Universal Human Rights as a Baseline

Hi Friends,

Happy Holidays! I’m using this post to expand more on solidarity, as informed by Jesse A. Myerson’s “White Anti-Racism Must Be Based in Solidarity, Not Altruism.” All of the quotes below, unless otherwise attributed, are from this essential article, along with most of the content I’m summarizing and sharing with you.

Myerson’s article explains exactly what I was trying to express in the earlier blog post I referenced in my last update. It also touches on this idea of a baseline, which I had written about before in the context of “wondering what would happen if we approached the challenge by creating a baseline of access and opportunity that we think every community member should have (things like clean water, reliable internet, safe and secure housing, a certain quality of education, food access, etc.). And if we created that baseline and saw that some of our community members were not receiving that access or those opportunities, that we would then allocate resources to address that disparity by prioritizing those needs first.”

I should have set my baseline at universal human rights. Speaking of which, International Human Rights Day is December 10. When basic, universal human rights are seen as privileges in our society, destitution and poverty become our baseline.

Myerson explains: “But even those who sit atop the racist hierarchy are pressured and bullied into the constant battle to maintain their position. In forcing them to jealously guard their resources and power against those with less — black people, immigrants, indigenous Americans, Muslims, and ‘white trash’ — our hierarchical system makes them develop fearful and contemptuous attitudes that worsen their lives. It alienates affluent white people from their fellow Americans and humans, depriving them of fellowship and cooperation.”

White people suffer in a system of white supremacy, too. In fact, “Losing ground in America is such a scary prospect that it blinds the affluent to the goal they might achieve if they adopted solidarity: liberation from that fear.”

Which means looking beyond discussions of privilege (which divide us) and shifting to demanding universal rights for all of us. Focusing on privilege emphasizes the scarcity mentality, telling us that we have to compete with each other just to survive. Focusing on privilege produces white guilt for racial inequality, which leads to inaction. If we look at universal human rights instead, suddenly we have abundance, and fury over inequality, which leads to action. Universal human rights puts us all on the same team.

Part of this work must address the mythology of the hierarchy of human value, as Dr. Gail Christopher often describes. The idea of valuing some people over others, believing that some people should have more rights than others, is one of the barriers that divides us.

Here’s an example. Max Nisen and Quartz write “Tackling Inequality in Gifted-and-Talented Programs.” They found that “universal screening leveled the playing field for students who traditionally get overlooked in referral-based systems” for gifted and talented programs in schools. “Given how many gifted children the old regime seemed to miss, and the economic and racial homogeneity it seemed to promote, the overtime seems like it might be worth paying.” However, it was more expensive to pay for testing all of the students than it was for only testing those who were referred, so universal screening was not adopted.

If we valued every student equally, if we believed that every student deserved the same access and opportunities to succeed, we would allocate the resources (financial and otherwise) to align our actions with our values. Instead, our actions uphold a hierarchy of human value, not universal human rights, because we are operating in a scarcity mentality.

More on this next time.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow.

Rethinking White Privilege and Altruism

Hi Friends,

Last time I wrote about the role of capitalism and class in systems of oppression. I’d like to connect our conversation to a more complex understanding of White privilege.

I had an awakening experience of what I have lost to white supremacy during a racially diverse discussion group earlier this year. We divided into self-identified White or BIPOC groups for breakout sessions to discuss what we like about our racial identity. In my White group, we expressed and experienced deep shame, guilt, and sadness about our racial identities. When the BIPOC group shared with the group about their discussion, they expressed joy, strength, and pride in their racial identities.

The difference in our racial identity perspective is not because BIPOC experience more oppression and hardship than White people (even though they do). The difference is that in general, BIPOC choose to create, maintain, and directly identify with deeply rooted cultural traditions and practices, whereas White people often do not, associating our “culture” with oppression, hatred, and violence against others. Our rich ancestral cultural traditions and pride and joy in that culture are part of what we have lost.

White supremacy and a capitalist economy have blinded us to what we have lost, have lured us away from solidarity with each other for human rights. White privilege has given White people the human rights that everyone deserves and has given additional advantages that no one deserves.

This approach to privilege is explained as the “Two Faces of Privilege” by David Kaib.

• The first face “would include food, housing, clean water and air, the ability to move about the world freely, and health care.”
• The second face “includes things that I would argue no one should ever have — the ability to rape, to sexually harass, or to shoot ‘suspicious’ people of color; the ability to dominate conversations, to pressure subordinates, or to demean or demand favors from employees, tenants, or students.”

