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| A Forest Path in Seattle - 2018 |
Things I Have Learned about Antiracism this Week
I have had a great week. I read Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, by Mary L. Trump, Ph.D., and How To Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D. I am reading White Fragility by Robin Di Angelo, Ph.D. I also watched “Who killed the Neanderthal?” on Curiosity Stream. Lastly, I did some research on Google that included "How Science and Genetics are Reshaping the Race Debate in the 21st Century" and "There's No Scientific Basis for Race - It's a Made-up Label."
These readings filled me with new learnings. Some of these discoveries stripped away old ideas. Others reminded me of ideas that I buried under preoccupations and negligence. I am grateful for those who have taught me this week, and I look forward to continuing my education next week. The pandemic is allowing me to explore, experience the challenge, and discover ways to “make a difference” in the world of my children and grandchildren.
I offer these things I have learned to encourage you to retrace some of my research and discover for yourself the power and reach of racism and the opportunities that antiracism offers to all of us.
Here are a few of the things I have learned this week.
Trump is a dangerous distraction! We need to deal with this distraction, but that is only a tiny first step! Voting him out of office is a very near-term task. But, our problems are far more profound and far more significant for our future than the rantings of a foolish little man. He is a symptom that we must address. But he is not the cause of our dis-ease. We need to put more of our energy at stopping the disease while we treat the symptom.
Racism is not what I thought it was! It is not people waving Confederate flags and wearing white hoods. They are certainly racists, but they are not the only ones. Racism is a system of policies that oppress some for the benefit of others. Racism did not create slavery. Racism is a by-product of a very profitable slave trade that continues today in ghettos and prisons across our country. Racists are those who support these policies and use their prejudices to justify their oppression. In the past, we told ourselves, “They are happier and healthier on the plantation. Besides, it allows them to get saved by Jesus.” Today we shrug our shoulders and say, “what can I do? I don’t own any slaves.”
This racism grew out of the mythology of individualistic meritocracy. It believes that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Our destiny is solely in our own hands. This idea supports the American fiction that anyone can succeed if they work hard enough. It is a pernicious myth that helps us to and ease our conscience and explain away the high rates of crime, unemployment, and poverty in communities of People of Color. We tell ourselves that People of Color are lazy, inherently stupid, and immoral. These beliefs make it easier to carry our White Privilege. We do not see ourselves as racists because we do not wear a white hood. But even without owning any “slaves,” we benefit from the system. How? I encourage you to read White Fragility.
Racism is not just hating People of Color. Racism supports a system of oppression against People of Color because it is in our self-interest to do so. It ties healthcare to employment and cuts public health services to the poor. Racism withholds policing and other public services to create redlined, segregated neighborhoods. It supports de facto segregation in public facilities through reducing funding for public education (especially for schools in segregated neighborhoods.) It limits social interaction between whites and People of Color by fostering fear with stereotypes in entertainment and the daily news. Self-interest drives us to ignore policies that unequally distribute the benefits of our society. This is racism at work.
In essence, Racism is a perceived difference barbed with a value judgment. Difference and diversity are healthy as long as they are grounded in mutual respect and celebration of those differences. But racism perceives a difference and immediately labels it as good or bad. It declares one group as superior to the other. It looks for reasons to justify those value judgments. It relies heavily on non-scientific observations and criteria supported by carefully selected anecdotes that grow out of our implicit biases and prejudices. Racism takes the non-scientific and socially created category of race and elevates it to a statement of relative value among Whites and People of Color. They are bad. We, the Whites, are good.
There is no such thing as a biological race. There are species and sub-species. The five races of humanity do not qualify as sub-species. People outside of Africa cannot even call themselves pure Homo Sapiens since we have roughly 2% of our genetics from a different species, the Neanderthals. Ironically, the only people pure Homo Sapiens alive today in Africa. Biology is not an ally of racism.
