Just like last week, I came into the room and instantly felt emotional. I won't spend time investigating that here, but our trainers had alerted us that the week would hit into some heavy material. So far we had been getting into a lot of stuff about visioning and organizing strategies, but he hadn't look at white supremacy so dead in the face as this Sunday.
The readings were chock full of history of both racist laws and events (and resistance too) and lists of specific ways in which whites benefit from white supremacy, and also, how those benefits come at a cost to our own humanity and experience of joy. I can't tell you how important and illuminating it was to have all this tangible, detailed information that really drew the picture of white supremacy. I have long struggled with how to convincingly explain to people the way that racism is institutional, often vaguely referencing uneven drug laws or historical things like redlining districts that mortgages used to keep blacks out, and some of the articles really laid bare the step by step process of building this country on oppression.
One thing I hadn't known about before was the Chinese Exclusion Act - that Chinese men were allowed to come to the US but they couldn't bring wives or families, nor marry non-Chinese women. So how could they survive as a people in the US? They weren't mean to; they were meant to labor and die.
Add that to the picture of how when the American Indian Movement tried to reclaim even a miniscule portion of their homelands, the fury of the federal government was unleashed, resulting in a pile of bodies and prison sentences.
Or how World War II was used as an excuse to force Japanese to abandon their homes and businesses and enter forced internment. Where did those homes and businesses, the accumulated wealth of decades of toil, end up? In the hands of whites. After more than 60 years of struggling, some families were able to win reparation awards, that really in no way measures up to the loss of assets after all these years, but it is exciting that some reparations were won. If I try to add up the value of the wealth and labor stolen from African slaves over all those hundreds of years, I can't even fathom the amount of reparations due.
Going through the history of all those measures, I kept coming back to something that was put out during our first reading session: that underneath all the oppression lies the root of economic injustice. So all those events, which were individually so violent and when seen collectively are devastatingly decimating, were ALL DONE BECAUSE OF GREED. I know people talk about that at all the time, and that's why we must fight capitalism, but I never really laid out in a line all the victims of the greed of one small segment of population. Is this human nature? How did this way come to dominate? Does it have nature on its side? How else? How can we fight something like that? Don't get me wrong, I'm not out of hope, I'm just startled by the depth of this system.
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but it's not just physical greed. there's psychological greed in this. i do think there is something in human nature, maybe a fear, that makes us act this way. like dogs who keep eating food cause they're afraid it's their last meal. we are animals, afterall. i'd have more hope if i thought we were increasingly becoming more peaceful as a species, but we're not. or maybe we are but it's hard to tell because we also have bigger guns.
ReplyDeletewhat 's always intrigued me, and maybe intrigue is a bad word and maybe this is a silly question, but is why that segment of the population is in control? i don't think it's ever been explained to me. was it the cold weather of the north that sparked industrial development and the search of other places? spain isn't cold. what gives?