we continue unconsciously to prop up White privilege, is to be confronted by a Black friend who we have offended by a remark or assumption we’ve held that that works as a put-down. “White fragility” is Diangelo’s term, which she uses to describe White indignation or embarrassment when we are caught unknowingly supporting the society’s racist status quo.

Diangelo defines success as the situation where a White person is perpetually working on his or her self in the humble quest to disconnect from prevailing White racist assumptions.