Racism: What It Is and How to Deal with It - Uned

Module 5. Racism: How can we deal with it? | 137
Q. The other boy we were with before said that they said to him: “You! Get out
of here.”
A.- Yes, “go to your fucking country” and all that
Q.- Wow... they say that kind of stuff to you? And why do you think that
people… are like that?
A.- I don’t know...
Q.- No, huh? And these are, boys from here at the institute 41 , or aren’t they?
A.- Yeah, some of them.
Q.- Some, right?
A.- Not so much any more, last year, yeah, a whole lot! Well, the year before,
because I stayed back in 1 st year, and um... when, the first time I got here it was
really bad, they picked on a friend of mine… and they beat her up once…
Q.- Really? Wow, you must have had a really bad time, didn’t you?
A.- Yes.
Q.- And then you had anxiety attacks? At home, or…
A.- Yes, I told my mother, and once my mother came here to talk to the teacher,
that this was intolerable... and the teacher told her to go to the police [laughs a
little].”
How should we act against racism? One example would be the one in the Critical
Incident of this Module, an association, in this case ZARA, that acts by offering support,
advice, and information to people in cases of racism, as an aspect of everyday life.
Among other initiatives, we propose the ones they carry out (see p. 120).
And when do we act? Both when we recognize racist situations and when we take
initiatives to promote racism-free social and educational spaces.
Sometimes as teachers we feel that we lack control, that we have no capacity to
change things. We say that the law and the norms control us. In some cases this is so,
but not always. Sometimes we do not change things precisely because we feel
impotent, isolated, lacking control. Empowering educators involves, as we have been
saying, helping them to become aware of what happens in schools and in classrooms.
Some of the activities that are proposed later are meant to achieve this.
41 High school or secondary school.