Racism

[Mark]

A concise description of how Critical Race Theory developed. These intellectual stances, as described in this and the last post, are the critical parameters for the perspectives that have been proselytized by those folks have been calling Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) in recent years. It has become a perjorative, when, in fact, it is a necessary evolution of a system of thought that spans centuries. Intellectual stasis is anathema to human beingness, from these clashes in the Academy further insights develop that increase the cohesion and coherence of society.

That is the goal, at least. We will see what results from these forays into the intellectual wilds.

What is Critical Race Theory?

The Theory.

Critical Race Theory was developed out of legal scholarship. It provides a critical analysis of race and racism from a legal point of view. Since its inception within legal scholarship CRT has spread to many disciplines. CRT has basic tenets that guide its framework. These tenets are interdisciplinary and can be approached from different branches of learning.

CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral and colorblind, however, CRT challenges this legal “truth” by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege. CRT also recognizes that liberalism and meritocracy are often stories heard from those with wealth, power, and privilege. These stories paint a false picture of meritocracy; everyone who works hard can attain wealth, power, and privilege while ignoring the systemic inequalities that institutional racism provides.

Intersectionality within CRT points to the multidimensionality of oppressions and recognizes that race alone cannot account for disempowerment. “Intersectionality means the examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation, and how their combination plays out in various settings.” This is an important tenet in pointing out that CRT is critical of the many oppressions facing people of color and does not allow for a one–dimensional approach of the complexities of our world.

Narratives or counterstories, as mentioned before, contribute to the centrality of the experiences of people of color. These stories challenge the story of white supremacy and continue to give a voice to those that have been silenced by white supremacy. Counterstories take their cue from larger cultural traditions of oral histories, cuentos, family histories and parables. This is very important in preserving the history of marginalized groups whose experiences have never been legitimized within the master narrative. It challenges the notion of liberalism and meritocracy as colorblind or “value-neutral” within society while exposing racism as a main thread in the fabric of the American foundation.

Another component to CRT is the commitment to Social justice and active role scholars take in working toward “eliminating racial oppression as a broad goal of ending all forms of oppression”. This is the eventual goal of CRT and the work that most CRT scholars pursue as academics and activists.

The Movement.

The Critical Race Theory movement can be seen as a group of interdisciplinary scholars and activists interested in studying and changing the relationship between race, racism and power. This is crucial to understand in order to fully realize the goals of CRS in SPA. CRT is an amalgamation of concepts that have been derived from the Civil Rights and ethnic studies discourses. In the 1970s, a number of lawyers, activists, and scholars saw the work of the Civil Rights as being stalled and in many instances negated. They also saw the liberal and positivist views of laws as being colorblind and ignorant of the racism that is pervasive in the law.

The works of Derrick Bell and Alan Freeman have been attributed to the start of CRT. Bell and Freeman were frustrated with the slow pace of racial reform in the United Sates. They argued that the traditional approaches of combating racism were producing smaller gains than in previous years. Thus, Critical Race Theory is an outgrowth of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), which was a leftist movement that challenged traditional legal scholarship. These CRT scholars continued forward and were joined by Richard Delgado. In 1989, they held their first conference in Madison, Wisconsin. This was the beginning of the CRT as movement.

CRT has more recently had some spin-offs from the original movement. Latina/o Critical Theory (LatCrit), feisty queer-crit interest group, and Asian American Legal Scholarship are examples of the sub-disciplines within CRT. These sub-disciplines address specific issues that affect each unique community. For LatCrit and Asian American scholars they examine language and immigration policies, whereas, a small emerging group of Indian scholars examine indigenous people’s sovereignty and claims to land. This displays the diversity even within the CRT disciplines that hold CRT to maintain its multidisciplinary approach.

[Mike]

Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
Ouch, Mike. Those Evergreen kids really got under your skin. You have strong opinions, but you're presenting them as facts.

Think of the absurdity of a white guy declaring what the most prevalent form of racism is currently, and multiply that by a thousand when declaring it to someone non-white. Kinda like a guy lecturing women on menstrual periods.

The gender issue is a dilutant to this thread, which is already (at its inception) blended with or compared with culture-clash.

It's not just the evergreen kids themselves, it's that they represent a microcosm of a much bigger problem. What happened there is what's happening on campuses all across the country, and it's finding it's way into corporate culture too. That's why it's so important. But if you haven't watched the videos then I wouldn't expect you to feel the same urgency I do. It's not just the students behavior that was so abhorrent, it was the faculty and staff as well. Small witch hunt cultures become big ones, and then it becomes authoritarianism. That's what's happening in our country today. Good people were unfairly accused of racism and bigotry at evergreen, and they lost their jobs as a result. i don't think that's a trend either of us wants to see continue

Re gender issues: fair enough, I'll let them go. My bad. Just trying to demonstrate that in some conditions, alleged racism is really just postmodernism masquerading as racism...just like other "equity" seeking phenomena. The connections are vital to have a comprehensive view of the picture. Respectfully, I don't think you really understand what postmodernism is, and it's causing you to kind of miss my points entirely.

I don't pretend to know exactly what we should do about racism, but the evergreen events and others like it, and the stuff that happened with James Damore at Google, make it pretty damn clear what we shouldn't do.

We shouldn't force "equity" on other people when it is really just a power game resulting in reverse discrimination. That's the answer that evergreen students and faculty suggested, and the answer Google was suggesting with the Damore debacle. Mark doesn't seem to have any issue with it at all either, so it appears it's his answer for it too. The whole thing is an insidious idea that will only make a bad problem worse.

And its ok to have opinions on what racism is. Thats partially the point of the thread. Mark's been sharing his on this thread all over the place. If you imagine its noble of you to continue to offer up yours with delicate subservience, by all means continue.

If you think the equity doctrine is the answer to all this mess, fair enough, ..we can make intellectual peace with each other right now, and not address it any further. Happy to do that.

[Strat]

Posted by Dennis Leahy (here)
You have strong opinions, but you're presenting them as facts.

You do the same thing though don't you? You are one of our resident masters of expressing opinion, I'd like to see you pick apart his post. I'm not saying this as a jab, I'm genuinely interested. He was basically dismissed and that's not fair.

Maybe off topic but I don't see the value in speaking my mind on the matter anymore. It seems as though you are shoved into 1 side or the other. I go out 1-2x per week and I never have issues with other cultures or they with me. So how does it benefit me talking these issues over? It causes more harm than good. I think it's better to just hang out with my friends, be a good person and let the issue slowly wither away and die.

[Mark]

Posted by Mike (here)
We shouldn't force "equity" on other people when it is really just a power game resulting in reverse discrimination. That's the answer that evergreen students and faculty suggested, and the answer Google was suggesting with the Damore debacle. Mark doesn't seem to have any issue with it at all either, so it appears it's his answer for it too.

And its ok to have opinions on what racism is. Thats partially the point of the thread. Mark's been sharing his on this thread all over the place.

