john powell: KPFA Evening Dialogue - A History of Race and Power

[deutsey]

http://diversity.berkeley.edu/john-powell-kpfa-dialogue-history-race-power



Haas Institute director john a. powell began his speech Wednesday night with an unexpected analogy.

“Race is a little bit like gravity,” he told more than 100 audience members at Berkeley’s St. John’s Presbyterian Church, who were gathered that evening to hear powell talk as part of a lecture series hosted by Bay Area radio station KPFA. “We’re all affected by it, but we don’t really understand it,” he said. “Race is incredibly complicated and even the experts struggle with it.”

In short, he said, race deserves careful thinking.

"Ferguson has been a long time coming. [It's] the modern expression of the slave patroller."

powell then did just that, leading the audience through a complicated history of the construction of race in America, synthesizing history, psychology, racial theory, and U.S. politics to offer a difficult portrait of American society.

Race, powell said, is both culturally malleable and socially constructed by and for the benefit of elites. He began his historical journey through American race relations before the Civil Rights Movement, before Jim Crow, and even before America’s founding. Instead, powell rooted his racial history with the early American colonies, specifically with Bacon’s Rebellion, a revolt led by white indentured servants who desired a greater portion of the colonial pie.