Do you consider Miami University a "racially charged climate"?

Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but there's no denying that Miami's racial tensions seem to bubble up multiple times a year when a Miami community member- usually white, well-off, or otherwise matching the "typical" idea of a Miamian- is caught saying something overtly, undeniably racist. While we may argue about how racially charged Miami may be on a "normal" day, these scandals make the simmering conversations and controversies about equality and hate reach a boiling point, where an undeniably hateful statement is used as a way for Miamians to argue whether it's an exception from an otherwise moral community or an example of a more subtle, pervasive bias that is usually ignored or accepted on campus.

Vignette #1 - Moral Panics, Language, and Myths

As seniors, we've witnessed plenty of scandals surrounding diversity, inclusion, and hate on campus, as well as the responses they triggered from different people on campus. In this vignette, we're covering what anthropologists call moral panics, and what they have to say about campus culture.

Do you remember any racial scandals that have shaken up campus conversations?

What did the events seem to have in common?

Were there any patterns in the way people talked about them?

Moral Panics

Moral panics are the conversations that emerge after a public figure makes a visibly racist remark (Hill 2008).

The viral conversations that they trigger show how people position themselves relative to the person who said the racist remark.

Whether they're defending, attacking, or indifferent to the speaker, they show the range of beliefs, or ideologies, surrounding race and language on campus.

What is a Moral Panic?

Let's consider the sensationalized events we recall during our 4 years on campus that have triggered moral panics, firestorms ranging from students' social media to national conversations:

A Miami student making a racist comment, including a slur, about black students to a shared freshman Groupme
Said student bragging about it on Tinder months later
Miami sorority girls recorded singing the n-word on camera
Patriot Front and Proud Boys, both neo-fascist groups, spreading propaganda across campus
A Miami professor yelling epithets at local anti-racist protestors
Business frat presentations, Intercultural Studies panels, and Black-run Groupmes being flooded with racist imagery and slurs through "hacking" and "Zoom-bombing"

Unearthing bias: How anthropology reveals racial and linguistic ideologies

Ideologies often appear to us as forms of common sense, but they're closer to a point-of-view shared by the majority than an objective truth. Most communities- and individuals- hold multiple ideologies that sometimes contradict one another.

Linguistic ideologies structure when, how, and why we defend or condemn speech. They're the logic behind how we decide what things mean: both what's being said and the actual things being talked about.

Below are some of the common linguistic ideologies that lie beneath reactions to racial statements on campus:

Unearthing Ideologies

Personalist Ideology

Personalist language ideology is at work when we separate a speakers' acts from their intentions. It's the logic that lets us say "he didn't mean it that way" or speculate if a racist statement was "accidental". This ideology finds meaning in "the intentions and beliefs of individuals acting alone" (Hill 2008).

Performative Ideology

Performative language ideology lets us believe that words "have an active force ... [to] soothe or wound" (Hill 2008). This is why slurs are recognized as hate speech and why apologies can be demanded- there needs to be a real statement to address real harm. It also is what lets these words be condemned- they're seen as aggressive actions, not free speech.

White

Virtue

This ideology governs white responses, both condemning and defending, to moral panics. Trying to defend the speaker by invoking personalist defenses- "she's not really a racist!"- tries to defend white virtue by erasing racist remarks as mistakes. Condemning those who say racist things defends other whites as good, non-racist bystanders.

While performative and personalist language ideologies influence how we see speakers and their actions, the drive to protect white virtue bridges the gap between linguistic and racial ideologies. Again, these ideologies are worldviews that many take for granted and see as "common sense," especially if it's to their benefit. For example, most white people feel more comfortable assuming that they're not racist, so they'll try to distance themselves from whites they see as racist and deny the idea of system where they benefit just for being white. One common set of myths that has shaped Miamians' "common sense" about race is the folk theory of racism (Hill 2008).

Myth #1:

Race Is Biological

While we assume race is a more "natural" divider than social ones like religion, caste, or language, it lets racists imply that any sort of racial disparities that occur, like higher rates of poverty or maternal mortality, are the fault of some biological flaw of the marginalized, rather than separate conditions they're subject to because of racism.

Myth #2:

Only Individuals Can be Racist

This myth allows people to deny the existence of institutional racism by framing it as a choice. Under this belief, racists are"bad apples" who are only swastika-clad KKK skinheads, not your housemate or your grandma. It also invites the idea of "reverse racism"- if being racist is a conscious action, then someone who believes in this myth could say "calling whites racist is racist"

Myth #3:

Prejudice is Natural

Black neighborhoods, under this myth, aren't the result of generations redlining and segregation- its just because people like to "be with their own kind" (Hill 2008). Anthropologists believe this myth is popular because it explains away symptoms of systemic racism and power imbalances by brushing them off as "natural" human impulses (Fuentes 2012).

The real impact of myths: how cultural constructs and "common sense" obscure reality

"[The folk theory of racism] isn't a theory like gravity of evolution, but it does impact out lives in important ways by distorting the true nature of racism and leaving us poorly equipped to talk about it, let alone challenge it." - Isabel

Myths can have real-life consequences, especially when they’re the ideological backbone for hierarchies that unequally distribute power across different social castes, such as race, class, ethnicity, or gender. They make it hard to change the status quo because they give us expectations and explanations for people and their actions. Because they influence peoples’ worldviews by working as unquestioned “common sense”, they snuff any other explanations or analyses that could explain why things are the way they are.

This is why anthropologists like Jane Hill (2008) use the word “folk theory” rather than “myth”- while it may not be true, the influences it’s had on our society are. Like gravity and evolution, the folk theory of racism explains things we observe in the world around us. Only in the case of racism and race, these “folk theories” give explanations for inequality, oppression, and violence that are based in “hunches” that have developed over generations of wealthy whites controlling the structure and narrative of American society rather than after decades of scientific debate and research.

Because these ideologies about race are so deeply rooted in America’s dominant culture, Anthropologists are tasked not only with pointing out when myths shape our popular understandings of the way the world works, but also with providing the empirical evidence and research needed to debunk them. Agustín Fuentes (2012) describes these ingrained ideologies, ideas, and myths that help us make meaning of the world as cultural constructs. Anthropology not only gives us the tools to identify cultural constructs like race, but also to refute them. A great example of Anthropology being used to “bust” myths like those in the folk theory of racism is from Fuentes’s book Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You, where he identifies and refutes multiple assumptions about race that are ingrained into our culture.

Busting Myths About Race

Busting myths about race with anthropology

Myth:

Race is biological, humans are naturally divided into races

Busted:

Race is just one way to interpret variation in the human species, but it has been the main influence on our cultural understanding of difference.

Biological anthropologists don’t see racial categories as a valid way to interpret or describe human biological variation. Aspects like skin color, size, blood type, and genetic markers vary in ways that don't align with and cannot be predicted by race.

Traits that differ across and between human populations have more to do with human migration over time than racial subcategories based on old European taxonomies.

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