Promote Peace by Learning How to Be Anti-Racist

The First Universalist Peace Action Circle invites you to a virtual discussion based on Ibram Kendi’s books “Stamped from the Beginning” and “How to be an Antiracist.”

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89790560664

Meeting ID: 897 9056 0664

Join by phone:

+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)

Meeting ID: 897 9056 0664

 

These days, every White person needs an opportunity to have a constructive conversation about race in America.

All are welcome so long as you are seeking to better understand the dynamics of racism in America and to understand your own thoughts and experiences. This is not a political discussion or an opinion session, but rather an opportunity to probe your assumptions and seek shared, increased understanding of the history of racism specifically in America.

Kendi defines a racist idea: it is any concept that in any way regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group.

Do you agree? What does that mean in practice?

In this one hour session, you will have opportunity to explore several topics. Among others, we will focus on Kendi’s definition of segregation, assimilation, and anti-racism.

Each topic will involve breaking into small discussion groups and reporting back to the whole group.

The 1400s were the period of European exploration that created great wealth from the Colonies and the exploitation of ‘exotic’ people. Fairly recently returned from the Crusades, Europeans were launchIng the age of Christian missionary zeal toward people in all non-Christian countries. One justification for taking Africans from their home countries was so that their souls could be saved by Christianity even though they were enslaved.

We request that you, at a minimum, read the Foreword of Kendi’s book “Stamped from the Beginning,” prior to this event.

FOREWORD, “Stamped from the Beginning” by Ibram X. Kendi:

‘Even before Thomas Jefferson and the other founders declared independence, Americans were engaging in a polarizing debate over racial disparities, over why they exist and persist, and over why White Americans as a group were prospering more than Black Americans as a group. Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument. A group we can call segregationists has blamed Black people themselves for the racial disparities. A group we can all assimilationists has tried to argue for both, saying that Black people and racial discrimination were to blame for racial disparities. A group we can call anti-racists has pointed to racial discrimination.

During the ongoing debate over police killings, these three sides to the argument have been on full display. Segregationists have been blaming the recklessly criminal behavior of the Black people who were killed by police officers. Michael Brown was a monstrous, threatening thief, therefore Darren Wilson had reason to fear him and to kill him. Anti-racists have been blaming the recklessly racist behavior of the police. The life of this dark-skinned eighteen-year-old did not matter to Darren Wilson. Assimilationists have tried to have it both ways. Both Wilson and Brown acted like irresponsible criminals.

Listening to this three-way argument in recent years has been like listening to the three distinct arguments you will hear throughout STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING. For nearly six centuries, anti-racist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist. The history of racial ideas that follows is the history of these three distinct voices – segregationists, assimilationists, and anti-racists – and how they each have rationalized racial disparities.

The title STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING comes from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington DC. ‘This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes…but by white men for white men.’ Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The ‘inequality of the white and black races…was stamped from the beginning.’

It may not be surprising that Jefferson Davis regarded Black people as biologically distinct and inferior to White people – and Black skin as an ugly stamp on the beautiful White canvas of normal human skin – and this Black stamp as a signifier of the Negro’s everlasting inferiority. This kind of segregationist thinking is perhaps easier to identify – and easier to condemn – as obviously racist. And yet so many prominent Americans, many of whom we celebrate for their progressive ideas and activism, many of whom had very good intentions, subscribed to assimilationist thinking that also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority.

We have remembered assimilationists’ glorious struggle against racial discrimination, and tucked away their inglorious partial blaming of inferior Black behavior for racial disparities. In embracing biological racial equality, assimilationists point to environment – hot climates, discrimination, culture, and poverty – as the creators of inferior Black behaviors. For solutions, they maintain that the ugly Black stamp can be erased – that inferior Black behaviors can be developed given the proper environment. As such, assimilationists constantly encourage Black adoption of White cultural traits and/or physical ideas.

But there is and has always been a persistent line of anti-racist thought in this country, challenging those assimilationist and segregationist lines. Anti-racists have long argued that racial discrimination was stamped from the beginning of America, which explains why racial disparities have existed and persisted. Unlike segregationists and assimilationists, anti-racists have recognized that the different skin colors, hair textures, behaviors, and cultural ways of Blacks and Whites are equal in all their divergences.

There was nothing simple or straightforward or predictable about racist ideas, and thus their history. Frankly speaking, for generations of Americans, racist ideas have been their common sense. The simple logic of racist ideas has manipulated millions over the years, muffling the more complex anti-racist reality again and again. And so, this history could not be made for readers in an easy-to-predict narrative of absurd racists clashing with reasonable anti-racists. This history could not be made for readers in an easy to predict, two-sided Hollywood battle of obvious good versus obvious evil, with good triumphing in the end. From the beginning, it has been a three-sided battle, a battle of anti-racist ideas being pitted against two kinds of racist ideas at the same time, with evil and good failing and triumphing in the end.

Both segregationist and assimilationist ideas have been wrapped up in attractive arguments to seem good, and both have made sure to re-wrap anti-racist ideas as evil. And in wrapping their ideas in goodness, segregationists and assimilationists have rarely confessed to their racist public policies and ideas. But why would they? Racists confessing to their crimes is not in their self-interest. It has been smarter and more exonerating to identify what they did and said as not racist. And the shrewdest and most powerful anti-Black criminals have legalized their criminal activities, have managed to define their crimes of slave trading and enslaving and discriminating and killing outside of the criminal code.

Likewise, the shrewdest and most powerful racist ideologues have managed to define their idea outside of racism. Assimilationists first used and defined and popularized the term ‘racism’ during the 1940s. All the while, they refused to define their own assimilationist ideas of Black culturally and behavioral inferiority as racist. These assimilationists defined only segregationist ideas of Black biological inferiority as racist. And segregationists, too, have always resisted the label of ‘racist’. They have claimed instead that they were merely Articulating God’s word, nature’s design, science’s plan, or plain old common sense.

All these self-serving efforts by powerful factions to define their racist rhetoric as non- racist has left Americans thoroughly divided over and ignorant of what racist ideas truly are. It has all allowed Americans who think something is wrong with Black people to believe, somehow, that they are not racist. But to say something is wrong with a group is to say something is inferior about that group.

These sayings are interlocked logically whether Americans realize it or not, whether Americans are willing to admit it or not. Any comprehensive history if racist ideas must grapple with the ongoing manipulation and co fusion, must set the record straight on those who are espousing racist ideas and those who are not.

My definition of a racist idea is a simple one: it is any concept that regards one racial group in any way as inferior or superior to another racial group. I define anti-Black racist ideas as any idea suggesting that Black people are inferior in any way to another racial group.

Like the other identifiable races, Black people are in reality a collection of groups differentiated by gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, skin color, profession, and nationality —among a series of other identifiers including biracial people who may or may not identify as Black.