Prejudiced, Racist, Privileged, “Woke”?

After sitting in on a few sessions of the Diversity Study Group at Pilgrim Place, the residential senior community where I live, I was invited to share thoughts on why racism cannot be ascribed to racial minorities. This essay was the end result, after major and significant portions of a longer essay were jettisoned in favor of brevity and succinctness. I may post the longer version later. For now here is the short version,

First, it is important to grasp that “Isms” artificially construct a high border wall between two groups of people — the “in group” and the “out group,” however defined — to prevent the two groups from discovering their common interests and overcoming their common exploiters.

Racism is systemic, extractive and exploitive and can only be exercised by people who have usurped power on the basis of the race construct. Racism is a function of power and greed. It typically defines one group by virtue of skin tone or origins as superior and “denigrates” another (literally: “blackens” the reputation of the group and its individual members) to make associating with them or subscribing to their causes undesirable. Racism is often associated with European explorers, settlers and pioneers and with colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Racial prejudice, on the other hand, can be laid on us by anyone on any side of  constructed walls of division and tends to further exacerbate our “otherness” and to prevent solidarity on both sides of the artificial border wall. It can even be a tool of racism used to enflame each “side” against the other. 

Prejudice itself is based on not knowing someone. Knowing someone opens us to affinity and appreciation of one another and turns unwarranted judgment on the basis of assumed (but often false) facts into capacity for listening and suspension of judgment as we may “friend” one another.

One of the means which systems of oppression (“isms”) have for maintaining themselves is the bestowing of conscious or unconscious privilege much like a benefice or an emolument on the “in group” which helps perpetuate its members’ identity with the oppressors rather than the oppressed. “White privilege” allows people defined as “white” to easily access some resources not readily available to the “unwhite” on equal terms – housing, credit, education, healthcare, even a ready supply of healthy food. 

Privilege, once assumed and enjoyed, is not easy to forfeit voluntarily. Who gives up hearth and home, pension plan or healthcare or a relatively higher sense of security and police protection just because these were acquired by unintentional participation in an intentionally unjust system? And how difficult it seems to be to convince like-privileged people to take on the task of universal sharing of even the most basic part of that privilege!

“Colorblindness” can also be a tool of racism, preventing us from understanding the often mitigating circumstances imposed by the dominant group on the “other”! “Whites” need to become “woke” to the racial and racist reality of their privileged world in order to begin to deconstruct it successfully.

Let me know what you think!

— Jim Dwyer

(See next post for TED talks suggested to me as relevant to the topic.)