Race As The Target Variable
Race as the Target Variable
©VISIONS, Inc.
Sometimes participants ask why we focus on racism as the key to creating a multicultural environment. We believe race is the critical variable in the history of the United States of America. When Europeans came to this country, they partially justified their mistreatment of Native Americans on the basis that they were an inferior breed of whites. By using themselves, their values and experiences, as their sole frame of reference, Europeans denied the differences of custom and appearance of a whole race of people. Perhaps even more importantly, this discounting of others allowed Europeans to ignore Native Americans land rights. Similarly by viewing “dark people” as less than human, whites partially justified slavery. This process of maintaining racism and white supremacy remain fundamentally unchanged even as we begin the twenty-first century.
In most indices of group access to power, brown and black people remain at the “bottom of the barrel.” Power has historically been correlated with skin color since the advent of colonialism and imperialism by Europeans across the world. In the United States, the lighter the skin, the more likely it was that a person of color would have access to social and/or economic resources. Of course, this reality is changing; yet historical residues persist. Today the black infant mortality rate is still higher than any other groups, the median income of black families is still lower, and the number of unemployed black men remains desperately high. Latino and Latina Americans and many groups of Asians fare poorly on these indices of power as well. Native Americans have been removed from their land and border on extinction.
Our focus on race does not reflect a choice to minimize other “isms.” They are all critical. Because of the historical legacy of racism, however, and its continued impact on equal opportunity for people of color, we must confront racism’s inequities directly. Whites must also confront the damaging and insidious effects of the myth of white supremacy as well, if our nation, and indeed, our world is to truly unravel this painful legacy. It is almost impossible still in the United States, for example, to talk about race without being labeled a racist. To the extent that racism continues, however, such a stance sets up the very condition it seeks to remedy.
Discrimination on the basis of color, then, is a crucial part of the legacy of the United States. This process occurs at personal, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural levels. Through our attitudes and behaviors, each of us supports or challenges racism and the myth of white supremacy at each level. We believe that enabling organizations and individuals to resolve these various forms of social oppression allows them to function more multiculturally.
Our goal, then, is to help participants explore their racial learning and its effect on our lives and in our institutions. Through the window of understanding how racism in its many facets limits us and our society, we seek to deepen our ability to recognize and appreciate the cultural uniqueness of all groups and how all forms of systemic oppression affect us all.
