I Was Called Racist in School Because I said....

The "survey" listed above requires me to select an answer and then only offers an insulting response if you want to disagree, as I do. In other words, my response to the question of whether you are right or not is No, but not because of any mental deficiency, unless ignorance of the way history, social life, and the creation of ideology functions is a deficiency.

You are wrong because your response to the classroom discussion was to deny the importance and impact of history on how people are situated and act in the present moment. In NO other context - not in psychology, science, religion, etc... - Nowhere else in life do people pretend as if the past has no effect on the present except with regards to Black people in America. Everywhere else in life people know that what has come before effects what is happening now, whether its a scientific experiment/evolution, Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, people abused when young children ending up a mess, or the Grand Canyon created by the shifting of tectonic plates and the erosion by water.

Additionally you are wrong because ideas take a long time to develop and become a part of the way we think. 'American As Apple Pie' didn't become a part of our national catchphrases overnight, and neither did our thoughts about different races. And just as food coloring may disperse throughout a large amount of water and be only slightly seen but still the chemicals are in there, so too a lot of ideas do not require people to "focus" on them to still be circulated through culture and still have an effect.

Why do I say all this? Because history DOES matter. There are problems with how and why we categorize some people as attractive and some people as unattractive, and those reasons are the result of a history of colonization and violence that resulted in one standard of beauty as being acceptable and good. And its not the fault of people who are oppressed by the ideas in society that say they are unattractive for being oppressed. If you tell anyone something over and over again in a million different ways, they will be influenced by it - just like women all thinking they need to weight two pounds to be pretty.

Expecting the little Black girl in The Bluest Eye to "figure out her issues" as you commanded she do in your class is like expecting the entire flow of history to no longer flow simply because you command it to. Change does not happen that way in any system whether its chemical reactions catalyzed in laboratories or the movement of glaciers down the sides of mountains or how our social world effects how people feel about themselves.