Human rights advocate Michael Simmons spoke out against the racism that permeates popular culture and everyday life yesterday to a diverse audience in Aaron Burr Hall.
"Racism," he said, "is more alive than ever before."
Simmons, a community organizing consultant who also works with the American Friends Service Committee and the Budapest-based Raday Salon, was active with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the late 1960s and focused his talk on racism in the United States.
He discussed the effects of racism on U.S. criminal justice proceedings and noted that possession of crack cocaine — a drug, he said, that is traditionally associated with urban African-American users — carries significantly higher penalties than possession of an equal amount of powdered cocaine, frequently associated with more white-collar, Caucasian users.
Simmons also identified the influence of racist perceptions on the American education system, arguing that "so-called objective" standardized tests, such as the SATs, "evaluate experience rather than intelligence."
He said that youths from African-American communities may not have had exposure to elements of mainstream white culture, and so are consistently disadvantaged by the imposition of absolute rather than relative standards of academic performance — standards which indirectly reflect the pervasiveness of racist ideology in the American style of teaching.
Such incidences of racism, Simmons said, are rarely publicized by the media, which dismisses the reality of cultural and social injustice by consistently stigmatizing blacks as representatives of a turbulent, urban culture that should be controlled.
"The problem is that we judge by pathologies," he said, and not by logic. "Racism is not rational," and as the dismissive behavior of the media suggests, "racist perceptions are independent of reality."
Simmons also called racism a driving factor behind American imperialism in Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America. He labeled the lack of international concern for genocide in Darfur as "a disgrace" and as clear evidence of the "racist lens" through which much of the international community sees global affairs.
Nene Umoren '10 said after the lecture that rather than propose a general solution, Simmons urged students "to find their own way to make a difference." By combating racism at the individual level, Simmons said, an overall enhancement of justice becomes a more attainable goal.
Despite the persistence of racism in the 21st century, Simmons remained hopeful.
"If there is one thing I have learned from my travels, it is that people around the world have more in common than they do in differences."
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