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      Learning Objectives

      Years ago, a White friend of mine told me the story of the day she began to see herself as White and realized that race was at work all around her. It was a surprising story, because my friend was famous for believing racism was a thing of the past, or would soon be, with people like her who treated others with fairness and respect and ignored race. Everything changed for her when her car broke down in what was considered the “bad part of town.” She had been driving through the Black neighborhood of our city, despite having been taught by her parents and friends to take the interstate (a longer route) to avoid it. The car was able to make it into the parking lot of a liquor store and then just died.

      Though it was in the middle of day, she had never stopped in the Black neighborhood alone before, and she found herself surprised by her growing fear. A Black store employee came out and brought her a bottle of water and offered to call someone if she needed. While she waited for help, two young Black men approached her. Afraid, she turned away from them and did not speak. Much to her surprise, they came up and said they had seen her car in distress and wondered if they could help. As they were checking out the car, the police pulled into the lot. The officers got out of the car, put their hands on their guns and ordered the men to the ground. The gentlemen were handcuffed and pushed to the sidewalk to sit on the curb. At that point, the police turned to my friend and asked if she was okay. She explained the situation and then watched as the officers gathered identifications and information from the two men and called in on their car radio before letting them go.

      In 2009, historian Bill Rankin released a project called “Radical Cartography,” central to which was a map of Chicago that used colored dots to represent the racial makeup of the city. Using the categories of: White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Other, Rankin’s dot mapping revealed not only the racial segregation of the city, but the clear and stark lines that divide us.

      Soon, others developed similar maps of various cities in the United States, and in 2013, Dustin Cable, of the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, published a map of the entire United States with a dot for every individual counted in the previous census. That work became part of a renewed national discussion on racial segregation. Despite the fact that the segregation reflected in the maps is historically entrenched, and that we have long examined the policies and social ideologies that created it, and that countless present-day studies reveal the various manifestations of it (from an increasing racial wealth gap to continued, and in some cases even worsening, school segregation (Orfield, Ee, Frankenberg, & Siegel-Hawley, 2016)—for some it felt like the maps presented new or unrealized information. The strong concentration of colors, the clear segregation, and the stark separations had a visceral impact, for some sadness and anger, for others shock and surprise.

      It was as if the expanded awareness and opportunities our contemporary technology and global marketplace provided (designer patterns purported to be “Indigenous,” the popularization of sushi, our love of guacamole, the commercialization of hip hop, etc.) had obscured the reality of the racial segregation that marks our social world and our day-to-day lives. It is a segregation not simply about space and place, but about how we see ourselves, others, and the world, and how and why we, individually and collectively, function as we do in society. The role of multicultural psychology is to assist in understanding those relationships between individuals and their personal, as well as social (culture, class, race, gender, etc.), structural (systems, institutions, ideologies, policies, etc.), and historical context.

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