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I was just thinking the other day how "white supremacist" the Bush people are (not necessarily in the skinhead sense of the word) according to what I've read about racism. And considering the fact that African-Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic, the Democratic party has done pitifully little to understand black issues and reward their loyalty.
I got into reading African-American authors a couple of years ago. It was such an enlightening experience that I just kept going and going. I read over a dozen of the feminist bell hooks's books (and she's written many more), a lot of Alice Walker's essays, some Audre Lordes, a novel called The Street, etc. and I really learned a lot not only about black perspectives, but about myself. And that they have figured out a lot about white people that we wouldn't like to admit about ourselves. When I started reading I thought I pretty much knew what to expect, but that wasn't true! Until you really listen to/read people of color in their own words, you can't pretend to know what they're thinking or feeling. And it's highly unfortunate/(stupid?) that we haven't done more listening because there's quite a lot we could learn.
There's a passage from a great book called Women's Reality by Anne Wilson Schaef that describes well the system of power relations between the sexes, and of the white race in general over everybody else, that I think is very illustrative:
"The White Male System sees its mythology as all-knowing and all-revealing. In truth, however, it is just the opposite. I realized this most clearly many years ago when I was doing a workshop on racial issues in a Southern state. (This was during the heyday of the civil rights movement, when school districts were required to sponsor workshops on this topic in order to keep their public funding). The group I was working with was about half Blacks and half whites. Neither side wanted to disturb the tenuous equilibrium they had established thus far, and they invited me in because I was perceived as essentially harmless.
I had designed a relatively simple exercise I wanted to try out on the group in order to generate some data. I asked the participants to draw three columns on a sheet of paper. In the first, they were to list those characteristics which they perceived as uniquely Black. In the second, they were to list those they perceived as uniquely white. In the third, they were to list characteristics they saw as common to both groups.
After explaining what I wanted the group to do, I sat down to wait. After a while, the anxiety in the room became almost palpable. I decided to find out what was happening.
I found that the blacks had done precisely what I had asked them to do. Because they knew the Black system, they had been able to list characteristics they perceived as uniquely Black. Because they also knew the White Male System -- they had to in order to survive -- they had been able to list characteristics they saw as uniquely white. They were ready to move on to the third column.
The whites were having great difficulty completing the exercise, however. Because they knew nothing about the Black system, they could not do column one. Because they could not see the White Male System for what it is (one has to experience non-pollution before being able to recognize pollution), they could not do column two either. Increasingly frustrated, most of them had gone directly to column three. They had decided to ignore the differences between the two systems ("Let's not look at differences. Differences separate us!") and focus instead on common characteristics ("Let's look at ways in which we're alike and ignore the experience of being Black in the White Male System!")
In addition, as often happens in educational groups, the whole group had started cheating. People were looking at one another's papers. When the whites saw that the Blacks had been able to come up with answers for the first two columns, they became agitated ("What do they know that we don't know -- and how can this be?") When the Blacks saw that the whites had not been able to come up with answers for those two columns, they felt exposed. ("We cannot let them now that WE know that THEY don't know MORE. We'll lose our jobs if they find that we know they aren't superior.")
What the group had just experienced was a full-fledged myth-breaker. The whites were not superior and did not know more than the Blacks. In fact, the Blacks knew more. They had to. They had learned all about the White Male System because they needed to in order to survive in it. Because the whites did not have to know the Black system to survive, the whites had learned little or nothing about the Black system. The only way for them to find out about it would have been for Blacks to teach it to them, and that had not happened. Nor was it likely to happen.
Both sides were exhausted by this exercise. The whites were supposed to be innately superior and all-knowing -- but they could not come up with answers! The Blacks were trying to support the myth that whites were innately superior and all-knowing -- in order to keep their jobs -- but they had completed the exercise. Sometimes it is difficult to remember what one is not supposed to know! The myth was that the whites knew more. The reality was that the Blacks did."
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