I am a White Supremacist. This leaning is the most painful for me. I grew up being taught and socialized into believing that being white is not only better than being a Person of Color but being white is the norm for all human beings. I grew up during the desegregation of public schools. I remember when the Latinx and Black children started coming to our white schools. They did not send white children to black or Latinx schools. These “substandard schools” were closed. The school boards chose not to invest any more money in schools in the wrong part of town. I have learned that assimilation flows one way, from the People of Color to the norm, White people.
My generation believed that the way you get rid of racism was by assimilating others into the “American Dream.” Unfortunately, that dream was a white dream that required that others give up much of themselves and their identity. They needed to become “more white” so that they could compete in a white world. There was never any real thought of changing the world to accommodate “them” in “our” world. In the town where I grew up, the population was mostly Latinx. But culturally, we were dominated by “whiteness.” We may have removed the “Whites Only” signs from the drinking fountains around the Courthouse, but People of Color were denied the vote due to Jim Crow laws. To vote, you had to learn English, pass a citizenship test, and pay a Poll Tax. That was called assimilation. People of Color had to “pass” as white and fit into our White community. The support for policies that enforce the idea that White is the norm to which People of Color must conform is racism. Whenever we label white as the norm and People of Color as bad, we are showing our White Supremacy.
Racism is Our Problem. I grew up thinking that racism was a Black or Latinx or Asian problem. The “minorities had to fix it by protesting and changing laws to erase the policies that supported it. It was as if to say, People of Color caused racism by being different, and they had to fix it. But, in the last week, I have been reminded that racism hurts our entire world, and I mean the whole world. Racism destroys individuals, families, communities, societies, rain forests, oceans, and air. When we worship at the altar of self-interest, we destroy those things and people that stand in our way of making a profit. Human rights, the rule of law, protecting the natural world, and defending the role of science when it teaches us inconvenient truths have fallen victim to our greed. Property Tax cuts that benefit the wealthy brutalize the poor. The income tax burden has shifted to those who have the least to spare and reap the smallest benefit from them. Whites created Racism out of greed. Racism continues because Whites believe it serves our self-interest. People of Color may carry a greater burden for racism, but it is our responsibility to address it. Unfortunately, we racists are too preoccupied with loving ourselves to think about the consequences of our actions (or inactions) on others.
My goal is to become anti-racist, not a non-racist. Racism is like a virus that was introduced to North America when the first slave ships of the Dutch West India Company and the British East India Company arrived on our shores as part of the sugar-rum-slaves trade agreements in the 17th century. Like any virus, it has proven quite adaptable as the times changed. It has spread from generation to generation. Slavery yielded to segregation following the Civil War. Segregation gave way to assimilation following the Supreme Court rulings in the 1950s and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s. In the 1970s and 1980s, we used an insidious cultural appropriation that allowed racism to hide beneath the “coolness of our afro” or using (or rather misusing) “rap and hip hop” to prove out non-racist credentials. Racism continues to hide behind the cultural fads and linger along the edges of being a non-racism. Those who would not go along with these subtle mutations of racism were kicked out of the “Kool Kids Klub” of progressivism. All the while, racism erodes the place and dignity of People of Color. Assimilation is racism as long as it only points in one direction, toward assimilation into white institutions and communities. It maintains whiteness as the norm. This is racism. It is different only in kind from the racism that justified the transportation of Africans on the slave ships of the 1600s.
A New Generation of scholars have a better idea. There is a new generation of people who are pointing us beyond racism and assimilation. They are leading us to and beyond what we called multiculturalism 30 years ago. These people are doctoral students and graduates of multi-discipline social science programs, liberal arts programs, and fine arts universities across North America. Many are calling on our culture see recognize that antiracism is far different than non–racism.
Antiracism changes the policies that label differences between groups of people and then assigns a relative value of those people based on those distinctions. Antiracism calls for a society that values people over profit and seeks to make our world safe and life-sustaining for all people. But antiracism is not about our intentions for a better world. It is about what we are doing to foster that change in racist policies. Antiracists learn about and grow through their racism. They help others understand just how adaptable racism can be so that they can begin to lean away from it in their lives. The antiracist works to create power structures that will change the game. They foster a society that moves away from individualistic meritocracy. They celebrate the essential value of every human being. Antiracism is about making the promise of the Enlightenment into the reality of the third millennium, namely life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people. All means all. The antiracist does not rest until all are living in this new world. We have a new generation of scholars who are leading the way beyond slavery, segregation, assimilation, and cultural appropriation and to-cool-for-school progressivism. This new generation does have a better way, antiracism.
