preview

A Raisin In A Sea Of Milk Research Paper

Decent Essays
Open Document
A Raisin in a Sea of Milk
“When she gets married and has children, I am sure that her parents would want her children to be of a lighter skin color” – said an elderly white male professor to one of the two dark-skinned African American female students in his classroom at Syracuse University in September of 2017.
It is 2017 and you are sitting in a discussion section or a lecture that ranges from 20 to 70 students, and the topic of race is brought up. You pause for the briefest second and look around forgetting to exhale. You understand that race is not a surface topic, one cannot discuss the high incarceration rates of African American males without first discussing institutionalized racism. You understand that there are different privileges and oppressions placed upon individuals when they are born depending on their…show more content…
This is often a shock for the many students who throughout their educational experiences attended schools where they were in the majority. The journal of higher education indicated that 70% of black students attended schools with more than 50% minority enrollment, and 36.5% of these students went to schools with a minority enrollment of 90-100%” (Taylor, 2004). The change in their environment exposes many individuals of color to instances of racism and microaggressions on their college campuses.
Racism does not have to be overt or explicitly announced. Microaggressions are present and prominent in many situations within and outside the classroom. Being the only person of color within a classroom at times imposes the mindset that the person of color must transcend their stereotypes. This aided with a white faculty member’s cultural insensitivity in generalizing student’s opinions in class as representing of all blacks becomes problematic (Guiffrida and Douthit,
Get Access
Related
Get Access