All you've offered, thus far, is opinion, Mike. It is appreciated as it is one that many share and we need all representative voices present and accounted for, so thank you for that. I've been sharing a bit more than opinion on this thread. I appreciate your presence but will not rise to your continuous offering of passive aggressive asides and poisonous bait.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Posted by Strat (here)
Maybe off topic but I don't see the value in speaking my mind on the matter anymore. It seems as though you are shoved into 1 side or the other. I go out 1-2x per week and I never have issues with other cultures or they with me. So how does it benefit me talking these issues over? It causes more harm than good. I think it's better to just hang out with my friends, be a good person and let the issue slowly wither away and die.

Love it. Real talk. Another valuable opinion, although I obviously disagree that it causes more harm than good. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, regardless.

[Mike]

Mark I've offered everyone the perfect case study to demonstrate what's actually happening in the country at the moment. That's what I've offered.

As I suspected, you think I'm the bad guy here, and you imagine yourself the calm purveyor of wisdom and truth. Sorry, I'm calling bullsh!t on that.

Much of what you're offering is also opinion, masquerading as fact. And I don't mind your opinions at all. Totally cool. Fair game. But your passive aggression lies in your assumption that you are morally and factually correct at every turn, and we just all need to cuddle up to the campfire and learn. Sorry dude, im not playing that game. You need to learn too. We all do.

I'm not here to stop you, or make your life difficult. I actually appreciate the back n forth, even though you've ignored some really important things I've said, like the fact that we couldn't have this dialogue on evergreen. Anyone that watches those videos knows that this is obvious. Not opinion.

I want to stress this again because it's important. I know you're a good dude. If we met over beers and chatted, I think we'd walk away friends. I think Dennis is a man of total integrity. I really do. But I resent the moral sermonizing and the assumption of moral high ground. It's not productive man.

[Mark]

Posted by Mike (here)
I want to stress this again because it's important. I know you're a good dude. If we met over beers and chatted, I think we'd walk away friends. I think Dennis is a man of total integrity. I really do. But I resent the moral sermonizing and the assumption of moral high ground. It's not productive man.

Projection is the bane of higher thought and movement in many areas of human endeavor. You've sermonized since you entered this thread and you brought your resentment with you, I did not cause it nor have I done anything to increase it, as its quotient was already sky-high. Perhaps you should check yourself and also the foundations of your understanding.

[Mike]

Posted by Mark/Rahkyt (here)

Posted by Mike (here)
I want to stress this again because it's important. I know you're a good dude. If we met over beers and chatted, I think we'd walk away friends. I think Dennis is a man of total integrity. I really do. But I resent the moral sermonizing and the assumption of moral high ground. It's not productive man.

Projection is the bane of higher thought and movement in many areas of human endeavor. You've sermonized since you entered this thread and you brought your resentment with you, I did not cause it nor have I done anything to increase it, as its quotient was already sky-high. Perhaps you should check yourself and also the foundations of your understanding.

I'll check myself if you do the same.

Equity baby!! See now we're making progress

[Mark]

It is good to have a cultural understanding of what we are talking about and its origins in the West. This concise rending of the historicity of racism gets the point across and gives us a shared point to jump off from in further discussions.

The Historical Origins and Development of Racism

by George M. Fredrickson

Racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable. An ideological basis for explicit racism came to a unique fruition in the West during the modern period. No clear and unequivocal evidence of racism has been found in other cultures or in Europe before the Middle Ages. The identification of the Jews with the devil and witchcraft in the popular mind of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was perhaps the first sign of a racist view of the world. Official sanction for such attitudes came in sixteenth century Spain when Jews who had converted to Christianity and their descendents became the victims of a pattern of discrimination and exclusion.

The period of the Renaissance and Reformation was also the time when Europeans were coming into increasing contact with people of darker pigmentation in Africa, Asia, and the Americas and were making judgments about them. The official rationale for enslaving Africans was that they were heathens, but slave traders and slave owners sometimes interpreted a passage in the book of Genesis as their justification. Ham, they maintained, committed a sin against his father Noah that condemned his supposedly black descendants to be "servants unto servants." When Virginia decreed in 1667 that converted slaves could be kept in bondage, not because they were actual heathens but because they had heathen ancestry, the justification for black servitude was thus changed from religious status to something approaching race. Beginning in the late seventeenth century laws were also passed in English North America forbidding marriage between whites and blacks and discriminating against the mixed offspring of informal liaisons. Without clearly saying so, such laws implied that blacks were unalterably alien and inferior.

During the Enlightenment, a secular or scientific theory of race moved the subject away from the Bible, with its insistence on the essential unity of the human race. Eighteenth century ethnologists began to think of human beings as part of the natural world and subdivided them into three to five races, usually considered as varieties of a single human species. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, an increasing number of writers, especially those committed to the defense of slavery, maintained that the races constituted separate species.

The Nineteenth century was an age of emancipation, nationalism, and imperialism--all of which contributed to the growth and intensification of ideological racism in Europe and the United States. Although the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews from the ghettoes received most of its support from religious or secular believers in an essential human equality, the consequence of these reforms was to intensify rather than diminish racism. Race relations became less paternalistic and more competitive. The insecurities of a burgeoning industrial capitalism created a need for scapegoats. The Darwinian emphasis on "the struggle for existence" and concern for "the survival of the fittest" was conducive to the development of a new and more credible scientific racism in an era that increasingly viewed race relations as an arena for conflict rather than as a stable hierarchy.

The growth of nationalism, especially romantic cultural nationalism, encouraged the growth of a culture-coded variant of racist thought, especially in Germany. Beginning in the late 1870s and early 1880s, the coiners of the term "antisemitism" made explicit what some cultural nationalists had previously implied--that to be Jewish in Germany was not simply to adhere to a set of religious beliefs or cultural practices but meant belonging to a race that was the antithesis of the race to which true Germans belonged.

The climax of Western imperialism in the late nineteenth century "scramble for Africa" and parts of Asia and the Pacific represented an assertion of the competitive ethnic nationalism that existed among European nations (and which, as a result of the Spanish-American War came to include the United States). It also constituted a claim, allegedly based on science, that Europeans had the right to rule over Africans and Asians.

The climax of the history of racism came in the twentieth century in the rise and fall of what might be called overtly racist regimes. In the American South, the passage of racial segregation laws and restrictions on black voting rights reduced African Americans to lower caste status. Extreme racist propaganda, which represented black males as ravening beasts lusting after white women, served to rationalize the practice of lynching. A key feature of the racist regime maintained by state law in the South was a fear of sexual contamination through rape or intermarriage, which led to efforts to prevent the conjugal union of whites with those with any known or discernable African ancestry.

Racist ideology was eventually of course carried to its extreme in Nazi Germany. It took Hitler and his cohorts to attempt the extermination of an entire ethnic group on the basis of a racist ideology. Hitler, it has been said, gave racism a bad name. The moral revulsion of people throughout the world against what the Nazis did, reinforced by scientific studies undermining racist genetics (or eugenics), served to discredit the scientific racism that had been respectable and influential in the United States and Europe before the Second World War.

