Posted By Nicki Leone,
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Updated: Sunday, May 5, 2024
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DAY 10: Internalized Racism
 "But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, White privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this." - Ta-Nehisi Coates
Of the four levels of racism (internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic – for a summary of these check out this link), internalized can be the hardest to see and is often the hardest to talk about. And yet for healing to happen, what is otherwise unseen must be named. Internalized racism can manifest as internalized racial inferiority on the part of Black, Indigenous and People of Color and as internalized racial superiority for white people.
To learn more, watch this short 3 min video by Dee Watts-Jones, which focuses on internalized racial inferiority, as well as this short 2 min segment with Hugh Vazquez. Also take a look at this page from the Dismantling Racism website which lifts up elements of both internalized inferiority and internalized white superiority.
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Consider how you relate to these notions of internalized racial inferiority and superiority. Is either one familiar to you? If so, how do they show up in your life? How do they show up in your workplace, school, place of worship and/or community? How do they interact with feelings associated with other aspects of your identity (gender, age, ethnicity, class status, etc.)?
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See if you can identify any specific feelings as they surface while doing this reflection (refer to the Feelings Wheel). What comes up? What messages do these feelings convey?
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Walk around your bookstore, as you were prompted to do yesterday, and look at what you're messaging to your community. Do gift cards and selections feature and potentially cater to only/mostly white people? What books are you facing out around the store; are they written almost exclusively by white authors, or is there a significant balance of BIPOC authors?
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Pay attention to body language and see if you can notice any patterns based on race and gender identity. Start with noticing that of others, then start to notice your own. How much space do people take up in the bookstore? Who tends to get out of the way when passing someone? How quickly or slowly do people move? How do people interact if there's a line? How might the ways we move through the world reflect internalized racial oppression or superiority?
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Write or talk with someone about messages you got about your race growing up. In what ways do these affect you today? In what ways have you tried to counter these messages?
Author Photo Credit: Wikicommons | Quote from Words of Change: Anti-Racism by permission of Sasquatch Books. Copyright 2020 By Kenyra Rankin. All rights reserved.
SIBA thanks its generous sponsors, who have made the 21-Day Racial Equity Challenge possible:
Many of the quotes used in the Challenge are excerpted from Words of Change: Anti-Racism by permission of Sasquatch Books. Copyright 2020 By Kenyra Rankin. All rights reserved.
Although SIBA has modified when appropriate for a bookseller audience, the majority of prompts and resources come directly from the 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge created by Food Solutions New England (FSNE). We are so grateful for their extraordinary work creating this program and making it available to other organizations.
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