Racism and White Privilege

Everyone - everyone who's Canadian, that is -  knows those nasty Americans are racist.  It's one of the  articles of faith we Canadians subscribe to. Moreover,  this knowledge braces up, reinforces, and shores up our feeling of superiority to  Americans.   

After all, look at how they treat Afro-Americans. True, they don't call them niggers anymore. But look at their incarceration rates! 

From Human Rights Watch:

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/usa/race/

Incarceration of Blacks

· In twelve states, between 10 and 15 percent of adult black men are incarcerated.

· In ten states, between 5 and 10 percent of black adults are incarcerated.

· In twelve states, black men are incarcerated at rates between twelve and sixteen times greater than those of white men.

· In fifteen states, black women are incarcerated at rates between ten and thirty-five times greater than those of white women.

And from :

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/usa/incarceration/


Blacks make up 12% or so of the total U.S. population and  represent more than 40% of inmates:


U.S. population by race and then Us inmates by race:

Tsk,tsk.  Plainly racist, right?  Not like us, right?  We're a tolerant, accepting lot, right?

Right.

From Prisonjustice at (Stats are all 2005/6, unless stated otherwise. Updated Aug 2008:

http://www.prisonjustice.ca/politics/facts_stats.html

Aboriginal Adults (2005-2006)

• 4% of the total canadian adult population - (2006 Census)
• 24% of admissions to provincial/territorial sentenced custody
• 18% of admissions to federal prisons
• 19% of admissions to remand
• 21% of male prisoner population
• 30% of female prisoner population

Gee, those stats look nastily familiar.  

But  that's all about criminals!    We don't see that out in the "normal" population! We don't ,do we? We're not racist!  That's not what research shows.

"As part of his research, Oreopoulos tailored 6,000 mock resumes to specific job requirements in 20 occupational categories and sent them to employers with online job postings in the Greater Toronto area.  Each resume listed a bachelor’s degree and up to six years of experience but the study found resumes with names like Jill Wilson or John Martin received interview callbacks 40 per cent more often than identical resumes with names like Sana Khan or Lei Li.

Oreopoulos said the findings help to explain why skilled immigrants arriving under Canada’s point system – with university degrees and significant work experience – fare poorly in today’s labour market. I wasn’t expecting the gap by name alone to be so large,” he said. “It defined as much of a gap as another study found between blacks and whites in the U.S.”"

http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2009/05/21/ubc-study-finds-people-with-foreign-names-face-job-discrimination/

Perhaps it isn't surprising that our institutions are racist - even a Unitarian  Universalist fellowship is racist. After all, no white person in North America has lived in a non-racist society - not even we morally superior Canadians.

What to do?

Examine our privilege and admit we benefit from a system that privileges whites. 

From:  
http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/olson.pdf`

"Racism will only end when a significant number of white people of conscience, the people who can wield systemic privilege and power with integrity, find the will and take the  action to dismantle it. "

Not only is racism unjust, eliminating it is important for reasons of self interest - which I'll examine in a future post.

Privilege

I'm naive.  And cranky.  And touchy.  A naive, cranky, touchy  bisexual cis  Unitarian. (If you don't know what cis means, look it up.  Told you I was cranky! )  

I fell in love with a Unitarian Universalist congregation the second Sunday in September 2008.   I remember the date - exactly - because a friend dragged me there against my will - me whining that I didn't want to go to church - and  I found the service and the hymn book so incredibly wonderfully amazingly shatteringly fantastic I fell in love with an audible fleshy thump . 

Nothing in life is permanent though...I noticed a few racist remarks and pushed them out of my consciousness.   Later someone commented they thought homosexuality was a sickness and would , therefore, be curable someday.  That one was harder to push into unconsciousness.  Others disliked the part of the welcome that stated that we lived on the traditional lands of the Secwempec people because they thought we should be over all that stuff - it was ancient history wasn't it?  Nothing to do with modern life was it?  

 I flinched every time I heard these things....I felt flayed. And I said nothing - I waited for long time church members to say something - anything - but they didn't hear those remarks.

I still said nothing.  And ....nothing changed.   

And one day I exploded.   A cheerful member of our Social and Environmental Action Committee said, after our Earth Day Service, "So and so has agreed to sit on the SEA committee!"  So-and-so is a climate change denier.  So-and-so is also the person who made the comment on homosexuality.  And a person who often makes racist comments.

I said - as gently as possible, that I had a real problem with that.   Everyone around me gazed at me as if I'd turned green  .  "We cannot exclude anyone!"  Why not?    Asking a climate change denier to sit on the committee is akin to asking a fervent Nazi to help us save Jews, I answered.   Plus ze is homophobic and racist. 

Then the  shit hit the fan - and mostly spattered me.  The answer to me was "I've never heard him say that."   Louder and louder .....while I got angrier and angrier. Later, the Board president kept shouting that my allegations were COMPLETELY UNBELIEVABLE!  Someone else told me  later  they thought I was making my story up.  

Gee, whiz, I never realized I'm either a liar or  delusional. 

Actually, I'm not.   My congregation is white, mostly older, mostly very straight ......and they have their furry white special ermine privilege wrapped up tight around themselves   right over their ears. So quite  literally , they  didn't hear the comments I heard.  

What's privilege?  Ok, I'll explain that one.   A quote on white privilege from:

http://www.amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html
I see a pattern running through the matrix of white privilege, a patter of assumptions that were passed on to me as a white person. There was one main piece of cultural turf; it was my own turn, and I was among those who could control the turf. My skin color was an asset for any move I was educated to want to make. I could think of myself as belonging in major ways and of making social systems work for me. I could freely disparage, fear, neglect, or be oblivious to anything outside of the dominant cultural forms. Being of the main culture, I could also criticize it fairly freely.

In proportion as my racial group was being made confident, comfortable, and oblivious, other groups were likely being made unconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated. Whiteness protected me from many kinds of hostility, distress, and violence, which I was being subtly trained to visit, in turn, upon people of color.

Straight privilege is similar.  

A few points on straight privilege from : 

http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~hyrax/personal/files/student_res/straightprivilege.htm

• If I pick up a magazine, watch TV, or play music, I can be certain my sexual orientation will be represented.
• I do not have to fear that if my family or friends find out about my sexual orientation there will be economic, emotional, physical or psychological consequences.
• I am not accused of being abused, warped or psychologically confused because of my sexual orientation.

So now what?  I'd like to know - I'd really like to know - what happens next in my congregation.