University of Mary Washington freshman Yasmeen Alhinty sheepishly giggled as she admitted she knew almost nothing about Rosa Parks before stepping foot on the Fredericksburg campus.
“All I knew was that she was a sweet old lady who got on a bus,” said Alhinty. “But it turns out she wasn’t even old, she was only in her 40s.”
Alhinty is one of 75 first-year students enrolled in UMW’s first-year seminar “Race and Revolution.” The course focuses on the importance on civil rights activists while contemplating the effects of racism through the decades, even today.
This fall, Alhinty and fellow classmates took a class trip to Washington, D.C., to tour the U.S. Capitol and visit the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.
While at the Capitol, the students enjoyed a private guided tour and explored remote areas rarely seen by the average tourist.
“It was really neat,” Alhinty said. “We all got to wear headsets to listen to the guide as we toured.”
One of the tour stops included the Capitol Rotunda, where Rosa Parks’ memorial was held following her death in October of 2005.
Just as they learned from reading the biography The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, the students also experienced the whitewashing of the civil rights movement that is still engraved in American minds today.
“We were at that very spot, and heard the tour guide utter the same sort of superficial platitudes, calling Parks “the mother of the civil rights movement,” said Craig Vasey, chair of the Department of Classics, Philosophy, and Religion, who has taught the “Race and Revolution” seminar for five years.
According to Vasey, the commonly used phrase attempts to cover up decades of terrorization forced upon the blacks, while putting up a front that America has rectified and overcome racism.
Yasmeen Alhinty is keenly aware of racism’s impact today as an Arab American. During high school, she conducted an experiment in which she dressed head-to-toe in a floor length black dress and scarf one day to test the public’s reaction.
The result was overall a negative response, said Alhinty who wrote about her experience for a class assignment. Many people reacted hesitantly around Alhinty and quickly shut down any interactions she tried to initiate.
Her findings were “eye-opening,” she said. “This simple experiment revealed that racism still exists no matter how much it’s denied.”
As she looked up from the ground, glowing with pride and accomplishment she said, “And in the end, I got a really good grade for it.”
Great educational experience to offer this class. Racism has been eroding the fabric of American democracy for centuries. There’s only one race, the human race made up of many ethnics. Race is a social invention used to separate, discriminate and subjugate one group for the economic benefit of another. The fight for freedom is an ongoing battle, part of the human condition.
Whitewashing? What? Because Parks was the one whose actions caused the civil rights movement to take off in the public eye, instead of being something that upper middle class black people debated and worried over in the comfort of their homes? It sounds like you’re the one whitewashing, trying to create a new narrative.
Also “racism is everywhere even if we deny it”- you realize that Islam isn’t a race and the fact that Christian Arabs are currently being, slaughtered by Muslim Arabs in Syria and Iraq makes your equation of Islam=Arab extremely insulting to most Arab Americans, since most Arab Americans descend from Lebanese and Syrian Christians who fled persecution in the Islamic Ottoman empire 100 years ago around the time of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides? Additionally wearing a full chador to school is extremely threatening considering that suicide bombers have dressed in that same kind of clothing in order to conceal bombs?
Like I said, you’re creating a narrative and it’s an extremely offensive one to anyone with more than a passing knowledge of history, demography and the world outside your classroom in general.
Did you have to pick that picture? That poor guy on the right…forever in infamy on the front page.