need to empathize regarding how your lived experience with racism affects you. You said it literally made you sick.
Ibram X. Kendi connected that to his cancer.
I shouldn’t expect you to always engage the theoretical if the actual lived experience is causing you pain.
Yet your pain confers a type of authority on the matter that I myself don’t have. So, your insights are appreciated when you see fit to offer them.
People’s lived experience have also come up when they try to justify their racist views. They’ve often told me stories and say “I was there. I saw it everyday.”
If I may share, there seem three main ways to unravel racism
(1) a ‘spiritual’ determination to see individual humanity;
(2) sociological and historical knowledge with which a person realizes that whatever negative racial stereotype he perceives in others is either the consequence of oppression on the person he’s observing or that his own perceptions in his own psyche are a result of his racist bias;
(3) circumstances that force multiracial cooperation and lead to various levels of social connection–neighbors, work peers, friends, spousal and familial bonding, combat veterans…etc.
On this third point, if I may suggest, desegregation isn’t “the house-slave loving his master” as Malcolm X said, all due respect to him.
Desegregation is instead the dismantling the social structures that were designed to promote racial alienation, justify exploitation, and prevent the threat of racial solidarity against the ruling class.
If I may further suggest, the short-comings of the Civil Rights Movement were due to, among other forms of pernicious racism, half measures or mere lip service to desegregation in housing and education, leaving the goal unacheived to this day.
That would seem the main problem, instead of desegregation itself undermining black community cohesion, as some black commentators have said.
With a fully racially integrated society, which we don’t have yet, instututional structures for economic justice are less vulnerable to the sort of racist attacks against existing social programs we’ve seen since Reagan, and the racist attacks against emerging programs of the Great Society in the 1960s and the New Deal in the 1930s.
So it seems if you want more effective anti–racism, you have to include multiracial, universalist agendas for economic justice.
In turn, if you want universalist economic justice, you have to include anti-racism, especially where black folk themselves are leading the movements.
At this point in US history, addressing anti-black racism has to be a part of addressing every conceivable social and ecological issue.
You can say it always should have been. That makes sense morally, and obviously makes sense to black people.
But as you know, many white folk have faltered in their support, including white leftists.
Many former white supporters abandoned MLK when he applied his brilliant focus to the defacto segregation of the North, even though they had supported, even helped finance, his efforts against Southern dejure segregation, as you are well aware.
In my opinion, the political landscape now is such that if white folk value our own freedom, anti-racism has to be a high priority.
On macro issue, our disagreement seems to regard the relationship between, on the one hand, (1) the cause of economic solidarity among black folk; and, on the other hand, (2) multiracial or universalist economic agendas.
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