Power and Privilege, Illusion or Not

Although I'm missing the second day of my semi-mandatory Undoing Racism training for work, because I'm out sick with either a bad cough or H1N1, there were some outstanding ideas presented in the first day that will be helpful to me.

Overall, I did not expect the training to be as earth-shattering to me as it was for many others, since I had an apparently unusually high number of critical perspectives and truths presented to me in high school and college, and I have been involved with enough workshops and trainings on community organizing and radical politics that all of the major concepts are already ingrained in me.

However, a couple of points stood out. Most people in the world are not white. By far. Clearly, this is fairly obvious for anyone that takes 2 seconds to think about it, but it is somethign that we, good white leftists (or well meaning white people, as they say in their trainings) in the US, need to keep reminding ourselves of this. It is a truth that is not borne out by the media we see around ourselves, even now that they insert the token African-American, Asian-American, person using a wheelchair, etc.

Second, it was helpful to know some of the details and meanings behind the original classification of races, which only had 4 races, back in the 16 or 1700s, something I can't recall ever learning. When you then think about all of the other ethnicities that have "become" white over the years in the U.S., it puts a really strong lens on the issue of Latino ethnicity/race in the Census, which has been an ongoing difficulty for decades, and it's not clear to me what the right answer is. The right answer needs to be whatever answer will produce the largest number of people counted as Latino via the census. But not being an expert, it is not clear to me what the methodology would be to do so, nor do I know if there is any potential to change it back from what the 2000 Census did in eliminating Hispanic/Latino as a race category. It's much more than just an issue for the Census, since so many other systems in research and human services will base their demographic classification off of the methodology used by the Census.

In preparation for the Undoing Racism training, many of us watched a PBS documentary called Race: The Power of an Illusion, which, for me, was similarly useful for the tidbits of history rather than the overwhelming messages. When one of our trainers, Diana, reminded us that Jews were the last ethnic group to "become" white before the recent "becoming white" of Latinos via the 2000 Census removing Hispanic as a race choice, it reminded me of something in the film.

In presenting the overwhelming foundation of racism that was unequivocally tied to the founding of the U.S., the film noted that for the first time in the history of modern Western civilization, white was used as the higher status rather than Christian. The primary reason this was mentioned in the film, was to point out that it served to pit poor whites against all blacks, by emphasizing their whiteness as something that increased their power, and preventing alliances between poor whites and poor blacks, against the white (unofficial) aristocracy. But what jolted me was that the very reason that Jews have been able to secure more freedom, power and privilege in the U.S. than any other nation-state in history (one could argue), is inextricably connected to the racist underpinnings of the nation. Now how is one to sit with that and what is one to make of that? And how does it relate to white guilt felt by Jews?

Talk amongst yourselves.