Learn as we go

Collected resources, thoughts and perspectives to help me grow.

[baysidebooks]

The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi (via baysidebooks)

[omisan]

The title " STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING" comes from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” but “by white men for white men,” Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”

Excerpt from the book "Stamped From the Beginning" by Ibram X. Kendi

Ahem! (Clears throat) I'll just leave this here...

[sunwukandy]

Kimberly Jones speaks compellingly about rioting, looting, and the situation black Americans face. Things that seem obvious, but that I hadn’t considered before now: 

1. African Americans were brought here for economic reasons. As Jones says, they were brought “...to do the agricultural work in the south and textile work in the north.”

2. There are historical precedents for black communities succeeding at the “bootstraps” method, creating wealth for themselves and successfully establishing their own affluent communities, only to have them literally demolished by whites. See Tulsa race massacre and Rosewood massacre.

[cigarettecase]

“At first I thought I should just shut up and listen to black people about this issue. But why would I do that? It’s not their problem, it’s mine.

People of colour are being failed by the system. The white system. Like a broken pipe flooding the apartment of the people living downstairs. The faulty system is making their life a misery, but it’s not their job to fix it. They can’t, no one will let them in the apartment upstairs.

This is a white problem. And if white people don’t fix it, someone will have to come upstairs and kick the door in.”

- banksy (instagram)

• new artwork by banksy revealed

[sunwukandy]

No such thing as non-racists

I am reading How to Be an Antiracist , by Ibram X. Kendi. I’m only a few chapters in, but so far the important assertion by the author is: 

“Racist: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.

Antiracist: One you is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.”

Immediately, the defensiveness in me wants to take issue with the “or inaction” of the first definition. Not because I believe inaction in the face of racist action frees one from guilt. It’s just an emotional response, one that I have to counsel towards sense in my own head rather than letting that reaction inform my response. I do not, after all, consider myself a racist, and I’m wary of such a broad definition of the word that might cause it to include me. #oops

I’ve had a number of these moments already in just a few short chapters of this book. Kendi asserts that “do-nothing climate policy” is inherently racist policy, because climate change affects the south (predominately non-White) more than the north, even though the north is more of a contributor to climate change. This too, I felt a strong urge to reject. The cynic in me assured me that Kendi is taking this a beat too far. How can climate change be racist? But I will admit that the more pressing thought was, how quickly would my fellow southerners laugh and dismiss me if I repeated the thought to them. 

But the core idea here is an important distinction. If there was equity across the board already, perhaps there could be non-racist policy and non-racist people. But there isn’t equity, and that’s a truth that even many of the ones perpetuating the status-quo will admit. So when we act, just as when we enact policies, we are either not challenging and/or changing the unequal system that we know exists, or we are challenging and changing it. There can be no nonracist policies because they either support the biased system that exists, or they attempt to create equity. Attempting to do neither means one does the former by default.

[internettythings]

republican governors

[sunwukandy]

Jane Elliot was a school teacher in a rural iowa town in 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. She did a now-famous exercise with her students the day after to teach them about discrimination. 

“...we are still conditioning people in this country and, indeed, all over the globe to the myth of white superiority. We are constantly being told that we don’t have racism in this country anymore, but most of the people who are saying that are white. White people think it isn’t happening because it isn’t happening to them.”

-- 2003 interview with Elliot discussing the exercise, which she continues to run around the world. Link

[sunwukandy]

“...we found that white men don’t know three things. One: we don’t know that we’re part of a group and that we have a culture. Two: we don’t know that others are having a different experience in the world than us. And three: we don’t know that the process of learning this is actually life-changing for us, and we gain so much in the process.” -- Michael Welp

Welp seems to use “know” in the empirical sense. A person can “know” that there’s injustice in the world without it being an impactful and real truth for them. This is an interesting look at some realizations Welp has had, as well as his efforts to help others enjoy the same revelations. 

[sunwukandy]

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

Antisthenes