I have just finished examining the work of Ibram X. Kendi who wrote “How to be an Anti-Racist”. He was a professor at American University and has moved to Boston University and Harvard to continue his work on racism. Why did a book about racism immediately take me to a course that I took at St. George’s College in Jerusalem? One evening we had the Chief Rabbi of the area talk about the history of the Jewish people in Israel. The next night we had a PLO officer talk about the history of the area from the Palestinian perspective. There was no common ground in understanding the history. Each saw it differently. How can you have peace with that as the background? They agreed on very little of the pertinent information.
The same basic issue is true for the Black Lives Matter movement. A Lack of common ground is true for this movement as well.
Kendi’s point is that we need a common definition of racism. “Right now racism is limited to what one person does or says to another. Racism needs to be seen as racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.” That has to be a larger part of the discussion as important as the person to person exchange is. Once that is completed, we can make significant progress. What I have taught is that ideas always precede action as a basic tenet of Ethics.
He makes the case for two kinds of racism. Segregationists believe black people are inherently inferior by nature. People who believe in “assimilating” black people believe that black people are inferior because of nurture having been raised in broken low-income homes. Liberals believe that you can civilize black people by nurturing them to get out of these broken homes and join the middle and upper class. He also indicates that middle and upper class blacks make it difficult for the vast majority of black people for white people can say “if they made it so can you.”
He also deals with the issue that stops the racial movement from moving forward. It is the following logic. If I am a racist, I am not a good person. We know that the overwhelming number of us are good white people. Even he has racist ideas moving about in him. Anti-racism asks that we try to “do something” about the racial systems in place like making sure that we vote and many more.
Those are basically his ideas, but here are mine with which he would agree as the heart of the problem. It is classism that is also based in human nature. We like to give a little and get a lot. We like to hold on to our “stuff”, aka money and not give it to others. We are competitive. These are generalizations but I think hold true for a good many white people. If this is the case then we can feel threatened by the progress of others particularly if they are not white. It is worse if we are white in the lower social economic class.
· There is an additional issue that was certainly in a group of which I was one on my journey from nobody in the lower class to somebody in the middle/upper class. I never looked around and said to myself “how can I help someone else get there with me.” It was hard enough for me to get out but because of educational opportunities where I enjoyed great success, as a result of very hard work, that also lifted me up. But few people say that if I could make anybody else could too. I am white and there were systems in place that helped me that I didn’t even know about at the time.
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