In early October, a group of about 30 people spent 2½ days at Grand Portage Lodge and Casino talking about how racism in America has impacted our entire society. Its lasting effects can still be seen in institutional practices and continues to filter down into individual lives.
The workshop, presented by The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond of New Orleans, is designed to facilitate critical analysis of systemic oppression, empowering people to organize for social transformation and self-determination. The goal is a long-term paradigm shift that will empower people of all colors.
Coming up with a common definition of the topic at hand was an important component of the discussion. The People’s Institute defines racism as racial prejudice combined with possession of power.
What is power? According to John Morrin of Grand Portage, on staff with The People’s Institute and one of the workshop’s facilitators, power is legitimized access to systems and institutions that have been sanctioned by the authority of the state, and it is inherent to those within the dominant culture. While people of any color can be prejudiced, only white people can be racist according to the Institute’s definition of racism, because they are the ones with access to the power.
Overcoming racism is not just up to the people being oppressed. The people who already have seats at the table need to move over and make room for those who have been left out. Racism and poverty
If a rich-looking person in front of you in the grocery store line was rude to you, workshop presenter Deena Hayes of Greensboro, North Carolina said, chances are you would judge them as an individual. If a poor-looking person did the same thing, chances are you would judge the group they look like they belong to.
Poor people are led to believe that they are poor of their own doing, Morrin said, and people in the dominant culture believe this as well. A document from the People’s Institute states, “People are not poor because they lack programs and services; people are poor because they lack power.”
“Poor people have come to believe the same things about themselves as we do,” said Hayes.
We’ve been told certain things about why people are poor, Hayes said. “Eighty percent of the wealth in this country is inherited,” she said. Wealth grows through property ownership, and family wealth, not personal income, determines a person’s financial outcome. People of color making $100,000 a year are going back and helping their families, filling in gaps that have existed for generations. Many white people, she said, can invest their money and “grow it forward.”
“In order for capitalism to work,” said workshop cofacilitator Cheryl Bowman of Duluth, “there needs to be a certain percentage of people who are poor in the United States.”
Racism has historically given white Americans a head start over people of color. Army training programs during World War II were not available to people of color. They were assigned janitor, cook and dishwasher jobs, and when these vets got out of the military, those were the types of jobs they were able to get while their white counterparts went into the professional world with the skills they had learned in the military. The GI bill helped veterans purchase homes after the war. People of color, however, were only allowed to buy homes in certain areas where other people of color lived, and their property values did not increase like those in white neighborhoods.
“Wealth and poverty do not occur in one generation,” Hayes said, and government policies continue to perpetrate poverty. One way this happens, she maintained, is by establishing minimum wage at a very low level that is not really a living wage. She challenged some popular perspectives, saying, for example, that people who get a tax credit for owning a home are “living off the system.”
Hayes challenged the notion that poor people don’t care enough to make a better life for their children. “Do we really think that poor people want their children to grow up and be poor, too?” she asked. People do make poor choices that are reckless and self-destructive, she said, but these are symptoms of poverty. Change needs to happen at levels far higher than the individual, she said. “We have made charity an acceptable response to poverty and injustice.”
Many programs simply help people become “more comfortable in their poverty,” said Bowman. “We could do more with less if the system was set up differently.”
Hayes talked about legislation passed in the 1930s that helped businesses get started. This benefitted mostly white people who then grew their companies into large successful enterprises. Some of those companies became huge enough to land contracts for major jobs such as demolition for disasters like 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina. And they are still owned largely by white people, leaving smaller contractors of color out of the game.
This is the second in a threepart series on issues discussed at an Undoing Racism workshop held October 3-5, 2011 at Grand Portage Lodge and Casino. Part 3 will discuss the value of not ignoring color and how institutions have made it difficult for people of color to find equal footing in America as well as offer new directions that can lead to the undoing of racism.
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