The third training in the year-long diversity, equity and inclusion series, “Let’s Talk About Race,” wrapped Thursday at Emmanuel Episcopal Church.

Pastor Edward Palmer led the training this week and will return in November for the last session, “Tying it all Together.”

“Remember everything about this series, this journey that we’ve been on this year, is about Clark County,” Palmer said.

During the third session, attendees learned the history of the “racial construct” within the U.S. and its impact on current race relations.

Palmer went over some dates in history critical to the conversation, including: 

— In 1619, the first slaves arrived in Virginia.

— In 1776, the Declaration of Independence 

— In 1800, the hanging of Gabriel Prosser, who planned the first major slave rebellion.

— In 1831, Nat Turner convicted and hanged for leading a slave rebellion in Virginia. 

— In 1831, Lloyd Garrison begins publishing The Liberator, a weekly abolitionist newspaper. 

— In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped to freedom and becomes the most famous “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. 

— In 1857, Dred Scott v. Sandford

— In 1861, the Confederacy formed and the Civil War began

— In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation

— In 1865, the Civil War ends; Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; and the 13th amendment abolished slavery. 

“Or did it?” Palmer said, adding he would explain later.

— In 1921, the Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 essentially declared all potential immigrants from Asia were unworthy to enter into the United States, Palmer said.

Palmer went on to discuss more key dates in America’s history that have left a lasting impact on modern society.  

Palmer, who is a certified diversity trainer working to eliminate disproportionate minority contact within the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, continued the session discussing terms. 

He said race isn’t significant. It’s a social construct, only given meaning because society deemed it so. 

“The reason it’s important is because once we built the racial construct, then everything else gets affected by it,” Palmer told the crowd. “Once we said to people, way back before the 1600s, that dark-skinned people are not totally human, they’re not capable of certain things, they’re not as intellectual… they’re not as intelligent… they don’t have certain capabilities. They’re inferior to us. That became the basis for everything. And so society started thinking there is significance.”

Race as a social construct affects the entire social structure. Palmer said through a facilitated discussion, he wanted attendees to specifically look at the issue of race in regards to justice, housing, socioeconomics and cultural identity.

“There nothing real about race,” Palmer said. “ … The reality is when you peel us back, we’re all pink on the inside.”

Palmer went on to discuss the term “racist.” Though, that’s not the topic he wanted to focus on, Palmer said.

“Racist is an individual preference,” he said. “That doesn’t bother me that an individual looks at me, and has an opinion about me on the basis of my skin because unless he pulls out a weapon and harms me, his individual ideas about me don’t really matter.”

A racist is someone who believes their race is superior to people of another race. Racists may also believe all members of a race possess characteristics and abilities or lack thereof specific to that race so as to distinguish it as an inferior or superior race, Palmer said. 

“Individual racists’ perception is not the problem,” Palmer said. 

The problem, Palmer said, is racism. 

“Racism is different because here’s what racism does: it’s the collective presence of a group of racist people backed by the power and legal authority for institutional control,” Palmer said. “That’s the problem that we really need to be focusing on because the racist individual can’t incarcerate all people but if a bunch of people who hold certain ideological perceptions about race get together and have the legal authority and institutional control to write policies that will disadvantage certain populations, now we have racist ideologies turned into racism.”

Instead of running around fighting racist individuals, Palmer said, communities need to pull together and deconstruct the systems perpetuating racism. The disparities are real; the data proves that, he said. Black men are more likely to be incarcerated for the same crime compared to their white counterparts; there is a real racial divide among housing districts and accessibility to needs and services in communities and more, Palmer said. 

Racism is a structure, Palmer said, not an event. Systems don’t need racist individuals to carry out the disparate outcomes anymore, Palmer said, because it is already built into the system. 

Palmer also talked about internalized racism and institutional racism. 

“This is important because racism has work folks down,” Palmer said. “Not some of the effects of racism have been internalized by the people affected by it… Still, a racially stigmatized group of people have negative perceptions about their own abilities.”

Palmer used examples such as the stratification of skin color in nonwhite communities, praising light-skinned black people compared to dark-skinned black people. 

“We start to internalize it in a way that we start to view our skin color, our heritage, things about us as it not being attractive or beautiful,” he said. 

In June, California became the first state to ban discrimination based on natural hair. 

“It’s 2019, and we have to pass a law that says it’s OK to wear your hair the way it grows,” Palmer said. 

Palmer spent the majority of the evening, though, talking about institutional racism, which is the existence of institutions, systems, policies, practices and structures that place minority, racial and ethnic groups at a disadvantage in comparison to others. 

Multiple organizations worked together to fund the series including the Clark County Health Department, Clark Regional Medical Center, Better Together Winchester and the Greater Clark Foundation. For more information, go to clarkambition.org/community-investment/diversity.

Palmer ended the session with an exercise, asking attendees to discuss ways to celebrate diversity and ways to work together to deconstruct the systems perpetuating racism in Clark County.

“As a community, we have to keep talking,” Palmer said. “ … This is a way of life. We live together. We look different. We have experienced American culture differently. But together, we become a whole and not an individual, cultural or racial side.”