RACE QUESTIONS

"It is obvious to the most simpleminded that Lokai is of an inferior breed."
"The obvious visual evidence, Commissioner, is that he is of the same breed as yourself."
"Are you blind, Commander Spock? Well, look at me. Look at me!"
"You're black on one side and white on the other."
"I am black on the right side."
"I fail to see the significant difference."
"Lokai is white on the right side. All of his people are white on the right side."

- Bele, Spock, and Kirk, Star Trek

OK, either I'm, a terrible racist or just plain stupid. I have been trying to wade through materials from The-Powers-That-Be in my denomination that are supposed to teach us how to be less racist. That seems like a very good idea to me. The less racist (and a lot of other -ists also), the better we would all be. It seems from what I read that because I am European American (I never realized that.) I'm supposed to acknowledge that European Americans "have inherited a history that is full of honor and faithfulness as well as being full of access to power and privilege." I wish my grandmother had known that when she was taken out of school in the fifth-grade and sent to work taking care of someone's house. I don't think she felt all that powerful or privileged just because she was born in Germany, but we'll let that slide.

Now there are numerous charts and lists and things showing just how different European Americans are from "People of Color." (That's the "in" word now.) This is where I begin having problems with the whole concept because I don't think I have met any "People of Color." I have met African Americans and people from Africa who live in America and Haitians and Jamaicans and Virgin Islanders and Mexicans and Cubans and Nicaraguans and Puerto Ricans and Colombians and Filipinos and Thais and Chinese and Koreans and Vietnamese and Japanese and Arabs and Iranians and a good many people from the Ho-Chunk nation. I am very uncomfortable lumping a lot of people together in a category and saying they are "people of color" simply on the grounds that they are not Europeans in ancestry.

For that matter, I'm not so sure what a European American is. What are you if you're ancestry is Portugese but your family had been living for generations in the Cape Verde Islands which is Africa? Or what happens when those same Portugese move to Brazil? How come someone from Spain isn't a person of color but a person from Argentina is unless they speak German instead of Spanish. I don't know how they classify Italian speaking Argentines. (Wait. I just found out. Only Spanish-speaking people from South America count. Italian speaking Argentines are right out and so are most Brazilians, I guess.) What about people from Malta? How about people from Cyprus? Does it matter if you are a Greek Cypriot or a Turkish Cypriot, and for that matter if you are a Turk who lives on the European side of the Bosporus, are you a European? I was at a university once where the faculty got into a real dither about whether an Arab qualified as a "person of color" and if they did, why wasn't an Israeli also a "person of color."

My first gripe is that this is a really bad way to do sociology. But beyond that, this sticking people in categories just reinforces stereotypes. You have to know real people and learn about them not stereotype or theory. It was stupid, vile, stereotypical "theory" about people that made some people justify the horrific treatment of indigenous Americans and Africans on the grounds that they weren't really human. And after what I thought was progress, we're headed right back down the path of stereotyping again.

Let me make it clear. Racism is evil. It is rooted in two related issues–power and prejudice. The power issue is the very destructive belief that the only way a person can achieve anything is to have power over someone else. Utter nonsense, but a lot of people think it's true. Often people decide that they can have power by teaming up with a group of people so that the whole group can subjugate another group. You see the root of so much human strife. It's us against them. Now all you need is some way to determine who is us and who is them. Race is one of the ways of doing the dividing. It uses the prejudicial belief that people who are different from us are not as valuable as us to turn people against each other.

The wicked irony of racism as a power play is that it doesn't necessarily benefit the people who think they gain power. Look at Nazi Germany. Hitler came to power launching a genocidal war against "them" (Jews, Gypsies, etc.) supposedly to benefit the "Aryan Race." But the only people who benefitted were high-ranking Nazis. Were the German people living in fear of the Gestapo better off? Did the thousands of Germans who died in the war gain anything? They had been tricked!

The same terrible trick was played in the United Sates when Poor Whites were stirred up against Blacks as a way of maintaining the power of White people. But Poor Whites benefitted not one bit in the process. They gained no power. They were just as poor as before. They had been used.

Overcoming racism requires us to destroy both roots that feed it, power and prejudice. A sad thing is that some of the attempts to undo this evil actually help to cement it in place. When you say to one group that they have benefited from racism by having access to power and privilege, you confirm exactly what the racist manipulators want the group to believe. An example: the racist manipulators tell a group, "you didn't get a job because affirmative action made the company give the job to one of 'them' who is much less deserving." The message is that you don't have a job because you don't have power. But when someone else says, "you got a job that someone else didn't get because you belong to the 'privileged' group and they don't," the message is that you have a job because you do have power. Either way, power is everything, so the logical thing is to continue playing the same racist game so as to maintain power. Result: nothing changes.

How much better it would be to show people that the "power game" actually gains them nothing. It is an illusion. Only small number of manipulators gains anything. Rationally, "us" and "them" should realize that they share the same interests. When "us" and "them" work together "we" all gain. When "us" and "them" are set against each other, only a tiny few benefit. Here is where it is so necessary to overcome the divisiveness of prejudice.

We should recognize that a person's race, ethnicity, language, national origin–in short culture–play a very large role in who a person is, but knowing those things doesn't tell us everything about a person. I am pretty sure that even if I had an excellent understanding of African Americans in general, I still wouldn't know that The Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) was nothing like the elegant Miss Grace Phoenix I knew years ago even though they were both African Americans. (For that matter, knowing what a European American is wouldn't prepare someone to know the difference between me, Baby-faced Nelson, and Nelson Rockefeller.) You've got to know a person as a person. That's the way to undo prejudice. Simply pigeon-holing someone doesn't help. It makes things worse by reaffirming differences.

I pray that racism will end. We all have to work at it to make it happen. But we have to be careful that we're not reinforcing it by thinking we know all that is important about a person when we can classify them as a "European America" or a "Person of Color." We need to know and respect people as people.

May the Lord bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne