Tammy a white student who goes to Texas A&M discusses her experience with being a white female. One of the initial things we learn about Tammy is that she does not believe race matters but her family disagrees with this fact. She tells the story of when she was younger and had a crush on a boy. When she pointed him out to her mum her mum said, “you know he is Mexican and you know I was like I guess he is but I had always seen him as just another boy” (6:06-6:35). Tatum would classify this stage as “disintegration, [which] is marked by a growing awareness of racism and white privilege as a result of personal encounters in which the social significance of race is made visible”(Tatum 96). Before this moment Tammy might have been aware of racism but it had never been so explicit. She sees the direct affects of racism on people’s lives.
At the conference Tammy is seen in a different stage. She talks about how she wants to be considered as an individual not as a group member, which Tatum considers the reintegration stage. Part of the reintegration stage is blaming the victim and feeling uncomfortable “being seen as a group member, rather than an individual” (Tatum 102) Tammy does not fall under the category of blaming the victim but she does say I am an individual and does not like when other participants generalize about white people. There is evidence of progress for Tammy through the learning stages and at the end she seems close to the Pseudo-independent stage and is seen socializing with all members of different races and is understanding her systematic advantages.
Citations
Skin Deep. Dir. Francis Reid. Iris Films, 1995.
Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations about Race. New York: Basic, 1997. Print.