Explicit racism also came under devastating attack from the new nations resulting from the decolonization of Africa and Asia and their representatives in the United Nations. The Civil Rights movement in the United States, which succeeded in outlawing legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the 1960s drew crucial support from the growing sense that national interests were threatened when blacks in the United States were mistreated and abused. In the competition with the Soviet Union for "the hearts and minds" of independent Africans and Asians, Jim Crow and the ideology that sustained it became a national embarrassment with possible strategic consequences.

The one racist regime that survived the Second World War and the Cold War was the South African in 1948. The laws passed banning all marriage and sexual relations between different "population groups" and requiring separate residential areas for people of mixed race ("Coloreds"), as well as for Africans, signified the same obsession with "race purity" that characterized the other racist regimes. However the climate of world opinion in the wake of the Holocaust induced apologists for apartheid to avoid, for the most part, straightforward biological racism and rest their case for "separate development" mainly on cultural rather than physical differences.

The defeat of Nazi Germany, the desegregation of the American South in the 1960s, and the establishment of majority rule in South Africa suggest that regimes based on biological racism or its cultural essentialist equivalent are a thing of the past. But racism does not require the full and explicit support of the state and the law. Nor does it require an ideology centered on the concept of biological inequality. Discrimination by institutions and individuals against those perceived as racially different can long persist and even flourish under the illusion of non-racism, as historians of Brazil have recently discovered. The use of allegedly deep-seated cultural differences as a justification for hostility and discrimination against newcomers from the Third World in several European countries has led to allegations of a new "cultural racism." Recent examples of a functionally racist cultural determinism are not in fact unprecedented. They rather represent a reversion to the way that the differences between groups could be made to seem indelible and unbridgeable before the articulation of a scientific or naturalistic conception of race in the eighteenth century.

George M. Fredrickson is Edgar E. Robinson Professor Emeritus of United States History at Stanford University.

[Mark]

Indian Schools and the clash of nations. Reservations and cultural assimilation. I did not know this history before today, an interesting and currently relevant revelation. Relatively good intentions were present here, the idea of bringing people into the Christian fold. Then, institutionalization and the invariably accompanying abuse, the depradations of dark human nature. Will time and continuing attention and this trial and error process result in positive ends, if there is no end at all?

The Ugly, Fascinating History Of The Word 'Racism'

GENE DEMBY



The Oxford English Dictionary's first recorded utterance of the word racism was by a man named Richard Henry Pratt in 1902. Pratt was railing against the evils of racial segregation.

Segregating any class or race of people apart from the rest of the people kills the progress of the segregated people or makes their growth very slow. Association of races and classes is necessary to destroy racism and classism.

Although Pratt might have been the first person to inveigh against racism and its deleterious effects by name, he is much better-remembered for a very different coinage: Kill the Indian...save the man.

"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," Pratt said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

We're still living with the after-effects of what Pratt thought and did. His story serves as a useful parable for why discussions of racism remain so deeply contentious even now.

But let's back up a bit.

Beginning in the 1880s, a group of well-heeled white men would travel to upstate New York each year to attend the Lake Mohonk Conference Of The Friend Of the Indian. Their primary focus was a solution to "the Indian problem," the need for the government to deal with the Native American groups living in lands that had been forcibly seized from them. The Plains Wars had decimated the Native American population, but they were coming to an end. There was a general feeling among these men and other U.S. leaders that the remaining Native Americans would be wiped out within a generation or two, destroyed by disease and starvation.

The Lake Mohonk attendees wanted to stop that from happening, and they pressed lawmakers to change the government's policies toward Indians. Pratt, in particular, was a staunch advocate of folding Native Americans into white life — assimilation through education.


Top: A group of Chiricahua Apache students on their first day at Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pa. Bottom: The same students four months later.
John N. Choate/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
He persuaded Congress to let him test out his ideas, and they gave him an abandoned military post in Carlisle, Pa., to set up a boarding school for Native children. He was also able to convince many Native Americans, including some tribal leaders, to send their children far away from home, and leave them in his charge. (They had reasons to be skeptical of Pratt, given the dubious history of white promises to Indians.)

"These [chiefs] were smart men," said Grace Chaillier, a professor of Native American studies at Northern Michigan University. "They saw the handwriting on the wall. They knew their children were going to need to be educated in the ways of the dominant culture or they weren't going to survive."

For many Natives, Chaillier said, this wrenching decision came down to a grim arithmetic: the boarding school would provide their children with food and shelter, which were hard to come by on the reservations. "The reservations were becoming very, very sad places to be," she said. "These were places of daunting poverty. People were starving."

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School would become a model for dozens of other unaffiliated boarding schools for Indian children. But Pratt's plans had lasting, disastrous ramifications.

He pushed for the total erasure of Native cultures among his students. "No bilingualism was accommodated at these boarding schools," said Christina Snyder, a historian at Indiana University. The students' native tongues were strictly forbidden — a rule that was enforced through beating. Since they were rounded up from different tribes, the only way they could communicate with each other at the schools was in English.

"In Indian civilization I am a Baptist," Pratt once told a convention of Baptist ministers, "because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked."

"The most significant consequence of this policy is the loss of languages," Snyder says. "All native languages are [now] endangered and some of them are extinct."

Pratt also saw to it that his charges were Christianized. Carlisle students had to attend church each Sunday, although he allowed each student to choose the denomination to which she would belong.

When students would return home to the reservations — which Pratt objected to, because he felt it would slow down their assimilation — there was a huge cultural gap between them and their families. They dressed differently. They had a new religion. And they spoke a different language.

"These kids coming from the boarding schools were literally unable to speak with their parents and grandparents," Chaillier said. "In many cases, they were ashamed of them, because their grandparents and parents were living a life that nobody should aspire to live."

But Pratt's idea to assimilate Native Americans gained traction, and the government began to make attendance at Indian boarding schools compulsory. Families who didn't comply were punished by the government. "For a period in the 1890s, federal Indian agents could withhold rations [from families] to kind of forcibly starve someone out," Snyder says.

Tsianina Lomawaima, who heads of the American Indian Studies program at the University of Arizona, told our colleague Charla Bear that the government's schooling policy had more cynical aims.

"They very specifically targeted Native nations that were the most recently hostile," Lomawaima says. "There was a very conscious effort to recruit the children of leaders, and this was also explicit, essentially to hold those children hostage. The idea was it would be much easier to keep those communities pacified with their children held in a school somewhere far away."

Unhappy, homesick students regularly ran away from the schools, and authorities were sent out to apprehend deserters, who were sometimes given asylum by Native communities who protested the mandatory school laws.

But since there was little oversight of the boarding schools, the students were often subjected to horrific mistreatment. Many were regularly beaten. Chaillier said that some of the schools were rife with sexual abuse. Tuberculosis or trachoma, a preventable disease causes blindness, were rampant. All of the boarding schools, she said, had their own cemeteries.

