[Antiracism] The White Supremacist in Us, by Rinku Sen

Mon Jun 29 10:30:17 EDT 2009

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rinku-sen/the-white-supremacist-in_b_217306.html

            Your request is being processed... 

                                Rinku Sen
                                Rinku Sen is Executive Director of Applied Research Center and Publisher of ColorLines.

																		Posted: June 18, 2009 09:48 AM

															BIO

								Become a Fan

								Get Email Alerts
								Bloggers' Index

					The White Supremacist in Us

Over
the past two weeks, Americans struggled to make sense of tragic
shootings that seemed disconnected at first glance. Anti-Semite James
Von Brunn killed Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard at the Holocaust Museum. George Tiller's
murder a few days earlier seemed to be about abortion, yet his shooter,
Scott Roeder, also had roots in the racial purity movement. Yesterday,
it was reported that the murders of Raul Flores and his daughter in Arizona were charged to three people with white supremacist ambitions. 

There's been lots of discussion about why hate crimes are rising
and how to prevent future tragedies, yet we've largely missed the
relationship between extremist racism and the less obvious version that
plays out in our political debates. These shooters all felt that people
of color (along with women and Jews) have stolen the birthright of
white men. In his book "Kill the Best Gentiles," Von Brunn rails
against "the calculated destruction of the White Race." Roeder was a
member of the Montana Freemen; commenters on white supremacist websites
praised him for ensuring that Tiller would never "kill another White
baby." Flores' alleged murderers appear to have been preparing for a
white uprising. 

Our discussion of these events has boiled down to the idea that
racism is an intentional, violent act of a lone crazy white man.
Underlying this idea, however, is the unspoken assumption that since we
criminalized such hatred through civil rights laws, there's nothing
else we can do as a country. Collectively, we bemoan the backwardness
of "some" people before we move on, thinking of racism as isolated
extremism. 

But social psychologists who developed the Implicit Associations
Test at Harvard and the Universities of Virginia and Washington in 1998
tell us that notions of the innate goodness of white people and the
equally innate badness of people of color are so deeply embedded in our
minds that we're totally unaware of making such judgments. Even I, a
woman of color and racial justice activist for 25 years, have taken
their online test with dismaying results. White supremacists speak
their beliefs aloud, but we all have similar ideas and act on them in
tiny ways that add up. 

The notion that people of color get more than our share plays out
again and again in our institutions and policies, expanding the racial
divide. If we think that Black people manufactured the foreclosure
crisis in order to get a handout, the law limits their ability to get
relief. If we think that undocumented immigrants are leeching off the
U.S., we will not pass an immigration reform that changes their status.
If we think that children of color can't learn, we don't do what's
needed to improve public schools. 

As a nation, we are about to make critical decisions about all our
systems. Unconscious biases already permeate these debates every time
we ask who deserves how much of health care, education, jobs. Our
discourse is heavily coded. There's no need to say that "illegal"
equals Mexican, or that the "irresponsible" homeowner is black, or that
"unqualified" means woman of color. Even if we don't rhetorically
attach these ideas to particular groups of people, our brains have been
conditioned to make the connections anyway. 

There's particular danger in characterizing racism as isolated
madness during the greatest recession in 60 years. We now have to
rebuild our economy - will we continue with a model that includes stark
inequality? That seems likely if we can't grapple honestly with the
racial gap, since structural inequality will always make our economy
more vulnerable to a crash. That inequality is also what keeps us
apart, in separate neighborhoods, schools and workplaces. That distance
makes it much easier for violent extremists to recruit struggling white
people into their ranks. 

As white communities, particularly men, face conditions that have
been chronic in communities of color, their vulnerability to racist
ideas could disrupt the possibility of working together for real
solutions. The unemployment of white men has more than doubled over the
past year, from 4.2 to 8.5 percent. They are shocked, angry, and ready
to direct all that heat somewhere. The most productive place for that
energy is in alliance with communities of color, so that together, we
can focus on changing the policies that allowed elites to run off with
all our assets. 

It is possible to craft truly universal social and economic policy
that can both generate racial equity and improve life for everyone,
including unemployed white men. There were racially-fueled murders
before last week, and there's every reason to think there will be more.
As we grieve, the Obama Administration and Congress continue the
immense task of rebuilding the economy and reforming immigration and
healthcare. Something positive can emerge from these tragic events if
our efforts to understand them led to policies that actually brought us
together - in our lives, as well as in our minds. 

				Economy

				Immigration

				The Recession

				Barack Obama

                Related News On Huffington Post:

Eduardo Suárez

413-335-6224

_________________________________________________________________
Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. 
http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_BR_life_in_synch_062009
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.hampshire.edu/pipermail/antiracism/attachments/20090629/bb62ec46/attachment.htm>