How Racism is Defined, Depends on Who Defines
By Art Mobley
There’s been an effort to water down the definition of Racism over the decades since the rise and fall of Nazism and more historically, the American Slave trade. The effort to dumb-down the meaning of racism or de-fang the term has resulted in a more friendly word that can be used interchangeably with prejudice or hatred.
This conveniently allows a person to surmise that if they don’t hate, they are free of racism; or if they are tolerant of other racial groups they can’t be classified as racists. Case closed.
Yes, various forms of racism have been practiced against civilized man for eons. Only recently has the practice been elevated to a sudo-science. It can be argued that the British/American Slave trade was the first time racial slavery had been practiced so completely against any other group of people. That is to say, nowhere in history is it recorded that a person was institutionally considered a slave from cradle to grave without exception, simply based on skin color or race. Hitler studied America’s scientific approach to Racism and it ugly child, Eugenics to arrive at his sociology that resulted in the tragedy of Europe* (War Against the Weak – Edwin Black).
The most common definition: members of one racial group who consider themselves intrinsically superior to members of other racial groups. This definition is in fact, inherently limited.
In reality and practice Racism is an act. It becomes a tool of those in position to institutionalize policies of ethnic cleansing, forced removal of other from their land or property or to simply exercise economic privilege. A position of racial superiority when coupled with the power to enforce racial policy is a more accurate definition. How someone feels about another only become relevant when one can act on those feelings. Feeling superior to the beasts of the fields or birds of the air does not automatically make us animal abusers. A simple feeling can be better characterized as something other than racism.
Racism begins with prejudice, but prejudice is not the act of rounding people up for concentration camps or enforcing racial slavery. Racism is the act of forcing others to accept prejudice as custom, the social standard or even as the rule of law.
I may not like you, but if I can’t make you accept second-class education or housing, or force you to work for less pay or no pay, my prejudice is harmless to you. It is force, the act of force that makes racism possible.
Fear of slave rebellions in the colonies and in Haiti had a profound affect on the wording of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Wording to solve the contradiction of slavery were stricken from both documents. The Constitution was of course later amended. However, nothing in modern culture supports the fears that Blacks or others would exact revenge on Whites or any other group for that matter if given equ
Barrack Obama’s distancing himself from a loose association with William Ayers was an act of sensible political diplomacy. In many ways the Right is still fighting the Viet Nam War, and thereby all its anti-war elements as well. The generational fears and the angst of left vs right, military vs civilian, corporate vs labor, Black vs White and all we remember vs all we want to forget are backed up like a clogged sink, stinking just a room away.
Obama was 8 or 9 years old when Ayers and his friends were drunk with the guilt and pain of a war against the world fought by their fathers and brothers, scared White men stirred by a cruel corporate trick.
Obama was right to back away from Reverend Jeremiah Wright for the same reason. Political expedience has its virtues when the stakes are so high that another sacrifice becomes dubiously unnecessary. What principle would Obama be standing for to up hold the battles of Ayers or Wright?
Both Ayers and Wright have to admit the folly of their pasts. Ayers and his misguided Weather Underground were used to systematically target and kill the leadership in the Black civil and human rights movements and selfishly exposed the violent levels necessary for the government to carry out scores of dastardly crimes against mostly Black targets. The WU became the cover story for a FBI COINTELPRO systematic murder spree of leaders like Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, a continuation of the assassination targets that claimed the lives of Malcolm X, Medger Evers and Dr. King. Later George Jackson and dozens of others were killed as the WU ran and hid to live and bomb another day. The Underground fled while Black leaders bled. The Black Panther Party and other central Black organizations had little regard for the WU and had avoided alliances for those very reasons. But the FBI tried to build association where there were none. If that didn’t work they’d just make shit up. Whenever loose associations were made, it was cartoon characters like Eldridge Clever who were out front. Provocateurs and agents of the government were all over the Black community. They didn’t even seem to be looking for the WU. Malcolm X once said of revolution…”If you knew what it meant, you wouldn’t use that word.”
Rev. Wright was thrust into a moment in time by fate. His job was to reveal a side of Barrack Obama that would usher him into the White House. His job is done, the Muslim ties they had planned to pin him with won’t stick in large part because of the right Reverend Dr. Wright. It was Dr. Wright’s performance at the Press Club that showed his opportunistic flare to grab a cheap headline at Obama’s expense and cheapened his own place in history.
Revolution means change. And Obama represents the last and only chance we will have for a proper and complete restructuring of our political and economic systems for the good of all mankind. We can’t afford college antics this time around. The time and future de
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