Chaillier said that Pratt wasn't always aware of these conditions. But these were the consequences of the popularity of his philosophies.

Chaillier, who is Lakota, told me a story that her mother often shared with her about her Indian school experience. One day, according to her mother's story, a young student snuck out from his room at night, fell into a hole being dug for a well on the school grounds, broke his neck and died. His body was put on display and the students were assembled, forced to view their schoolmate's corpse as a reminder of what happened to students who were disobedient.

But Chaillier's mother insisted that she didn't attend one of the bad Indian boarding schools. And she wanted Chaillier to attend one, as well. "If you were Indian, you went to Indian school," she said, describing her mother's feelings. Her mother felt that the Indian schools were a net good, even as they were calamitous for Indian cultures.

It's that ambivalence that makes Pratt's legacy so hard to neatly characterize.

"Richard Henry Pratt was an incredibly complex individual in many ways," Chaillier said. "Some of the worst outcomes that have happened in society have started out with someone thinking they were doing something good."

"For his time, Pratt was definitely a progressive," Snyder said. Indeed, he thought his ideas were the only thing keeping Native peoples from being entirely wiped out by disease and starvation. "That's one of the dirty little secrets of American progressivism — that [progress] was still shaped around ideas of whiteness."

Snyder said that Pratt replaced the popular idea that some *groups *were natively inferior to others with the idea that some *cultures *that were the problem, and needed to be corrected or destroyed. In other words, he swapped biological determinism for cultural imperialism.

Given the sheer scale of the physical and cultural violence he helped set in motion, was Pratt himself a practitioner of the very ill he decried at the Lake Mohonk convention? Was he a racist?

Over a century after he was first recorded using the word, we still ask that question — is she or isn't she racist? — in situations where no clear answer would ever present itself. We argue about the composition of the accused's soul and the fundamental goodness or badness therein. But those are things we can't possibly know. And as we litigate that question, other more meaningful questions become obscured.

Racism remains a force of enormous consequence in American life, yet no one can be accused of perpetrating it without a kicking up a grand fight. No one ever says, "Yeah, I was a little bit racist. I'm sorry." That's in part because racists, in our cultural conversations, have become inhuman. They're fairy-tale villains, and thus can't be real.

There's no nuance to these public fights, as a veteran crisis manager told my colleague, Hansi Lo Wang. Someone is either a racist and therefore an inhuman monster, or they're an actual, complex human being, and therefore, by definition, incapable of being a racist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic, who often writes about race, is one of several writers and thinkers who has drawn attention to this paradox:

The idea that America has lots of racism but few actual racists is not a new one. Philip Dray titled his seminal history of lynching At the Hands of Persons Unknown because most "investigations" of lynchings in the South turned up no actual lynchers. Both David Duke and George Wallace insisted that they weren't racists. That's because in the popular vocabulary, the racist is not so much an actual person but a monster, an outcast thug who leads the lynch mob and keeps *Mein Kampf *in his back pocket.

We can ask whether Richard Henry Pratt was himself racist even as he decried racism. But that question distracts from the concrete and lingering realities of his legacy. It's far more valuable to wrestle with these two ideas at once: Pratt probably improved the material lives of many individual Native American children who lived in poverty and were at risk of starving. He also aggressively campaigned to destroy their cultures and subjected them to a panoply of miseries and privations.

Last Monday, a woman named Emily Johnson Dickerson died. She was the last person in the world who spoke only the Chickasaw language. That's a reality interlaced with the difficult legacy of Richard Henry Pratt.

In the century since Pratt used the word racism, the term has become an abstraction. But always buried somewhere underneath it are actions with real consequences. Sometimes those outcomes are intended. Sometimes they're not. But it's the outcomes, not the intentions, that matter most in the end.

[Mark]

The author does not come to a very optimistic conclusion, but the attempt must be made. The text of the article is only 5 pages long so it is not that dense, but it is quite illuminating for anyone interested in examining the:

Psychological and Physiological Origins of Racism and Other Social Discrimination

In his book "White Over Black," the historian Winthrop Jordan, has documented much of the early developmental course and some of the dynamics of American racism. He laboriously gathered and creatively organized his data so that they show, graphically and in considerable detail, that European whites, upon encountering blacks, imputed to the blacks all the group-threatening characteristics which the whites were attempting to renounce and repress in themselves. By the psychological mechanism of projection they purged and purified their image of themselves as thev
dumped their undesirable characteristics upon their image of blacks, and thereby created a pro-white, anti-black paranoia. Role relationships, philosophies, economies, politics, education, and all other aspects of culture and social structure were then altered to support and to conform to these false beliefs which aggrandized whites and denigrated blacks.

Shakespeare beautifully reflected these 17th century social dynamics in the play "Othello" when he depicted the crafty white Iago systematically undermining and destroying"the dignity, the man-hood, the confidence, the initiative, the self-esteem, the capacity for love and trust, and eventually the life of the black Othello.

[Mike]

Posted by Praxis (here)

Posted by Mike (here)

Posted by Mark/Rahkyt (here)

Posted by Mike (here)
My remedies to the current situation won't resonate with you at all because I don't view western civilization as being an inherently evil, patriarchal society run by white supremacists. But it mostly involves facing what's in front of us (reality) with courage and strength(not inventing subjective narratives to avoid it), cultivating virtue, and embracing personal responsibility instead of blaming everyone and everything for one's issues (hey I warned you that it wouldn't resonate with you! lol)

I understand exactly where you are coming from. Thank you for sharing your perspective in the thread.

respectfully, i don't think you do. i think you still imagine that you're the good guy and i'm the bad guy. am i wrong?

First, Mark is a good guy and I hope we all know(not imagine) this is true.

Second, I supremely dislike what you are doing here with this statement. Like pick up artist level debate tactic. Dont you see yourself as the good guy?

Are you the bad guy? No. Why would you think that anyone here thinks that? Are some of your points not what others think? Clearly yes we all do not agree on everything. We have a difference of opinions on some things and that is why we are here discussing. This doesnt mean that you are the bad guy in any sense.

This feels like projection mike. Why try to pivot to the victim stance?

Reverse Racism is a white nationalist dog whistle.

It doesnt exist. There is racism.

When a black person says "**** crackers, not allowed here" That isnt reverse racism. It is racism full stop. If a Mexican calls me snow white, it is racist full stop.

Reverse racism is a perspective that only ethnonationalist have because think of how it shifts the perspective. It makes them now the victim.

All racism is wrong no matter who it is directed at and where it came from. Humans are humans.

Hi Praxis, have you watched the evergreen videos i posted here?

Are you familiar with the James Damore debacle at google?

Victimhood is what I'm speaking out against. If you're not familiar with how notions of "equity" can go way too far, then you'll have no idea what I'm trying to say here. Those 2 events are perfect case studies, and I highly suggest you take a look.

