Privilege and racism - some strategy thoughts

The following is a comment I made in response to another post relating to privilege and racism in the South African context. I am interested to hear your constructive thoughts.

There are so many sad realities:

- the fact that many, if not most of the privileged have no clue the true extent of their privilege.

- the fact that many, if not most of the privileged are not willing to be curious enough to learn and understand their privilege and the impact it had on others.

- the fact that the psychology behind prejudice and racism is complex and is unique to each individual. Therefore a once size fits all fight against racism seems to get nowhere.

- the fact that the hurt of the oppressed is so so deep and often is beneath layers upon layers of defensive mechanisms and numbing tactics.

- the fact that, like with privilege, the healing for the oppressed is complex and unique to each individual.

So how do we tackle this? Well the answers are not obvious and not easy. However based on some research and thinking, here are some of the thoughts I have started to formulate:

- When the environment is as volatile and very divided as we have seen it is, using revolutionary and conflict approaches to fight racism gets lots of visibility but in the end still leaves us with two camps and not many changes in mindsets.

- we need to look long term (e.g. next one hundred years) as our time frame, with the objective of our great and great great grandchildren living in a fair, compassionate, racially integrated society.

- this for me says that (for example) trying to change the mindset of the Brakenfell high school parent is probably a waste of energy and could result in lots of collateral damage.

- rather lets focus on the youth in a comprehensive way. Lobby to get community, empathy, cross-culture, cross-religion, cross-class, cross-language, cross-race programs that are deep and practical to be the highest education priority for the next 100 years. These should supersede teaching of values of individualistic “success” and material wealth. Other key educational disciplines can still be there but we should put healing for our future as the highest priority. If our adults can’t learn to listen with open hearts to those who have suffered then let’s focus on our youth.

- in the interim, we can also focus on the healing of those that were and are still victims of oppression. We need to work at slowly undoing all the layers of defensive mechanisms and numbing behaviour. There are many wonderful initiatives working in this space. But somehow we need to get this going on a much bigger and purposeful scale. Not sure how we do this? Perhaps it needs to be a strong focus within the government’s health budget. This is the space I am personally drawn to.

- lastly, also in the short term, I also feel that we need to take a different approach to the oppressors/racists. Calling them out for their prejudice seems just to create more aggression with no change. However when I have had individual dialogues with racists and offered curiosity rather then “shaming” the results were remarkably different. The one individual went from extreme aggression and denying any racism to shedding many tears and explaining that he feels trapped in the racism and that if he behaved any differently he would be ostracized and rejected even by his family and would have no where to go. I offered him the take away thought of comparing that to being free from the constant burden of hatred for the rest of his life.

There are obviously lots of additional layers and complexity to consider but I feel we need to definitely think long term and try to avoid using all our anti-racism energy on approaches that make little to know difference.

What do you all think?

#antiracism