I learned about this perspective on privilege in Jesse A. Myerson’s “White Anti-Racism Must Be Based in Solidarity, Not Altruism.” I have written before about my concerns about “society’s dependence upon charity and volunteers to meet the baseline needs of our community members who are hungry and/or without shelter” and that my “hope is for systemic change that addresses the root causes of suffering so that the charitable and volunteer work is no longer relied upon for survival.”

Myerson’s article made me think completely differently about anti-racist work because he identified that “The dominant liberal conception of white anti-racism emphasizes altruism. In this mode, white people must set aside our own self-interest in order to extend kindness to those less fortunate.”

Through my anti-racist work, I had internalized that “White people are encouraged to defer, shrink, and assist. It is not our fight, the white-altruism mode says, so we must strive to decenter ourselves and support black people’s ‘advancement’ as peripheral allies, doing what kindnesses we can to compensate them for the privileges we enjoy.”

In this way, much of our anti-racist work is tied up in White saviorism. “Without being anchored to a goal of redistributing power, altruism is often carried along by the prevailing currents of racist capitalism.” Our intent does not matter — our impact matters.

This leads us to solidarity. Myerson says “Time and again, white people acting as allies in other people’s ‘progress’ have not just failed to address racist power relations; they have entrenched white dominance. Altruism cannot be the basis for white anti-racist action. There’s only one thing that can: solidarity.” Further, “Only when white people come to see that our own liberation is bound up in the liberation of others can we achieve solidarity and have a basis for white anti-racism that does not produce the colonial outcomes generated by altruism.”

I will write more about solidarity and a baseline of human rights in my next update.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in finding ways to contribute to fundraising and philanthropy in an anti-racist way, check out Community Centric Fundraising (CCF). Their Slack channel is open to anyone, their newsletters are thought-provoking, and their “10 Principles” can be adapted to many kinds of organizations, even when fundraising is not your main focus. I would love to see these ideas applied to PTAs, for example (a girl can dream!).

Emily

Listen. Amplify. Follow. 

The Intersection of Race and Class

Hi Friends,

I have been exploring some new topics in my anti-racism self-work and one of them is how “White people” became White. My creative writing piece in my last update touched on this somewhat. The reframe, after understanding the origins of whiteness, is to see the connection with economics, with class. I had left class out of most of my work so far because much of the content I had found in anti-racist work pushed race as the single-most oppressive factor for marginalized people, so I focused on race. My mistake was in neglecting the connection between race and class, a situation I’ll be rectifying from here forward. I have not been serving you as well as I would like, so I’m here now to correct my perspective and approach. There is always more to learn!

I want to share some key takeaways from some readings from White Awake’s “Roots Deeper Than Whiteness” online course, which I cannot recommend highly enough. As you will see in the next few of my updates, it has been life-altering and significantly perception-shifting, especially about the role of capitalism in oppressive systems in our country:

The first one I want to highlight is Chris Crass’s article “Anti-Black Racism, the Minstrel Show, and the Making of Whiteness” (we read pages 22–25, but the whole thing is worth a read):

“White supremacy in the United States is primarily about organizing the economy and the political system to serve the interests of elites at the expense of the vast majority of people. White supremacy is a divide-and-rule strategy to maintain structural inequality and the logic and culture of supremacy systems that normalize and rationalize inequality.” (p.23)
“…white racist rage and white resistance to Black equality is rooted in white anger and pain for not achieving the American Dream.” (p.23)

The creation of whiteness has its roots in the desperate migration of displaced and impoverished European people who traveled or were sent (under indenture) to the American colonies. This process required assimilation, abandonment of traditional cultural practices, in the name of survival (sound familiar?).

When landed, wealthy people of European descent encountered solidarity among poor people from many different cultures, they adopted a divide and conquer solution, one that is still in operation today, to prevent the majority from rising up against the minority. They created whiteness to bestow slightly better conditions and opportunities on people of European descent and removed resources and opportunities from everyone else, creating a hierarchy of human value. This persists today.

Did you know that many southern, non-slaveholding White men resisted the Confederacy and hid from or fled the Confederate Army with enslaved and free blacks in the Deep South swamps of Georgia? (see Keri Leigh Merritt’s “War Happens in Dark Places, Too”) Connect this to the way history is taught in our country and why this narrative and others of solidarity among working people are not the stories we share with our children.

White people have been and are still morally and materially harmed by white supremacy. We all are.

This is why anti-racist activists talk about collective liberation and what they mean when they quote Fannie Lou Hamer’s “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Much of the antiracism narrative talks about white privilege, implying strongly that White people have something to lose by engaging in anti-racist work. It turns out that it’s more complicated than that. More on this next time.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow.