When Mark McPhail, an interdisciplinary studies professor at Southern Methodist University, asks his students how they know what they know, he’s looking to solve problems.
McPhail asks for the kind of self-realization that he says is key to solving today’s social problems such as racism, sexism and other prejudices.
McPhail spoke about the relationship between racism and rhetoric in a lecture Wednesday afternoon at the College of Communication. The professor has published several books and essays on the topic of rhetoric, including “The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation?”
In his lecture, McPhail explained how language creates reality and plays a key part in transforming social injustices.
People can begin to engage in the behaviors that others ascribe to them, for better or for worse.
“If we describe people different from ourselves by using terms that are negative, sometimes people accept those definitions,” McPhail said. “This is a complex subject that we really need to study to understand.”
McPhail said it was easy for people to claim to be anti-racist, but it’s the conscious decisions they make on a daily basis, including how they treat others, that should act as a barometer.
Much of racism derives from people simply not recognizing their own racism, McPhail said. People also use the term “post-racial” to falsely claim that racial problems no longer exist, he added.
People cannot hold themselves accountable until they leave the confines of the classroom and have real-life experiences with people who are different from themselves, he said.
“White people have never really acknowledged there are racial problems,” he said. “A few have, but it’s people of color who mostly raise these issues. Just like how mostly women raise issues about sexism and the men believe themselves to not be sexist.”
Using alcoholism as an example, McPhail said that similar to alcoholics, racists must acknowledge the problem before they can overcome it. The only way to overcome is to face the problem in a real-life situation, he said.
“It cannot be solved through education,” McPhail said. “If I suffer from neurosis, I have to go to a therapist. I don’t go to a teacher. A teacher can’t teach me to not be neurotic.”
Deal me in.