Without racism, there would be no Ku Klux Klan. Without racism there would have been no Jewish Holocaust. Without racism there would not have a 100 days of genocidal slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans, mostly of Tutsi heritage. Racism is both ugly and vicious but for many it is subconscious. Xenophobes have a fear of others and that is of the perceived stranger and so hate the foreigner. Racism is pernicious and it is the most divisive issue between human beings. It not only cobbles together inequalities but also a sense of inferiority. Racism is borne of exploitation, of the oppressor and the oppressed dichotomy and its dynamical structures. Racism is a most powerful propaganda weapon which seeks to turn people against people in order to secure an ulterior motive. The history of humanity has been polluted by this diabolical ploy. Racism is not about difference, but about the manifestation of difference for the purpose of exploiting an outcome – the perpetuation of power over others.
Racism cannot exist without exploitation. For without power over people inequalities can be bridged. With equality the cruel tool that is racism becomes redundant, benign. Racism is a tool of the oppressor, of the exploiter. Concepts of ‘inferiority’ and of ‘racial supremacy’ are attributions originating in the exclusive pursuit to exploit human beings, whether as chattel or whether to acquire benefit from their dispossession. To achieve these ends the exploiters have disguised their actions with false concepts intended only to justify the oppression and disenfranchisement of peoples. These concepts are sold so powerfully on a wholesale scale that even ‘learned’ individuals justified slavery and racism while the more ignorant developed cultish behaviours around these presumptions. The conscious and subconscious hating comes in various forms, including the claim to superiority – where people truly feel that that their way of living, that their culture is superior to those of others. That’s dangerous because it pits people against people, denying diversity.
America wants to be great again, but America was never great – a country that has engaged in brutality the world over with more than 100 military engagements since World War 2, and its subversion of the internal affairs of other nations. Racism is always used as part of the propaganda package. America that sells itself as the 'land of the free' built its economies on the back of Black slavery – for a long time 90 per cent of the American economy was intertwined with slavery. The poor White masses were taught not to dissent at their own starvation level wages or the slave would replace them. This narrative of the self is sold by Trump in his war against Hispanic immigrants. Across the West we see hate against migrants and refugees, particularly of the ethnic minorities with the racist catch cries, “I want my country back,” “we are full,” “England for the English” and of course “lets make America great again,” where the indigenous people rebel against the idea that they are not special and are just like any other. In the racist, white people are sold their superiority over the black and brown. Martin Luther King said, “When (the White’s) wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide… a psychological bird told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a White man, better than the Black man.”
Remember the mass murder in the US city of Charleston, where a White man killed 9 Black people in a church, seen to be motivated by depression, alienation and mental illness – not terrorism.
In Brisbane Australia, again depression was cited as the cause when an Indian Bus driver, Manmeet Alisher was burned alive by a white man and Queensland Police and media were quick to suggest, one, the attack was not terrorism and two, not racially motivated.
In Brisbane Australia, again depression was cited as the cause when an Indian Bus driver, Manmeet Alisher was burned alive by a white man and Queensland Police and media were quick to suggest, one, the attack was not terrorism and two, not racially motivated.
The highest arrest and jailing rates in the United States of America are of African-Americans, and in Australia of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. One in four African-American males can expect to go to prison. In Australia, one in 9 of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders living have been to prison while in the Northern Territory and Western Australia one in six have been to jail.
For many Western whites, opportunities for reaching the top of the hill seem unattainable. So their identity, their whiteness feels under threat and more important than ever. In other words if you were supported for the majority of your life in a world that re-enforced whiteness, that whites are superior and lacks inferior in need of civilisation – rather than embrace a deconstruction of the truth you become fearful. And because the foundations of your identity were based on denial and non-truths rather than acceptance you fear this “truth” will destroy or diminish an identity you cherish, and because you have no understanding of a world beyond whiteness you have no culturally acceptable way to articulate what you perceive as a crisis.
Morris Dee and J. Richard Cohen also published in a The New York Times article “White Supremacists
Racism continues today in its ugliest exploitative forms as did when the colonialists were pillaging Africa, the Americas, Asia and Australia. Islamophobia is used to turn people against people while the citadel of exploiters loot and pillage. Propaganda is sold daily as is the scare-mongering. Oneness is the greatest threat to the exploiters Without Borders” published in 2015; “We know Islamic terrorists are thinking globally, and we confront that threat. We’ve been too slow to realize that white supremacists are doing the same.”
In the words Martin Luther King, during his March 25, 1965 speech in Montgomery, Alabama. “And so I plead with you this afternoon as we go ahead; remain committed to non-violence. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the White man, but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with conscience. And that will be a day not of the White man, not of the Black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
Diogenes described humanity as citizens of the world and not of nations. Our battle is with the capitalist system that gives rise to racism and perpetuates it but we have no fight with one another. If we have a problem with each other then we have all got a problem and if so we are all in trouble and in some ways we are as bad as each other. In the fight to end the system that oppresses, that turns people against each other, that discriminates and disadvantage, that screw us all, we have to carry this fight together. Racism hurts, it hurts deeply that we are not seen equally and therefore so to beat racism we must indeed see each other equally, live with one another, walk by any neighbour with the love that will bring us together as one – the means and the end are one. In understanding racism let us consider it as an atrocity borne of nothing but to justify something that disservices us all, and that in other words racism is no more than filthy gossip without any truth.
Adapted from here
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