The Torahs Strange Cure for Snakebite: A parable for confronting our own biases

The snake that bites:When,on Wednesdaynight, a 21-year-old white man named Dylann [sic] Roof entered the Charleston church founded by former slave Denmark Vesey on the anniversary of Veseys planned 1822 slave rebellion and shot and killed nine people, he provided the United States with the latest installment of a history lesson we adamantly refuse to learn: that our racist past is not past. It is present. It is unending. It is, in many ways that we seem congenitally unable to acknowledge, fundamentally unchanged. . . .

As Jelani Cobb (contributing editor to the New Yorker) wrote on Wednesday, recent incidents can seem like gruesome boomerangs of history until we consider the more terrible idea that they are simple reflections of the present.

Its not just a terrible idea, it is a terrible reality. The cold reality of our country right now. We are not post-civil rights. We are not post race. We are not better than we were. We do not inhabit a world in which stray instances of violence might recall a distant and shameful history. This shame is a flood that has never abated. (Written by Rebecca Traister, Senior editor at The New Republic)

A Definition of RacismRacism is a doctrine or teaching, without scientific support, that does three things. First, it claims to find racial differences in things like character and intelligence. Second, racism asserts the superiority of one race over another or others. Finally, it seeks to maintain that dominance through a complex system of beliefs, behaviors, use of language and policies. Racism ranges from the individual to the institutional level and reflects and enforces a pervasive view, in white dominated U.S. culture that people of color are inferior to whites. [endnoteRef:1] [1: http://www.tolerance.org/article/racism-and-white-privilege]

1. Take a minute to think of a time when you made a general remark about character, intelligence, or the cultural or ethnic qualities of a particular race or ethnic group or were surprised by the articulateness of a person of color.

2. In what ways does your skin color provide advantages to you? (Have you ever been confused for a custodian, busboy, or pulled over by the police for a minor fix-it violation?)

3. Take a minute to think of the institutionalized systems in American society that perpetuate racial disparities in this country. Can you list them? a) Some examples to get you thinking: the faces on a currency are white males, the numbers of Black people living in your neighborhood, someone you know who was treated for a drug addiction vs. imprisoned, the quality of the public schools in your neighborhood vs. those in minority neighborhoods, the minorities of color in your childrens schools (at all levels), the Confederate Flag flying in South Carolina