Page 27 - Microsoft Word - resource book.doc

Dismantling Racism Resource Book

when those in power talk about immigration through our southern borders (immigrants who also
happen to be people of color). The warning is clear: if you let those people in, they will take
your jobs, ruin your schools which are already in economic struggle, destroy the few
neighborhoods that are good for people to live in. People are pitted against one another along
race and class lines. Meanwhile, those who have economic power continue to make obscenely
excessive profits, often by taking their companies out of the country into economically depressed
countries occupied by people of color where work can be bought for minuscule wages and
profits are enormous. It is not the poor or working class population that is consuming and/or
destroying the world’s resources; it is those who make enormous profits from the exploration of
those resources, the top 10 percent of the population.

That economic power ensures control of institutions. Let’s go back to the example of the
Congress. How much does it cost to run a campaign to be elected to the House or Senate? One
does not find poor people there, for in order to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars that
campaigns cost, one has to be either personally rich or well connected to those who are rich.
And the latter means being in debt, one way or another, to the rich. Hence, when a
congressperson speaks or votes, who does he (or occasionally she) speak for? Those without
access to wealth and resources or those who pay the campaign bills? Or look at the criminal
justice system. It is not by chance that crimes against property are dealt with more seriously than
crimes against persons. Or that police response to calls from well-to-do neighborhoods is more
efficient than to poor neighborhoods. Schools in poor neighborhoods in most instances lack
good facilities and resources; and a media that is controlled by advertising does not present an
impartial, truthseeking vision of the world. Both schools and the media present what is in the
best interest of the prevailing norm.

The maintenance of societal and individual power and control requires the use of violence and
the threat of violence. Institutional violence is sanctioned through the criminal justice system
and the threat of the military-for quelling individual or group uprisings. One of the places we
can most readily see the interplay of institutional and individual violence is in the white man’s
dealings with the Native American population. Since the white man first “discovered” this
country, which was occupied by large societies of Indians who maintained their own culture,
religion, politics, education, economy and justice, the prevailing norm has been to lay claim to
land resources for those who have the power to establish control by might and thus ensure their
superior economic position. This “might” brings with it a sense of superiority and often of
divine right. The Native Americans were driven from their land and eventually placed (some
would say incarcerated) on reservations. By defending their lands and their lives, they became
the “enemy”. Consequently, we now have a popular culture whose teaching of history represents
the Native American as a cruel savage and through hundreds of films shows the white man as
civilized and good in pursuing his destiny and the Native American as bad in protecting his life
and culture. Institutional racism is so complete that now great numbers of Native Americans,
having lost their land and having had their culture assaulted, live in poverty and in isolation from
the benefits of mainstream culture. And on the personal level, racism is so overt that television
stations still run cowboy-and-Indian movies, and parents buy their children cowboy-and-Indian
outfits so that they can act out genocide in their play.

Dismantling Racism Project 27 Western States Center