See menu for related video. Introductions 1. Please say your name and something about yourself you want to share. In what ways do you believe that understanding racism can help make you a more effective grassroots social justice activist?
Agenda Review 1. What is Racism? Shinin the Lite on White focuses primarily on racisms effect on white people. Both pieces form part of an analysis of the U. The analysis is specific to the U. I call this session an historical introduction because I believe that we cannot understand how racism operates today, if we do not know its history.
And if we dont know how it works today, we cant work effectively to challenge it tomorrow. Scribe it on the newsprint. Fill up no more than one page of print. Few or none mention the word race. I believe that the inability to decide on a common action is the result of a consciously constructed campaign of confusion implemented over the last 30 years. Im not a conspiracy theorist. Im talking about people in power making plans over coffee, in board rooms, on golf courses. All legal and above board.
A bit of history will help make my point. A Campaign of Confusion on Racism During the height of the Southern Black Freedom struggle, in the s and s, people were clear on what racism was.
Racism was visible, legal and institutionalized. They called it "segregation. Every institution was separate, unequal, maintained for the clear purpose of subordinating people of African descent and benefiting all classes of people of European descent. The movement, led by African Americans, was massive and multiracial. But the price activists paid was high. In the South, for example, when Black people challenged racism, they were often fired, evicted, imprisoned, raped or murdered.
When white people challenged racism, they were called race traitors, ostracized by their friends and neighbors, denied opportunities to earn a living, and occasionally had crosses burned in front of their houses. In spite of the overwhelming odds, the power of organized, committed people won some significant gains, the most prominent of which was the end to legal apartheid.
Perhaps even more important, people who organized got a real sense of their own power. When the Black Liberation Movement moved north, activists targeted institutions schools, housing, social servicesthat practiced segregation in fact, though not by law. Furthermore, African Americans called for selfdetermination in their own communities, and challenged the white domination of institutions within their communities. Many liberal whites worked as professionals within these institutions and felt their privilege personally threatened.
Using their discomfort with the term Black Power as an excuse, they abandoned their solidarity with the Black liberation struggle. Progressive whites abandoned their solidarity for different reasons.
As they began to organize in their own communities, against the war in Vietnam, for educational transformation, for womens and gay liberation, and for an end to environmental degradation, they found that it was very difficult to mobilize large numbers of white activists if the organizers demanded that these activists start from a firm antiracist perspective, a lens through which to view their own issues.
SNCC Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a leading group in the southern Black Freedom Movement had suggested that radical whites organize against racism in their own communities in order to build genuine coalitions between activists of color and white activists.
But white activists simply organized in their own communities and said less and less about racism. There were many exceptions to this racist organizing: for example, the Students for a Democratic Society SDS was the largest antiracist organization made up of mostly white students that the country had ever seen. Meanwhile, the government was exercising its own form of virulent and violent racism.
Under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, with the complicity of police departments all over the country, the government waged a war against revolutionaries of color: African American, indigenous, Chicano, Puertorriqueno and Asian American.
Hundreds were imprisoned, exiled or murdered. The FBI planted agents within revolutionary organizations, who spread distrust and often incited incendiary actions as a way to entrap activists, and ensure them long prison terms.
With liberation movements in disarray, whitecontrolled institutions began to redefine the meaning of the term racism in order both to undercut white support for liberation struggles, and to aggravate divisions among activists of color. Word Power: A Small Group Exercise Earlier in this workshop, we learned one definition of power created by The Peoples Institute: Power is control of or access to those institutions sanctions by the state.
Now Id like to introduce another definition, also used by The Peoples Institute: Power is the ability to define reality and to convince other people that it is their definition. Definition created by Dr. Wade Nobles Lets see how this definition works in relationship to different meanings of the term racism that have been promoted by schools, the media, politicians, and research institutes over the last thirty years.
Please pair up with the person next to you. Each pair will take one card with a common definition of racism on it. Please analyze the definition in the following way: if a person believed this definition or description, and chose to take action based on that belief: 1.
What kind of action might the person take? Who might be oppressed by the action? Who might benefit from the action? Use your imagination. If you believed in this statement, how might you act? Please analyze the definition in the following way: If a person believed this definition or description, and chose to take action based on that belief:.
Reverse racism is a form of racism. Please analyze the definition in the following way: If a person believed this definition or description, and chose to take action based on that belief: 1. Racism is personified by the TV character Archie Bunker. Racism is the same as prejudice or discrimination. Racism is the same as race relations. Anti-racism is the same as diversity or multi-culturalism".
Racism is an oppression like other isms: sexism, classism, or heterosexism. Reverse racism is supposedly something nasty that people of color do to white people. The term was first coined during the presidential campaign of arch segregationist George Wallace. In order to win white working class support in the South, Wallace asserted that government programs that supported Black people were deliberately victimizing white people.