Earlier Mark accused me of being passive aggressive. I'm not being passive aggressive at all. I'm just being aggressive! I've integrated that aggression from my shadow in a healthy way (reread that thread and all the other brilliant ones ive started lately, too many to count). Anyone who hasnt integrated theirs will view mine as being intrusive. But it's really just an excuse to assume moral high ground while avoiding the integration of their own shadow. It's cowardice masquerading as morality. Thats often what "taking the high ground" really is. It's not noble at all; it's a faux moral stance designed to remain willfully blind to one's shadow, all while justifying a failure to be honest with oneself.

I don't feel like I've really talked to Mark at all so far. I'd love to talk to him, but I feel like I'm mostly speaking to an ideological persona. I don't feel ive really learned anything about him yet; I feel like I'm discussing and debating a spread sheet filled with universally cliched ideological talking points. My aggression has been an attempt to break thru that.

[Gemma13]

I'm a lurker on this thread benefiting greatly from contributors so wanted to say thanks; especially to Mike and Mark.

[Melinda]

Hmmm... (I clench my pale fists - then release, letting out a sigh...)

I really appreciate so many posts on this thread. But recently, in relation to Mark/Rahkyt and Mike in particular – you are both (in my humble opinion) such bright, intelligent souls. Both making such valuable contributions. For entirely selfish reasons I almost wish distance was no object, as I'd love to make us all big pots of tea and sit by a warm, juicy fire so I could listen to you both expound for hours. And, as I'm a bit of a talker, sometimes especially when people inspire me, join in with my own contributions – as I seek to explore my own biases, compassion, and the sources of my viewpoints. In short, I'm really glad you're both here. Tea for everyone.

Racism. What a monumental subject. With such a vile, painful and damaging history. I've tried several times to write a post for this thread, each draft coming in at half a dozen or so pages. I'll try a shorter version that will no doubt be inadequate by my own standards, before I even worry about others'.

When I was a tiny child, my mother turned to me one day and reminded me that a friend of hers and my father's was coming over to visit. I remembered him and described him as “Chocolate coloured” and my mum, a sensitive soul, told me it was probably best not to describe him that way. My budding psyche was confused. Since while I didn't find chocolates delicious - I was a strange bod who didn't like candy - I did appreciate their dark, silky beauty. Things are different now. I've just gobbled two Ferrero Rocher, chocolates containing both brown and light bits. Although the lighter (whiter) parts are nuts. So, perhaps not the best metaphor for integration, on a thread about race. (Ahem.)

My scruffy-hermit attempts at interracial humour aside...

Institutional racism obviously exists. I could write pages on that alone. Equally, racism can and does exist in the minds or attitudes of people of all races. But that in itself cannot be a distraction from addressing institutional biases where they exist. In addition, people of the same race do not always agree on every accusation of racism levelled at people of another race.

Sometimes, when I look around at the world, at the problems facing people of all colours and races, the ways in which various people (of all races and nationalities) are attempting to handle it can seem like we are still just fighting for scraps from 'the master's table.'

It's one of the reasons I've spent so much time on Avalon writing about and exploring the 'Free Energy' topic. The notion that to completely remodel our world we need to start at the root, addressing the energy that fuels it, both spiritually and materially. The premise that we need systems of clean, abundant and environmentally-responsible energy for a radically new economic infrastructure, and a philosophy that seeks to provide true equality of opportunity for all, with an aim towards a shared peace and profoundly loving experience of life. It won't be easy getting there, and that's if we don't annihilate ourselves first with bombs, frequencies or a weaponised virus. Etc.

So many issues in society, including racism and counter-productive competition, have aspects of their foundation or their support-structures rooted in economic inequality. It's hard to resolve that when we're operating from a system that is, inherently, environmentally destructive. It inevitably colours our ability to grow, and to really come from a place of deepest integrity. I don't plan to elaborate further on that in this space. It would risk being a tangent on a thread that is needed space to address the roots and existence of racial ideas, experiences and constructs.

I will note however, that when it comes to growing such a system, a new system with a clean energy foundation, certain cultures can and need to learn from the viewpoints, and spiritual essence or experience, of what have been (historically) 'outsiders', or oppressed and/or sidelined minorities in their midst. From black communities, to Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Australian aboriginals, the list goes on. For that to happen those groups need their voices to be heard. And deeply listened to. You also have people in Asia and Africa who are keen to learn from and adapt the cultural fruits and ideas from what have been countries with predominantly white cultural leaders. People, everywhere, want to learn from each other. And many are denied access, whether the censorship is overt (e.g. China) or less obvious (e.g. North America.)

Questions remain over the best way to facilitate that access. But freedom of speech is and will remain crucial to it. Which is why I sympathise and agree with Mike's point that using accusations of racism (or transphobia) to shut people down, without giving them a proper opportunity to defend themselves, is a dangerous thing. If people want their ideas and/or voices to be taken seriously, respected, they have to apply that principal to all.

Many years ago I used to write letters, based on appeals by Amnesty International. I later came to question aspects of their organisation, but that's irrelevant to this particular story. Amnesty would email people cases so we could write letters to appeal to politicians, law enforcement etc, to reconsider the situations of an individual or group whose rights were being ignored or oppressed. Individuals who were abused or unjustly incarcerated. The first letter that gave me cause to doubt, cause to deeply consider whether I wanted to write on the person's behalf, was one of capital punishment. The murder the man had committed was so vile, that even though I did not support the death penalty, I wondered what right I had to ask for his sentence to be commuted, when I had not experienced the pain, the loss, of his victims or the victims' loved ones. What shifted me back to a place of principal was reading how the murder victims' closest relatives had themselves decided they did not want to punish the perpetrator in that way. Perhaps they had decided that murder was not the path to forgiveness that would ultimately set them free from part of their pain.

An eye for an eye will leave the world blind. If you are against murder, why support another form of it in the death sentence? Equally, we either believe in freedom of speech for those whose opinions we disagree with, or we don't believe in it at all. We cannot create a truly new and respectful system if it is built on hypocrisy. Built on the killing of a fundamental right. I agree with Mike that some of the questionable attitudes towards this are reaching into other areas of our lives, from corporate practices to internet censorship. The effects may linger, in policy or law, long after the furore of individual cases dies down in the media.

There are no doubt many and layered reasons why the civil rights movement in the U.S., or Mandela's road to ending and healing apartheid in South Africa, or Gandhi's path to freeing India from colonial oppression, did not result in utopias in the decades that followed. But it pays to ask, what were the deepest obstacles? Why hasn't the civil rights movement in the U.S. achieved more than it has? What is absent? It would be easy to say unlimited funds, or laser weaponry and super-advanced psychic power in the hands of civil rights crusaders. But to go deeper... If it was strength in the black people, or the white people, everyone involved - where do we find that missing strength?

Some answers are going to be different for people of different races or backgrounds. It's obvious that different groups are going to have very different experiences, histories, emotional and physical DNA memories, and sets of ancestors flowing in their veins. Some answers, conversely, are going to be simple, and the same for all. Some answers are going to require us all working together, to identify hidden enemies or forces of control – whether they are within us or safe in ivory towers or other dimensions.

On conflict, I read a quote attributed to Malcolm X which I agree with :

“Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/...-independence/

There is a danger that in appealing to minorities or oppressed peoples to be peaceful in protest, it will be seen as attempt to further pacify, to silence, to refuse to acknowledge the vast pain inflicted by silk-tongued or savage oppressors. That it will undermine the passion required to drive change. It is a legitimate danger. There are necessary fights that would never have been won had there been no warriors, only kind words.

But I'm also reminded of something Alice Walker wrote in a letter to Bill Clinton, while he was President, which I first read decades ago. About harmlessness. Alice Walker strikes me as more than just an interesting and powerful writer, with a rich mind and a deep heart. Writing to Clinton, talking with David Icke, loving her own people and 'the other' through life. She is an explorer. I can't really do her soul or contribution justice in a paragraph. But anyway... From her words to Clinton :

“The world, I believe, is easier to change than we think. And harder. Because the change begins with each one of us saying to ourselves, and meaning it: I will not harm anyone or anything in this moment. Until, like recovering alcoholics, we can look back on an hour, a day, a week, a year, of comparative harmlessness.”

I doubt this is an entirely accurate reproduction of her letter, but I found a copy at this link, and recall enough parts that I think it's worth reading despite what may be inaccuracies or typos :

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43b/118.html

It's hard to embody such 'harmlessness' when the wolves are at the door. Wolves, ever circling, in the flesh or in your head. Very hard indeed. But as Alice Walker described, even though I am mindful that the context in which she wrote is very specific and could take pages to explore and unpack in itself, perhaps some things are easier, at times simpler, than we think.

It concerns me that some of what's going on currently has its roots in power-plays rather than progress. There are murky politics. There is the risk of powerful, wealthy (in some cases white-skinned) social engineers using this very issue, racism, for their own ends to manipulate groups in certain directions via institutions and the media. I've read and heard non-white people making the same claim – that the ploy is dangerous. How it pits people against each other and uses / abuses their skin colour, gender, nationality or cultural inheritance to divide, to more easily conquer them. Perhaps it is elitists enslaving people in a new (yet not so new) way. Hard to navigate that trap in the midst of very real grievances. I imagine some minorities are aware of it, but using it to fund their objectives. Playing the system. They are in a difficult position.

When I consider all of the above, and try to reduce it to a simple principal, I believe the foundation on which a new system is built will influence deeply the quality of what it births. Will determine how new it really is. And none of this feels easy when the game is rigged.

You've been posting some great stuff Mark/Rahkyt. Thank you. The writing by Nate Hochman that you copied over in Post #450 made some really valuable points, and was an interesting read. And Mike, you've been posting some really valuable and necessary stuff too. You both seem (in this scribbler's humble opinion) basically awesome.

Deepest respect and love to all

[Mike]

That was beautiful Melinda Thanks. You really have a wonderful soothing energy.

I didn't expect to get so involved in the thread, but it's an important topic that deserves a few points of view.

And now that I've expressed mine, and my little chapter is written, I don't have anything else to add. Mark and Denno, no hard feelings.

[Praxis]

Posted by Mike (here)
Victimhood is what I'm speaking out against. If you're not familiar with how notions of "equity" can go way too far, then you'll have no idea what I'm trying to say here. Those 2 events are perfect case studies, and I highly suggest you take a look.

Earlier Mark accused me of being passive aggressive. I'm not being passive aggressive at all. I'm just being aggressive! I've integrated that aggression from my shadow in a healthy way (reread that thread and all the other brilliant ones ive started lately, too many to count). Anyone who hasnt integrated theirs will view mine as being intrusive. But it's really just an excuse to assume moral high ground while avoiding the integration of their own shadow. It's cowardice masquerading as morality. Thats often what "taking the high ground" really is. It's not noble at all; it's a faux moral stance designed to remain willfully blind to one's shadow, all while justifying a failure to be honest with oneself.

I don't feel like I've really talked to Mark at all so far. I'd love to talk to him, but I feel like I'm mostly speaking to an ideological persona. I don't feel ive really learned anything about him yet; I feel like I'm discussing and debating a spread sheet filled with universally cliched ideological talking points. My aggression has been an attempt to break thru that.

Maybe Mark's approach has been an attempt to break through your aggression.

We are literally holding children in cages because they are the wrong color and culture and you are screaming about Evergreen college. I have ZERO time for you anymore.

[AutumnW]

Academia is creating a parallel reality right out of Gulliver's Travels, where countries go to war over which end of an egg should be cracked. It's become completely loonie.

It isn't Mike who is ignoring children in cages, nor Jordan Peterson. It's the students and those who cater to them who have created an ideological wall around themselves using the mortar of narcissism, naïveté and entitlement. The wall is so impenetrable and tall they can't see beyond it to the actual deep suffering going on.

What has made the deepest impression on me in the last year is being part of a vast writer's group, many of whom are well educated black women. In all the essays that have been written by this group, I don't think I've read one about Ferguson, Missouri riots and their causes. Nor have I read anything about the prison system. What they write a LOT about is all of the "micro-aggressions" they have to put up with when dating white men.

In Canada, a good 10% of the text in the leading newspaper is devoted to hair splitting gender non- issues but curiously, precious little text about the ongoing horror of people freezing to death in the winter on the streets. Amd that frosts me,mid you'll forgive a bad pun!

And Praxis, just a suggestion -- before you write someone off, send them a pm and try to get to know them, behind the scenes. Most importantly, watch their linked videos.

[Ernie Nemeth]

I'd like to revisit a topic I've been exposed to recently, at least I think I have been exposed to from my point of view.

I am trying to break into a new but very much related area of electrical work - robotic control and industrial automated systems.

I am running into a strange situation. My knowledge is not a commodity as much as a liability in this setting. That is one thing.

The other is I was wondering where all the minorities we are bringing to the country are working. Well, I found them, they are in these industries I want to break into. Except the rules have changed in these places of employment. The focus is on obedience and following rules, and of course making them. The labor gains we have enjoyed in past decades are being eroded in these places and those who know better are not wanted or tolerated.

Collaboration, for example, beyond quickly discussing who will do what, is frowned upon, as is any form of socialization. The overview is the first casualty as the workers are only concerned with their own job security. That overview is as important, especially to service workers, as is job-specific knowledge. The logical flow-chart of the plant's operation and organization is withheld from those that need it the most. Questions and study in that regard are not welcome because the activities of the service workers has been identified and listed. There is no room or need for innovation or individualized effort.

So here it comes.

When I look around I see this is not true of all in these industries. In fact, the minorities are encouraged to excel, to mingle, to collaborate and have each others' back. It is only the long-term Canadians receiving this treatment. I would say white but it is not only whites but blacks being targeted by this tactic. Our rights and privileges are being removed and there is not a thing we can do about it. I was told to get my hands out of my pockets while discussing technical issues, like some 18 yr old kid with an attitude, by a young minority overseer who was trained in the old British influenced rigid style of everything by the book and no room for novelty school.

Am I seeing reverse-racism or am I seeing my own prejudice? A little of both perhaps?

Sure could use some helpful perspective on this one.

[Praxis]

Posted by AutumnW (here)
Academia is creating a parallel reality right out of Gulliver's Travels, where countries go to war over which end of an egg should be cracked. It's become completely loonie.

It isn't Mike who is ignoring children in cages, nor Jordan Peterson. It's the students and those who cater to them who have created an ideological wall around themselves using the mortar of narcissism, naïveté and entitlement. The wall is so impenetrable and tall they can't see beyond it to the actual deep suffering going on.

What has made the deepest impression on me in the last year is being part of a vast writer's group, many of whom are well educated black women. In all the essays that have been written by this group, I don't think I've read one about Ferguson, Missouri riots and their causes. Nor have I read anything about the prison system. What they write a LOT about is all of the "micro-aggressions" they have to put up with when dating white men.

In Canada, a good 10% of the text in the leading newspaper is devoted to hair splitting gender non- issues but curiously, precious little text about the ongoing horror of people freezing to death in the winter on the streets. Amd that frosts me,mid you'll forgive a bad pun!

And Praxis, just a suggestion -- before you write someone off, send them a pm and try to get to know them, behind the scenes. Most importantly, watch their linked videos.

I would recommend you go back and read what we said to each other. After reading, do you feel Mike addressed any of my comments? I do not.

So we really arent discussing here but rather he is spouting Jordan Peterson Talking points and feeling very full of ego.

Again. We are holding children in cages and he is talking about a tiny college nobody cares about or goes to. If I went to evergreen maybe I could comment or care. Since evergreen doesnt affect me but the immigration policy of the US does, I actually care about immigration policy and not what is happening on a small college campus.

[Gemma13]

Ah, if only it was limited to a small group in our global sea.  Sadly it is a global hot potato that has invented extremist ideologies that are quite literally shutting down free speech along with insidiuosly creating massive division amongst good people by branding them with false accusations of being guilty of heinous acts against humanity.

I am so strapped for time so cannot provide a comprehensive list of independent media outlets, research papers, authors, etc who are tackling this problem - but Mark and Mike have provided good ground.  Here's one though to demonstrate that Mike's discussion on Evergreen is being used as a good summary, with visual proof to boot.

Disclaimer:  This article is from a political magazine whose leaning/bias will not appeal to some but the article captures the essence of the Evergreen discussion in my opinion.  There is so much more out there though.


https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/0...a-race-denier/

EXTRACT:

(...)

And yet for all their different styles and success rates, these two groups share something incredibly important in common: they are obsessed with race. Genuinely, sometimes even hysterically obsessed with it. Indeed, my battering by both sides last week gave me a stark and enlightening realsation: both of these camps think of me, and presumably everyone else, as little more than a racial category. In my case, as a ‘white man’. The speed and firmness with which both sides reduced me to a white man was striking. The racists, including in a weird YouTube video one of them made about me, informed me that I am a white man who is insufficiently proud of my white heritage or of my genetic superiority to blacks. The wokeists denounced me as a white man who, by dint of my cultural heritage, can have no understanding of the racial complexities of modern Britain. (Even worse, I am a ‘mediocre white man’, in the words of the people at Novara Media. Perhaps I need to make a greater effort to strive for Aryan non-mediocrity.)

To both groups, I am a disappointing white man. I am a disappointment to my race. The racist abusers of science who propagate the foul idea of white genetic superiority see me as a self-hating white man who refuses to acknowledge my genetic supremacy to people of colour. The wokeist promoters of identitarian difference see me as a self-denying white man who refuses to acknowledge my inherited privileges, the way in which history has bestowed on me the category of ‘privileged’ while bestowing on black people the category of ‘victim’.

Neither side allows reality to leak in. That I am less intelligent than many black people makes not a blind bit of difference to the racist right who think I should wallow in my ‘superiority’. That I come from an Irish working-class background and am a first-generation Briton makes no difference to the wokeist left who think I should self-flagellate for my ‘privilege’. All truth and nuance is erased by both the science and the culture of racial myopia; by both the scientific racists of the new right and the cultural racialists of the woke left.

(...)

That we live in a new era of racial thinking, in which so much of educational, political and public life is organised around these new-sounding and dangerous racial ideas, is clear from the fact that it has become incredibly difficult to question and push back against woke racialisation. Indeed, there is now open ridicule of anyone who says: ‘I prefer the Martin Luther King approach of judging people by their character rather than skin colour.’ Woke activists mercilessly mock people who say this. In the US, some campuses describe such a worldview as a ‘racial microaggression’. So to argue against racial thinking is racist. This is mad, Orwellian nonsense.

We cannot let them demean and destroy the MLK belief that character is more important than colour, because this belief is the very essence of a progressive, humanist politics. Both the alt-right and the woke left want you to think racially. Refuse. Rebel. Do the right thing: view all people as individuals with agency, autonomy, aspirations and character, regardless of their skin colour, their ethnicity or their heritage. Fight for the King approach to humanity over the deeply destructive racialism of the flagging racist right and the ascendant woke left.

[Mark]

Posted by Gemma13 (here)
I'm a lurker on this thread benefiting greatly from contributors so wanted to say thanks; especially to Mike and Mark.

Thank you Gemma. Thank you also, for reaching out and letting us know you've been reading. That always feels nice, as for issues like this, it is often hard to get folks to comment because it is so close to home in so many ways. So you are appreciated for being present and accounted for!

Posted by Melinda (here)
Racism. What a monumental subject. With such a vile, painful and damaging history. I've tried several times to write a post for this thread, each draft coming in at half a dozen or so pages. I'll try a shorter version that will no doubt be inadequate by my own standards, before I even worry about others'.

Thank you for sharing this post and I hope, in the future, you will feel freer to share others as well. All perspectives and realities are valid, here, and it is as safe a space as I and the moderators can make it for feeling open. If you are thinking or feeling something, others are too. And they will read your words and say, 'Yes! Someone said it, thank you!' Even though they may think that instead of giving a thanks, or commenting. Every word counts. So thank you, again, for these.

Posted by Melinda (here)
When I was a tiny child, my mother turned to me one day and reminded me that a friend of hers and my father's was coming over to visit. I remembered him and described him as “Chocolate coloured” and my mum, a sensitive soul, told me it was probably best not to describe him that way. My budding psyche was confused. Since while I didn't find chocolates delicious - I was a strange bod who didn't like candy - I did appreciate their dark, silky beauty. Things are different now. I've just gobbled two Ferrero Rocher, chocolates containing both brown and light bits. Although the lighter (whiter) parts are nuts. So, perhaps not the best metaphor for integration, on a thread about race. (Ahem.)

What an elegant story-telling style you have. Very visual and an early experience that obviously had a marked influence upon your later thoughts about these issues.

