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Session Objective: to acknowledge how political, social, economic, linguistic & environmental structures marginalise communities
“Confronting Injustice” is about understanding the wider context in which we exist and environmental racism plays out. This week’s time with your Discussion Group will involve defining structural racism, applying reference category theory to the study of injustice, and critiquing the ‘Oppression Olympics’. This session’s Learning Log will help you prepare for that conversation by taking a look at some BIPOC-produced tellings of America and sourcing your own material to share with the group.
Systemic Racism
Read: the “History of Racism in America” by Meilan Solly for the Smithsonian.
While you’re reading,
Identify: something you did not previously know about the timeline, impact, or extent of racially based oppression in the United States. Note it below to raise during discussion.
Meilan Solly is a journalist and designer who has covered everything from dollhouse crime scenes to student mental health. She is currently an assistant digital editor at Smithsonian magazine; she has previously written for Kiplinger, The Saint, and The Flat Hat. Based in Washington, D.C., Solly is an alumna of William & Mary as well as the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is a World War II buff and a lover of the Renaissance, modern art, and dogs.
Understand: what is meant by different ‘layers’ of racism with this “Theory at a Glance” overview and “Reverse Racism” comedy sketch.
At a Glance_ Layers of Racism.pdfThis 2.5-minute stand-up comedy sketch by Aamer Rahman demonstrates why ‘reverse racism’ simply does not exist, because of the intense systemic injustice and structural oppression involved in contemporary racism.
click for transcript
A lot of people don’t like my comedy -
A lot of white people don’t like my comedy
A lot of white people say this to me:
“Hey, Aamer: You get on stage, you make your jokes about white people. You say ‘white people this; white people that’. What if I did something like that, huh? What if I got on stage and I said ‘yeah, Black people are like this; Muslims are like that’. You’d probably call me a racist, wouldn’t you?”
And I say: “Yeah, yeah, I would. You should never do that; that’s...that’s bad for your health.”
They’re like: “Well, you do that, Aamer. You do that. You get on stage; you make your jokes about white people. Don’t you think that’s a kind of racism? Don’t you think that’s...reverse racism?”
I say: “No, I don’t think that’s reverse racism.”
Not because I think reverse racism doesn’t exist, right? If you ask some Black and brown people, they’ll tell you flat out “there is no such thing as reverse racism”. I don’t agree with that; I think there is such a thing as reverse racism, and I could be reverse racist if I wanted to.
All I would need would be a time machine, right?
And what I’d do is I’d get in my time machine, and go back in time, to before Europe colonised the world, right?
And I’d convince the leaders of Africa, Asia, Middle East, Central and South America to invade and colonize Europe.
Just occupy them, steal their land and resources, set up some kind of...like, I don’t know, trans-Asian slave trade where we exported white people to work on giant rice plantations in China.
Just ruin Europe over the course of a couple of centuries, so all their descendants would want to migrate out and live in the places where Black and brown people come from. But of course, in that time, I’d make sure I set up systems that privilege Black and brown people at every conceivable social, political, and economic opportunity; white people would never have any hope of real self-determination. Then every couple of decades, make up some fake war as an excuse to go and bomb them back to the Stone Age, and say it’s for their own good because their culture’s inferior.
And just for kicks, I’d subject white people to colored people’s standards of beauties, so they end up hating the color of their own skin, eyes, and hair. If, after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of that, I got on stage at a comedy show and said “Hey, what’s the deal with white people? Why can’t they dance?” That would be reverse racism.
আমার রহমান (Aamer Rahman) is a stand-up comedian from Australia. His parents hail from Bangladesh. A stand-up comedian, Rahman often performs with Nazeem Hussain as Fear of a Brown Planet. Born in Saudi Arabia where his father worked as an engineer, Rahman moved to Australia when he was six. He spent some of his pre-teen years in Oman, but grew up primarily in Melbourne. Aamer holds a degree in Law from Monash University; as a student, he protested against mandatory detention, higher education funding cuts, and anti-refugee policies.
Listen: to Lauryn Hill’s self-described ‘sketch’ on “Black Rage”.
Read through the words on her website if you need to, and then
Quote: the lyric that struck you most from Hill’s rewrite.
Lauryn Hill is a singer-songwriter known for the Fugees, a hip hop group drawing on elements of soul and reggae, whose name reclaimed a derogatory term for Haitian Americans derived from the word “refugee”. Hill broke barriers for female rappers throughout her career. “Black Rage” is, in Hill’s words, “about the derivative effects of racial inequity and abuse”. Set to the tune of “My Favorite Things”, you’ll hear Hill’s children playing in the house in this lo-fi version she released dedicated to Ferguson.
Examine: queer Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson’s American History canvas featuring a quote from Black playwright and novelist James Baldwin:
“American history is longer, larger...more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. A writer and activist whose work dived deeply into the nuances of Western social divisions along racial, sexual, and class lines, Baldwin’s fiction focused on journeys of self-acceptance for predominantly African American, gay, and bisexual men. Faced with strong anti-Black prejudice and wanting to see his work beyond a reductionist African American context, Baldwin emigrated to France. He lived to witness both the Civil Rights and Gay Liberation Movements. (Photograph by Allan Warren.)
American History (Mixed Media on Canvas, 2015)
Jeffrey Gibson is a queer Mississippi Choctow-Cherokee painter and sculptor who spent his youth in Germany and Korea. His artwork draws on everything from rural pow-wows to urban raves while incorporating media as diverse as Iroquois beadwork and Everlast punch bags. A 2019 MacArthur Fellow, Gibson’s work prompts a shift in how Native American art is historicised.
Intersectionality
View: a memorable moment from an interview with James Baldwin, the author quoted above, that serves as a good introduction to the concept of intersectionality.
Watch: this explainer on “What is Intersectionality?” by 蒋梦珏 (Mengjue Jiang).
蒋梦珏 (Mengjue ‘Ashley’ Jiang) is a Shanghai-born lesbian Asian living in LA, giving her four marginalised identities: woman, queer, person of colour, and immigrant. Building on the theory of intersectionality by critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ashley explains how these different characteristics overlap to create a unique experience of discrimination. She also discusses how the mainstream feminist, gay rights, and anti-racism movements all fail to adequately advocate for her full identity.
Connect: theories of intersectionality to environmentalism by watching this video produced by Intersectional Environmentalist providing more perspectives on the concept.
Listen: to this medley of voices sharing portions from Audre Lorde’s “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”. The piece reminds us why intersectionality is so important: not so we can engage in a competition over who is ‘worst off’, but so we can include the full range of people’s identities — because if we don’t, we end up marginalising others ourselves. As Lorde points out, it is a common strategy for those in power to “encourage members of oppressed groups to act against each other, and so long as we are divided because of our particular identities, we cannot join together in effective political action”.
Born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents, Audre Lorde described herself as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”. A feminist writer and librarian, Lorde spent her life campaigning against racism, sexism, classism, capitalism, heterosexism, and homophobia. She spent time in Berlin in the 1980s, helping birth the Black movement in Germany and raising awareness of the connections between multiple racial and ethnic struggles. (Photograph by Elsa Dorfman)
Complete: your Learning Log via the form below, which invites you to find and bookmark some additional materials to share with your Discussion Group when you meet this week.
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