He called this governmental action reverse racism. In my 35 years of doing antiracist organizing, I have actually witnessed only one example of reverse racism.
That was when the lawyers defending the white cops who beat Rodney King played the tape of that beating backwards during the trial! But in spite of the bogus nature of reverse racism, it was brilliant as a campaign strategy. Dubbed the Southern Strategy by electoral analysts, its aim was to win white working and middle class voters away from the Democratic Party by consciously catering to their racism. The strategy bore bitter fruit. Wallaces American Independent Party garnered 10 million white voters, who became the foundation for the New Right organizations of the Republican Party which now control Congress and the bipartisan national dialogue on virtually all social and economic issues.
Pop culture did its bit to confuse the white populace. TV created the image of Archie Bunker, the loud mouth, verbally racist, white working class man who was funny to some viewers as well as obnoxious. The image of Archie the racist promoted several false concepts of racism: its the result of individual, not institutional, behavior; its carried out only by white working class men, not white working class women or white middle class men and women; and it is overt language that may be sickening and offensive, but is really just harmless talk.
This definition of racism has been widely disseminated in public schools and universities, so that many people use these terms as synonyms. But they are not. Prejudice is a prejudgment, which can be either positive or negative, about a person, group, event or thing, for or against.
Discrimination is action based on that prejudice. A negative prejudice about a group of people is often called a stereotype. An action based on a stereotype is usually called bigotry. What distinguishes all these terms from racism is that none of them necessarily involve a power relationship as a condition of their existence. For example, a person of color can be prejudiced against another person of color or a white person, but that doesn't make her a racist because she has little or no access to the institutional power that could back up her actions.
Why has the misconception of racism as prejudice or discrimination been so widely used in educational settings? Educational institutions have been a major political battleground against racism and for community of color selfdetermination since the mid s. Activists have challenged racist school curricula, teaching staff, disciplinary procedures against children of color, tracking systems, limitations of access to higher education, and lack of accountability of schools to the community.
My belief is that popularizing racism as prejudice is consciously used to take all white professionals working in any capacity in any school systems off the hook. They are not implementing institutional racism, because there is no such thing! Its not an issue of power but merely of prejudice.
This definition is, I think, a creation of sociologists. Racism isnt just about the Archie Bunkers. Its about how groups of different races treat each other. Whats left out of this group dynamics explanation of racism is any analysis of the differential power of the participating groups. Perhaps this is because the mostly white sociologists using this analysis do not choose to recognize how mainstream white institutions demonstrate preferential treatment to all white groups as compared to all groups of people of color.
Anti-racism Is the same as diversity or multi-culturalism. Progressives have added to the campaign of confusion. This particular mis definition of racism has been perpetuated by social justice educators and trainers. Diversity refers to different kinds of people: gay, straight, old, young, white, different communities of color, able, physically challenged, etc. When white folks use the term diversity, they usually mean a few folks who are not white in a predominantly white group.
The term diversity achieved popularity among antiracist trainers when many Fortune companies hired these trainers to run diversity workshops for their multi- racial work forces. Corporate CEOs knew that they needed to ensure. Multicultural at its best celebrates different forms of culture; it has nothing necessarily to do with races of people, nor with diversity of people. A group or institution that endorses multiculturalism can support racism or antiracism.
As Peoples Institute trainers ask in their Undoing Racism Workshop, If you want to have a multicultural table, what does white culture bring to that table? The table. In the mid s, many white progressives began organizing themselves through consciousness of their own oppression as individuals and as part of a group, instead of around issues.
This method of organizing became known as identitybased politics. It was a very powerful form of consciousnessraising for thousands of people, and became the basis for many of the social justice movements against sexism and homophobia and antisemitism.
But identitybased politics also has had some negative effects, such as: 1. Oppression olympics a term coined by Elizabeth Martinez : endless arguments that begin with my pain is worse than your pain; 2. False analogies between racism usually referring to the experience of African Americans and other isms, especially sexism, heterosexism and antisemitism. Although all these are forms of oppression, there is no historical similarity between the slavery experienced by people of African descent, the genocide experienced by Native Americans, the colonial wars of conquest experienced by Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Filipinos and any forms of discrimination faced by European immigrants once they came to the United States.
These false analogies also paper over the distinct history of racism that has pervaded white progressive movements of electoral reformers, women, workers, farmers, environmentalists, antiwar and queer activists for the last years.
Finally, false analogies marginalize the issues of activists of color within these social justice movements, and prevent these activists from exercising their leadership potential in building bridges among different identitybased social movements.
A Working Definition of Racism If you take apart the term racism, you get an ism an oppression based on race. The Peoples Institute uses this working definition: Racism equals race prejudice plus power. Weve already defined prejudice. Lets examine race and power. What she usually means by this statement is that she doesn't want to perpetuate racial categories by acknowledging that she is white.
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