Becoming an antiracist society will change a lot of other sins as well. If we become antiracist, we will have a smoother road to becoming anti-ageists, antisexists, and allies for LGBTQI (yes, I learned that there is another letter on that one, intersex.) Antiracism offers a way of seeing our neighbors and the strangers around us as companions, not competitors. It will help us find better ways to deal with our fears and avoid unfair discrimination against those who are different from ourselves. Antiracism will help us discover and address our complicity in their oppression. It creates a pathway that we can walk to embrace those who challenge our world view and our deepest beliefs. As long as we give in to our self-interest and rely on our biases and prejudices against those who are different from ourselves, our world will become less and less able to sustain life itself. Antiracism will allow us to choose life over death for the whole human community.
Finally, I have learned that there is a place for me in this journey. I can become an antiracist. Everyone will need to bring their skills, interests, and energy to this task. The following are a few of the things that I, and we, can do to live into becoming an antiracist.
As I have written before, first, I need to recognize my racism and do my best to root out those places where it still infects my daily life. Along with this, I need to let go of the idea that I will ever be a non-racist. Racism is a part of who I am, but I do not have to let it determine how I live my life. See "The Soul Cancer of Prejudice" blog at Spiritual Health Associates.
I need to amplify the voice of those who are most directly affected by racism. There are many voices out there who can help me and those around me gain a deeper and more meaningful appreciation for racism. Their voices may not reach the ears of many of the other white men and women who are wrestling with these same demons. I can and will broadcast this new generation’s voice on social media, through my writing, through daily conversations, and in personal encounters.
I need to keep learning, growing, and challenging myself. I am a work-in-progress where I measure success against where I sat yesterday rather than how close I am to tomorrow. There are new voices to discover and new ideas to be evaluated and weighed for relevance. There is more darkness in my own life to be revealed by the light of new insights and learnings. There are new companions and dialogue partners to discover around me. There are new opportunities to embrace and quite a few unknown and unjust biases and prejudices to uncover and address. The road will begin each day with an honest assessment of where I was yesterday. Each day will end with gratitude for those who have helped me see a better path for tomorrow.
However, sometimes I need to look back with new eyes if I am to move forward with new energy. A light appeared in my life many years ago, but I was blind to its wisdom. While serving a remarkable community in Toronto in the 1980s and early 1990s, I had the opportunity to see multiculturalism in real life. While racism still existed, there was a commitment by most of that community to receiving and celebrating the gifts that each person brought. There was an honest effort at recognizing and respecting each person for who they were, regardless of their nationality, skin color, education level, and economic status. At the time, I was dazzled by this community. I did not appreciate what it took to sustain them. As I look back with new eyes and insights, I am coming to see the genius that was at work in that small community. My racism veiled my eyes to what that community had to teach. But antiracism allows looking back and beyond the self-interest and self-centeredness that fogged my body-mind-soul at the time. I am learning to cherish the years I spent as part of Hillcrest Christian Church in the heart of Toronto in new ways. Those precious people have much to teach me now that I am ready to learn.
In July of 2020, I am planting only one acorn. Millions more need to be planted in the next decade. Each of us needs to do our part. We do so with the hope that our children will see the trees take root in the soul of America. We look for the day when our grandchildren will be able to enjoy the forest, and our great-grandchildren will live new lives in a land of abundance where justice and mercy walk hand and hand. We are sowing the seeds of a new world, but they will need our tears, our tender care, our courageous protection, and our patience for them to grow into a new creation. Let us pledge our open hearts, our open minds, and our open hands to the wondrous tasks that await us on the road to that new horizon.
Blessings,
Bob
