Table of Contents of the RAQ Facilitator's Guide

1. Overview
2. Some Background
3. Who Should Take the Quiz?
4. Who Should Facilitate the Quiz?
5. What Approach Should Be Used?
6. Purpose of the Quiz, in Detail
7. About Assumptions
8. Issues and Concerns Raised During Field Tests
9. Effects of the Quiz on Participants During Field Tests
10. How I Would Explain the Need for This Exercise in Simple Terms to White Americans
11. Frequently Asked Questions About the Center for the Study of White American Culture
12. Bibliography
13. General Discussion Questions
14. Discussion of Individual Quiz Questions (Sample page)(114 kB image)
15. Quiz Questions
16. Quiz Answers

Purpose of the Quiz - In Detail
The general purpose of the quiz, as stated above, is to raise awareness of assumptions shaped by an Eurocentric system of education, that people have formed about white culture in the United States. However, it has several more specific purposes, which are listed below in no specific order:

• Raise awareness about assumptions made by the dominant culture.
• Disrupt assumptions absorbed from the dominant culture. This can be uncomfortable and psychologically stressing to some people.
• Provide an opening to learning new assumptions that help decenter whiteness and promote development of multiracial structures.
• Sensitize people so that they might see that assumptions shape our stance, active or inactive, toward the racial structure of United States society.
• Raise an awareness of the need for accuracy and integrity in education on racial history in the United States.
• Serve as a teaching resource.
• Be non-threatening, interesting, fun.
• Create an "itch" as opposed to a "wound," and an openness to learning, not closure.
• Facilitate discussion and dialogue about white people and our role in a multiracial society.

How I Would Explain the Need for this Exercise in Simple Terms to White Americans
Every culture has problems and every culture has good points. In any given culture, people tend to emphasize the good points and ignore the problems. Thus a culture will tend to build a positive, and distorted view of itself. At the same time, it will defend itself from facing up to its problems and negative aspects.

If we lived in a place where only one culture existed, this might not be a concern. So what if people think highly of themselves. But in a multicultural society such as there is in the United States, how we view our culture sometimes has an impact on how we relate to people from other cultures. Also, how other people view our culture has an impact on how other people relate to us.

In the United States the dominant culture is white American (or European American) culture. White Americans control nearly all the media, and the educational system. Consequently, the view of white culture that is presented in our media and through our schools is generally a positive one. Often the culture is not named as "white." Frequently our history books claim to be discussing "American" culture. But because the people controlling the educational system are predominantly those whose culture is white American (this includes parents, teachers, administrators, political and civic leaders, lobbying groups), the end result is that "American" history has a bias toward presenting European Americans in a positive light. This creates an image of white culture that is only partially true.

This does not mean there is a conscious conspiracy to present white culture as positive. Rather, it may be possible decision makers are simply acting as any humans would. If the decision makers were black, Indian, Latino or Asian, perhaps their respective cultures would be presented in the same universally positive way. But they are not. White culture, for better or worse, is the dominant culture and the one whose image holds sway. Furthermore, this is an image that functions to make us comfortable and to "protect" us from seeing the problems our culture has produced. If we begin to explore beyond this unrealistically positive image, then we will necessarily encounter the discomforting information that our culture has withheld from us.

We are adults, not children. If we aspire to create a society in which a multiracial culture is valued, we need to become increasingly aware of some things. We need to understand our world and our history. We need to understand how others see us and we need to understand how we see ourselves. This means we need to look beyond an education centered on the European American experience. We need to be able to discuss negative events in our culture, particularly if these events have had an impact on people of other cultures. In the United States our traditional system of education does not equip us to discuss the negative events that took place between white culture and cultures of color. Many white Americans are not even aware of the extent to which we’ve been taught to avoid discussing such events. Our culture has protected us, but in doing so it has left us with an unrealistic image of ourselves.

People of other cultural groups are often aware of these negative encounters with white culture through alternative means of learning history that are supported by their own cultural processes. Basically those people most ignorant of the negative events in European American history are white people ourselves. Our culture has conspired to keep us that way.

In our present times, it’s not enough to be satisfied with our own ignorance. Being able to acknowledge negative events in history of one’s culture and discuss them is an important skill. This particular exercise is designed to help white Americans confront and understand some of our history and present culture that our same culture, acting simply on its own, would not bring to our awareness. We do so not for some perverse need for self-flagellation, but rather in the hope that learning a more balanced picture of ourselves will help us build a society that is truly multiracial and multicultural.

Bibliography
The following is a consolidated list of sources used in the quiz and this manual. Although some of the books may be hard to locate, most are readily available at book stores and online booksellers. As noted already, the events discussed in the quiz are amply documented, and this documentation is easily located.

Bennett, Jr., Lerone. Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

Bennett, Jr., Lerone. "The Second Time Around: Will History Repeat Itself and Rob Blacks of the Gains of the 1960s." Ebony, Sept. 1995, Vol. 50, No. 11, p.86(4).

Conrad, Earl. The Invention of the Negro. New York: Paul S. Eriksson, Inc., 1966.

Davis, Burke. Black Heros of the American Revolution. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company (Odyssey), 1976.

Herm, Gerhard. The Celts: The People Who Came Out of the Darkness. New York: Barnes & Nobel Books, 1993.

Herring, Roger. "Native American Indian Identity: A People of Many Peoples." In Race, Ethnicity and Self: Identity in Multicultural Perspective. Edited by Elizabeth Pathy Salett and Diane R. Koslow. Washington, D.C.: NMCI Publications, 1994.

Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish became White. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Jahoda, Gloria. The Trail of Tears: The Story of American Indian Removals, 1813 -1855. New York: Random House, 1995.

Katz, Judith H. White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1995.

López, Ian F. Haney. White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Medley, Keith Weldon. "The Sad Story of How ‘Separate but Equal’ Was Born." Smithsonian, Vol. 24, No. 11, February 1994, pp. 104-116.

Nies, Judith. Native American History: A Chronology of a Culture's Vast Achievements and Their Links to World Events. New York: Random House, 1996.

Oakes, James. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982.

Orfield, Gary and John T. Yun. Resegregation in American Schools, The Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, 1999. (Available online at: http://www.law.harvard.edu/groups/civilrights/
publications/resegregation99.html).

Parrillo, Vincent. Diversity in America. Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Press, 1995.

Sacks, Karen Brodkin. "How Did Jews Become White Folks." In Race, edited by Steven Gregory and Roger Sanjek. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Era of Reconstruction: 1865-1877. New York: Random House, 1965.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989.

Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. New York: Fawcett Columbine (Ballentine), 1988.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present (Revised and updated edition). New York:HarperCollins, 1995.