A short video called “White Bred” is one of the “resources” the Urbandale School District shares on the Equity & Inclusion portion of its website. Check it out:
“I was 25 years old when someone told me that being white had shaped my life and my thinking, and I said ‘No, no, no. I was raised to be colorblind. I don’t think about race,'” the narrator says at the beginning. “And it was years before I began to understand that it’s exactly that experience of not needing to pay attention to race. It shaped me.”
Then a guy defines whiteness as assimilation to dominant white culture, which is a social construct.
“You know, I think people forget that when ethnic European immigrants started to come to this country in large numbers, they were not seen as white people,” he said. “There was incredible derogatory language that was used to describe them and they were excluded and they were persecuted.”
Those who came from Europe had “white enough skin” to find a “pathway” off of that persecution, he adds.
“Which is a door that’s never been open for people of color.”
Someone else notes that most of the power systems within America are still white-led, which means “white people with white norms that get to decide what is correct or incorrect.”
“And that is white supremacy,” she said. “It’s not of the same conscious orientation of white people are better and therefore people of color need to be excluded or bad. It may not be consciously that way, but that ends up being the result anyway.”
We’re told the guy wants “collective liberation.” He wants to see people of color to be free from a white supremacist system, but he also wants white people liberated from that system.
You can watch it below:
