New Racial Literacy: Professor Jabari Mahiri

In this talk UC Berkeley Professor of Education, Dr. Jabari Mahiri, offers a paradigm shift in the ways that race and racial literacy have been conceptualized, understood, and enacted. He offers the following terms:

Illegible skin: Biological racism is predicated on a kind of pigmentcentric literacy. This means that characteristics are ascribed to human beings based simply on their skin color.

Pigementocracy: Pigmentocracy is the hierarchical organization of peoples based on the presence or lack of melanin. In this country because of the wages of white supremacy, our Nations' pigmentocracy privileges proximity to whiteness as evidence by certain, relatively static somatic standards (e.g., blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin, etc.) while, simultaneously, penalizes distance to these same standards.

Lifting the veil of white supremacy: White supremacy is a system that privileges whiteness, however it is defined in a particular context, while simultaneously dismissing and denigrating non-whiteness. 

Microcultures: Race and culture are performed, social realities (albeit with real material consequences for traditionally marginalized peoples). This understanding challenges the essentialist narrative that white supremacy and racism necessitate. 

Clapback: Responses to being racialized and color bound.