What is
Antiracism?
Meet Jane Elliot (She/Her)
Known Internationally her for teaching, lecturing, diversity training, and recipient of the National Mental Health Association Award for Excellence in Education, and she often holds discussion on bigotry and racism and irrational classism in the American governing systems.
Acknowledging that our governing systems privilege and discriminate on the basis of race, sex, and sexuality, is a form of anti-racism.
What is a racist?
A racist is someone who communicates ideas that are racist, supports racist policies, or by being apathetic to racism.
A racist idea is one that posits any racial group as being better or worse than another e.g. biologically, culturally, or any other respect.
Meet Ibram X. Kendi (He/Him)
author of the book:
How to Be an Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi on Antiracism:
“a racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way,” (Kendi,19).
“an antiracist idea is any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group,” (Kendi, 20).
“a racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups,”
(Kendi, 18).
“an antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.”
(Kendi, 18).
“there is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy."
"Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups,” (Kendi, 18).
identity as empowerment.
From the Combahee River Collective
"identity politics" was not just about who you were; it was also about what you could do to confront the oppression you were facing.
"Or, as Black women had argued within the broader feminist movement: 'the personal is political.'"
"This slogan was not just about 'lifestyle' issues, as it came to be popularly understood, rather it was initially about how the experiences within the lives of Black women shaped their political outlook."
"The experiences of oppression, humiliations, and the indignities created by poverty, racism, and sexism opened Black women up to the possibility of radical and revolutionary politics." (How We Get Free, 9)
"This is, perhaps, why Black feminists identified reproductive justice as a priority, from abortion rights to ending the sterilization practices that were common in gynecological medicine when it came to treating working-class Black and Puerto Rican women in the United States, including Puerto Rico."
"Identity politics became a way that those suffering that oppression could become politically active to confront it."
(How We Get Free: The Combahee River Collective Statement)
Am I Racist?
When we don't understand the issues that affect racial minorities, women, and those of a particular sexual orientation, we become complicit in the norms that uphold the oppressive systems that affect these groups, and ultimately contribute to preserving their oppressive state.
Can BIPOC be racist?
Any person can hold an anti-Black ideas, and therefore contribute to upholding systems of oppression through prejudice.
Ideas and stereotypes hold power as significant as systematic action and benign ignorance when it comes to ending oppressive systems and norms.
BIPOC stands for Black and Indigenous People of Color
"This is not
MY fault.
This is not
MY problem."
It's easy to feel like none of what has occurred in history is our fault,
but we are not asking you to accept responsibility
so that we can blame you.
Instead we are asking you to accept the responsibility to acknowledge world issues in inequality, to investigate the issues which perpetuate inequality among people of differing race, gender and sexuality, and to act with meaningful intention to contribute to dismantling long embedded systematic issues.
Research and Essays in
Antiracism
How We Get Free: The Combahee River Collective Statement
The Combahee River Collective Statement believes that if all systems abusing the "most oppressed" are dismantled, then you will have liberated all oppressed peoples.
In order to inspire political action, it calls for solidarity across differing identities in order to gather power against oppressive forces.
This all "…to strengthen the political commitments from other groups by getting them to recognize the different struggles were related to each other and connected under capitalism."
"It called for greater awareness and understanding, not less."
Through understanding an array of intersectional identities and the oppressive experiences connected to those, we are able to create bridges for solidarity with those identities and experiences, and in due time, give rise to the end of oppressive experiences.
Dr. Phillip Ewell:
Music Theory and
the White Racial Frame
Phil Ewell launched a blog in order to seek racial, gender, and social justice in the field of music theory.
"Everyone in my field knows that it is unremittingly white and male, but once I began to understand how whiteness and maleness work in tandem to suppress non-whiteness and non-maleness, both subconsciously and consciously, I began to do the academic work in order to expose this unjust side of music theory so that we might begin the process of deconstructing our white-male structures."
He considers himself an activist in the field, one, "...who advocates for change by exposing how existing white-male power structures suppress marginalized voices, and by pressing for the necessary changes so that all voices in music theory can be heard."
Blue
Eyes Brown Eyes
In a 1968 response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jane Elliott planned a study in her classroom "Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise."
Its current fame came from exercise labels which participants as inferior or superior based solely upon the color of their eyes and exposes them to the experience of being a minority. Everyone who is exposed to Jane Elliott's work, be it through a lecture, workshop, or video, is dramatically affected by it.
Have you thought of what this study could offer perspectives in your own life?
