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When I woke up this morning, I started to get ready for work because I forgot that it was a holiday. That's fair, I guess, since I checked just now and I've never posted about Martin Luther King Jr. Day either. Hmmm.
I did some more reading today (corporate holiday) for my job's DEIJ "homework". One of the books I picked is "White Fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism". Long title, but it's pretty good. I think the central difficulty is succinctly explained in the first dozen pages. Basically, we're all steeped in complex systems, and we have to name and address those systems.
In light of this insight, it's particularly bothersome that our local newspaper posted an opinion piece yesterday by their favorite hate-clicks writer, complaining about racism education in schools. (To be fair, she also dislikes the gays.) That newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the George Floyd protests, even though Unicorn Riot did so much more and better on that topic. This whole situation is so on point.
Happy #MLKDay? We need better systems. I guess that's the essence of this holiday. Justice demands better from us.
I did some more reading today (corporate holiday) for my job's DEIJ "homework". One of the books I picked is "White Fragility: Why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism". Long title, but it's pretty good. I think the central difficulty is succinctly explained in the first dozen pages. Basically, we're all steeped in complex systems, and we have to name and address those systems.
"... the mere suggestion that being white has meaning often triggers a range of defensive responses. These include emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and withdrawal from the stress-inducing situation. These responses work to reinstate white equilibrium as they repel the challenge, return our racial comfort, and maintain our dominance within the racial hierarchy. I conceptualize this process as white fragility...
I could see the power of the belief that only bad people were racist, as well as how individualism allowed white people to exempt themselves from the forces of socialization. I could see how we are taught to think about racism only as discrete acts committed by individual people, rather than as a complex, interconnected system...
Interrupting the forces of racism is ongoing, lifelong work because the forces conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play; our learning will never be finished... For example, perhaps you grew up in poverty, or are an Ashkenazi Jew of European heritage, or were raised in a military family. Perhaps you grew up in Canada, Hawaii, or Germany, or had people of color in your family. None of these situations exempt you from the forces of racism, because no aspect of society is outside of these forces."
I could see the power of the belief that only bad people were racist, as well as how individualism allowed white people to exempt themselves from the forces of socialization. I could see how we are taught to think about racism only as discrete acts committed by individual people, rather than as a complex, interconnected system...
Interrupting the forces of racism is ongoing, lifelong work because the forces conditioning us into racist frameworks are always at play; our learning will never be finished... For example, perhaps you grew up in poverty, or are an Ashkenazi Jew of European heritage, or were raised in a military family. Perhaps you grew up in Canada, Hawaii, or Germany, or had people of color in your family. None of these situations exempt you from the forces of racism, because no aspect of society is outside of these forces."
In light of this insight, it's particularly bothersome that our local newspaper posted an opinion piece yesterday by their favorite hate-clicks writer, complaining about racism education in schools. (To be fair, she also dislikes the gays.) That newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the George Floyd protests, even though Unicorn Riot did so much more and better on that topic. This whole situation is so on point.
Happy #MLKDay? We need better systems. I guess that's the essence of this holiday. Justice demands better from us.