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August 5 - September 6, 2023
our societies, our policies, our ideas and our histories and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter.
King Afonso asked Gomes Eanes de Zurara to defend the lucrative commerce in human lives, which he did through the construction of a Black race, an invented group, invented through racist ideas. This cause and effect—a racist power creates racist policies out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.
The word “racism” went out of fashion in the bipartisan haze of racial progress—Obama’s political brand—and many Republicans and Democrats started to treat “racist” as the equivalent to the N-word, a vicious pejorative rather than a descriptive term.
Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.
the unfortunate truth is that their post-racial strategy makes no sense in our racist world.
if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity.
We, the young Black super-predators, were apparently being raised with an unprecedented inclination toward violence—in a nation that presumably did not raise White enslavers, lynchers, mass incarcerators, police officers, corporate officials, venture capitalists, financiers, drunk drivers, and war hawks to be violent.
Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.
this system is hardly a justice system. It is not oriented toward justice, meaning it is not oriented toward accountability, toward healing or eliminating the root causes of harm, whether structural or individual.
It is no longer accurate to call it the criminal justice system. It is more precise to call it the criminal “punishment” system. And this system must be abolished to bring into being antiracism, safety, and justice for the people.
“Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence.”
The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist as the idea that languages inside Europe are fixed.
The act of making a cultural standard and hierarchy is what creates cultural racist ideas.
To be antiracist is to reject cultural standards and level cultural difference.
Hip-hop has had the most sophisticated vocabulary of any American musical genre.
To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals.
Racial-group behavior is a figment of the racist’s imagination. Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups. And it is racist power that creates the policies that cause racial inequities and injustices.
to explain a racial disparity by speaking about the deficient behaviors of individuals of a particular race is to say that particular race is behaviorally deficient. And to suggest that a race is behaviorally deficient is a racist idea. In other words, the new focus on individual behaviors to explain group disparity is intended to ensure the deniability of racist ideas, when in fact it is proof of racist ideas.
in his own “Talented Tenth” essay in 1903 listed twenty-one Black leaders, all but one of whom was biracial.
toward White people. But since White people remain on the higher end of nearly every racial disparity, we can conclude that Black people (and non-Black people) hardly wield racist policy when being racist toward White people. And the instances of Black people engaging in anti-White discrimination are as negligible as Black people engaging in voter fraud, even as propagandists keep fearmongering about both.
Racist White people do not want to define racial hierarchy or policies that yield racial injustices as racist. To do so would be to define their ideas and policies as racist. Instead, they define policies leading to justice as racist. Ideas not centering White lives are racist. Beleaguered racist White people who can’t imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Embattled police officers who can’t imagine losing their right to profile and brutalize respond with “Blue Lives Matter.”
racist power thrives on anti-White racist ideas—more hatred only makes their power greater.
White supremacists are the ones supporting unjust policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who
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When a policy exploits impoverished people, it is a classist policy. When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy. When a policy exploits Black impoverished people, the policy exploits at the intersection of classist and racist policies—a policy intersection of class racist policies. When we racialize classes, support racist policies against those race-classes, and justify them by racist ideas, we are engaging in class racism.
To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in impoverished Black neighborhoods are pathological. Pathological conditions are making the residents sicker and poorer while they strive to survive and thrive, while they invent and reinvent cultures and behaviors that may be different but never inferior to those of residents in richer neighborhoods.
Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.
economists,
explored the role of policy in the “cycle of poverty”—predatory exploitation moving in lockstep with meager income and opportunities, which kept even the hardest-working people in poverty and made poverty expensive—Lewis
Research shows, in fact, that impoverished Black people are more optimistic about their prospects than impoverished White people are.
it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.
Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins—capitalism and racism—when it initiated the transatlantic human trade of African people. These newborns looked up with tender eyes to their ancient siblings of sexism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia.
The conjoined twins are again struggling to stay alive and thrive as their own offspring—inequality, war, pandemics, and climate change—threaten to kill them, and all of us, off.
Impoverished Black people are much more likely to live in neighborhoods where other families are impoverished, creating a poverty of resources and opportunities. Sociologists refer to this as the “double burden.”
“The discovery of gold and silver in America,” Karl Marx once wrote, “the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Marx recognized the birth of the conjoined twins.
The antiracist assumption underlying integration is that in a multiracial nation, all racial groups can live together in harmony and equity where biological and behavioral sameness is acknowledged, ethnic and cultural differences are respected, and the diversity of it all benefits all.
Separation is not always segregation. The antiracist desire to separate from racist neighbors is different from the segregationist desire to separate from “inferior” Black people.
To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist.
To be antiracist (and feminist) is to level the different race-genders, is to root the inequities between the equal race-genders in the policies of gender racism.
The average life expectancy of a transgender woman of color in the Americas is between thirty and thirty-five years.
To understand why racism lives is to understand not only its power but the history of antiracist failure—why people have failed to create antiracist societies.
Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.
An individual can challenge racism as an antiracist. An individual can express racist ideas, can support racist policies. An individual can be racist. But an individual cannot engage in racism; racism is structural, institutional, and systemic.
‘Respectable’ individuals can absolve themselves from individual blame: they would never plant a bomb in a church; they would never stone a black family,” Ture and Hamilton wrote. “But they continue to support political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies.”
Policymakers and policies make societies and institutions, not the other way around. The United States is a racist nation because its policymakers and policies have been racist from the beginning.
The history of racism is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn bleeds ignorance and hate.
