{"id":58098,"date":"2022-06-01T10:41:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-01T14:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/?p=58098"},"modified":"2026-01-30T16:47:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T21:47:24","slug":"prof-copeland-discusses-racism-light-buffalo-terrorist-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/prof-copeland-discusses-racism-light-buffalo-terrorist-attack\/","title":{"rendered":"Greater Boston Today with George Knight: Professor Copeland Discusses Racism in Light of Buffalo Terrorist Attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

Racial justice expert Professor Phillipe Copeland<\/a> discusses the racist motives of the white terrorist who murdered 10 and injured 3 in Buffalo, New York in a recent interview on Greater Boston Today with George Knight. The interview covered the history of racism in the United States, including the nature of racism as a problem, contemporary racist manifestations, and what people can do about racism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Excerpt from an interview on “Greater Boston Today with George Knight<\/span><\/a><\/i><\/b>,” originally aired <\/i><\/b>on May 29, 2022:<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

\"quotation<\/a>I think of the analogy of a fish in the water. Sometimes we think about racism as the fish. \u2018There\u2019s something wrong with the fish.\u2019 Another way to think about it is that there\u2019s something wrong with the conditions in which the fish is living. When you live under toxic conditions, you get toxic behaviors. That\u2019s what happens to human beings. This isn\u2019t just racism, we see this in many aspects of life. When you subject human beings to toxic conditions, you get toxic behavior, toxic attitudes, you get all kinds of inequities, you get violence. It isn\u2019t really a surprise that we see these kinds of things happening in society because we all continue to live under these conditions. Racism is the water, it\u2019s not the fish. If we want to do something about this problem, we have to fix the water.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the things that happens with racism is that you have to convince people that racism is rational. That it makes sense to be racist. There are people who call themselves \u2018race realists\u2019 right now who try to claim, \u2018Look, it\u2019s just science. Some people are inferior and some people are superior. We\u2019re not being bigots, we\u2019re being realistic.\u2019 There was a time when so-called scientific racism had been discredited, but there\u2019s been a resurgence of it in the past few years. A person can go to academic intellectual settings and listen to people explain that it\u2019s a fact that black people are inferior with complete confidence and sincerity. In the manifesto of the Buffalo massacre terrorist, there was citation of a lot of these ideas. \u2018Hey, these are just the facts. These people are not like us.\u2019 So trying to integrate them into society, allowing them to have power, allowing them to live next to you, allowing them to marry your daughter, that this is not only irrational, but suicidal. That it puts so-called western civilization at risk. That these inferior people at best need to be controlled and managed, and at worst need to be exterminated.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the ways you spread racist ideas is through storytelling, such as racial stereotypes. Most of us can recite those stereotypes from memory even if we don\u2019t believe them, because we\u2019ve grown up with those stories about \u2018those people.\u2019 \u2018Those people\u2019 do this, \u2018those people\u2019 do that. Many of us were told these stories by people we love, by people that we respect. We learn them from popular culture, by the television shows we watch, by the children\u2019s books we read. We\u2019ve been swimming in that water for quite awhile.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Listen to the full interview.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Learn More About Professor Copeland\u2019s Research<\/b><\/a><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Racial justice expert Professor Phillipe Copeland discusses the racist motives of the white terrorist who murdered 10 and injured 3 in Buffalo, New York in a recent interview on Greater Boston Today with George Knight. The interview covered the history of racism in the United States, including the nature of racism as a problem, contemporary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19132,"featured_media":58100,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7440,7520,7511,4057],"tags":[8283],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58098"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58098"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76286,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58098\/revisions\/76286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/ssw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}