Posted by Melinda (here)
Institutional racism obviously exists. I could write pages on that alone. Equally, racism can and does exist in the minds or attitudes of people of all races. But that in itself cannot be a distraction from addressing institutional biases where they exist. In addition, people of the same race do not always agree on every accusation of racism levelled at people of another race.

Sometimes, when I look around at the world, at the problems facing people of all colours and races, the ways in which various people (of all races and nationalities) are attempting to handle it can seem like we are still just fighting for scraps from 'the master's table.'

Absolutely. Which underlies all of my efforts to get people to see past their partisan bias, which is present even here, to understand that we all have to work together and get beyond the created differences that were designed to keep us from working together in the first place. I've explored how those differences were created in the mid-1600s here in the USA and how they've been exported to Western nations across the world to institutionalize this hierarchy based upon a completely irrational form of judgment, skin-color.

Those masters remain content every time we concentrate on minor events and lose sight of the larger and more important goal.

Posted by Melinda (here)
It's one of the reasons I've spent so much time on Avalon writing about and exploring the 'Free Energy' topic. The notion that to completely remodel our world we need to start at the root, addressing the energy that fuels it, both spiritually and materially. The premise that we need systems of clean, abundant and environmentally-responsible energy for a radically new economic infrastructure, and a philosophy that seeks to provide true equality of opportunity for all, with an aim towards a shared peace and profoundly loving experience of life. It won't be easy getting there, and that's if we don't annihilate ourselves first with bombs, frequencies or a weaponised virus. Etc.

I will look for your work. I don't get out and about much lately but I will make a point of it as the topic of 'free energy' is one that will help to free people from the systemic oppression that has dogged oceanic humanity for so long.

Posted by Melinda (here)
So many issues in society, including racism and counter-productive competition, have aspects of their foundation or their support-structures rooted in economic inequality. It's hard to resolve that when we're operating from a system that is, inherently, environmentally destructive. It inevitably colours our ability to grow, and to really come from a place of deepest integrity. I don't plan to elaborate further on that in this space. It would risk being a tangent on a thread that is needed space to address the roots and existence of racial ideas, experiences and constructs.

I will note however, that when it comes to growing such a system, a new system with a clean energy foundation, certain cultures can and need to learn from the viewpoints, and spiritual essence or experience, of what have been (historically) 'outsiders', or oppressed and/or sidelined minorities in their midst. From black communities, to Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Australian aboriginals, the list goes on. For that to happen those groups need their voices to be heard. And deeply listened to. You also have people in Asia and Africa who are keen to learn from and adapt the cultural fruits and ideas from what have been countries with predominantly white cultural leaders. People, everywhere, want to learn from each other. And many are denied access, whether the censorship is overt (e.g. China) or less obvious (e.g. North America.)

Well said. I am glad to highlight it again.

Posted by Melinda (here)
Questions remain over the best way to facilitate that access. But freedom of speech is and will remain crucial to it. Which is why I sympathise and agree with Mike's point that using accusations of racism (or transphobia) to shut people down, without giving them a proper opportunity to defend themselves, is a dangerous thing. If people want their ideas and/or voices to be taken seriously, respected, they have to apply that principal to all.

Agreed. Those accusations of racism, depending upon who makes them, and what they are talking about specifically, can be valid or invalid, depending upon the context and, again, the specific instance.

There is racism. And people say racist things.

And, sometimes, it needs to be called out.

But, if that instance is one of ignorance or misunderstanding, then of course it should be explained.

Posted by Melinda (here)
An eye for an eye will leave the world blind. If you are against murder, why support another form of it in the death sentence? Equally, we either believe in freedom of speech for those whose opinions we disagree with, or we don't believe in it at all. We cannot create a truly new and respectful system if it is built on hypocrisy. Built on the killing of a fundamental right. I agree with Mike that some of the questionable attitudes towards this are reaching into other areas of our lives, from corporate practices to internet censorship. The effects may linger, in policy or law, long after the furore of individual cases dies down in the media.

That is so. But this thread is not the place to go in-depth in exploration of those separate issues even though they are deeply intertwined, mentioned as asides and in support of the discussion about racism, the LGBTQIA movement is certainly going to come up as it should. This could become a thread on all of the linked exposures the masses have to the excesses of privilege and oppression, and validly so. The identity politics movement is now vast, and includes people on what used to be called the Right.

This phenomenon, which is not new, as European Americans in this context were the first to employ identity politics, is something we can talk about and stay true to the intent of the thread.

Posted by Melinda (here)
There are no doubt many and layered reasons why the civil rights movement in the U.S., or Mandela's road to ending and healing apartheid in South Africa, or Gandhi's path to freeing India from colonial oppression, did not result in utopias in the decades that followed. But it pays to ask, what were the deepest obstacles? Why hasn't the civil rights movement in the U.S. achieved more than it has? What is absent? It would be easy to say unlimited funds, or laser weaponry and super-advanced psychic power in the hands of civil rights crusaders. But to go deeper... If it was strength in the black people, or the white people, everyone involved - where do we find that missing strength?

We find it in that space of desperation that exists when people realize they have nothing further to lose. Too many, on all sides, are currently too comfortable to make these changes because they are afraid it will take something from them and theirs. It is my opinion that we all have more to lose before we are desparate enough, as a human collective, to truly and effectively make the change necessary to shift society to that higher modality of beingness.

And it will take more collective trauma to get there.

Posted by Melinda (here)
It concerns me that some of what's going on currently has its roots in power-plays rather than progress. There are murky politics. There is the risk of powerful, wealthy (in some cases white-skinned) social engineers using this very issue, racism, for their own ends to manipulate groups in certain directions via institutions and the media. I've read and heard non-white people making the same claim – that the ploy is dangerous. How it pits people against each other and uses / abuses their skin colour, gender, nationality or cultural inheritance to divide, to more easily conquer them. Perhaps it is elitists enslaving people in a new (yet not so new) way. Hard to navigate that trap in the midst of very real grievances. I imagine some minorities are aware of it, but using it to fund their objectives. Playing the system. They are in a difficult position.

Yes. All "power players" do it, from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to Donald Trump Jr. and Steve Bannon. It's not a new way, it is what has been called the wages of whiteness, which, by their very existence, call into existence their opposition, both using the same tactics for different populations, in effect, mirroring each other creating a potentially equal, although seemingly oppositional, karmic effect.

Posted by Melinda (here)
When I consider all of the above, and try to reduce it to a simple principal, I believe the foundation on which a new system is built will influence deeply the quality of what it births. Will determine how new it really is. And none of this feels easy when the game is rigged.

You've been posting some great stuff Mark/Rahkyt. Thank you. The writing by Nate Hochman that you copied over in Post #450 made some really valuable points, and was an interesting read.

The game is rigged. And when we play the games of the "riggers", by falling for the ideological traps and conundrums they set, we are falling headlong right into the parameters of conflict that their Machiavellian designs have placed in this reality version to distract us. Thank you for the gift of presence and sharing these valuable words. Blessings.