Silent Racism: The End

I agree with a lot of the points that Trepagnier has made in her book ‘Silent Racism.’ However, I think Jenna has made an interesting point that some of Trepagnier’s ideas are counter-active. One idea Trepagnier fails to focus on is that of which in order to overcome racism, people must be seen as exactly that: people. The color of an individual’s skin should not be a focus point or a characteristic of a person that holds them back from the same opportunities that white people have. Although, I really think that it will be a long time before this happens. Racial profiling occurs constantly throughout police investigations and in job interviews.

I think the idea of making a racial continuum rather than ‘racist’ and ‘not racist’ is a very good idea. But it is only an idea. The entire book talked a lot about ideas and not enough about specific actions to be taken. I think that it would have a greater impact on readers if its focus was ‘what should we do’ vs. ‘what should we think about.’

I think this study would have been more interesting if several other actions were taken. First of all, it only dealt with women, so I think the same study should have been done, separately, with a group of men before this book was written. Secondly, I think it would be interesting to include many races in the study, and a larger number of individuals in total. This would have given varied responses and more believable assumptions could be made from these. I also think that blind-folding everyone would lead to interesting results. For example, the people in the study wouldn’t know if Trepagnier was white or black, nor would they know if anyone else around them was. It would be interesting to see how people’s words and phrases change when they cannot censor them based on the people’s skin color of who they are taking to.