Racism

Racism  (prejudice,  social control,  polarising perspective,  enemy image,  plastic word)
Interest of	• Tendayi Achiume • Ajamu Baraka • Colette Pichon Battle • Ibram Kendi • Ralph McGill

Racism is a slightly flexible concept, not least since there are no distinct 'races' of people in the scientific sense.

Official narrative

Racial discrimination is not acceptable and racist states such as the government of South Africa have been opposed by the (non-racist) international community. Explicit racism should not be tolerated (even to the point of impinging on free speech). Implicit racism based on economic or other means is however not a problem.

Concerns

Institutions can be racist. Arrests for drug use in particular are disproportionately heavy for non-whites in many nations, such as UK and US. The "War on Drugs" has often been used as a hidden means of racist social control.

Social control

Racism has been exploited for millenia as a method to divide and conquer.

British empire

The British empire systematically exploited tensions between different ethnic groups in its subject states.

China

Using the language of the "war on terror", the Chinese government has been launching a range of attacks on minority populations on minority population groups, notably Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang as part of the "Strike Hard Campaign".

“Chinese authorities, bolstered by technology, arbitrarily and indefinitely detaining Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang en masse for actions and behavior that are not crimes under Chinese law. And yet Chinese authorities continue to make wildly inaccurate claims that their “sophisticated” systems are keeping Xinjiang safe by “targeting” terrorists “with precision.””
 (1 May 2019) 

 

Examples

Page name	Description
"White Supremacy"	The racist belief that white people are superior to people of other races and therefore should be dominant over them.
Apartheid
Berlin Conference	1880s conference to regulate European colonization and trade in Africa
Dehumanisation
Eugenics	The idea of breeding humans, allegedly discontinued, but under a guise resumed in modern institutions.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Joe Biden	“Poor kids are just as bright as white kids!”	Joe Biden	9 August 2019
Blowback	“You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”	John Ehrlichman	1994
Lyndon Johnson	“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”	Lyndon Johnson
Ibram X Kendi	“Some White colonizers 'adopted' Black children. They 'civilized' these 'savage' children in the 'superior' ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity. And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can't be racist.”	Ibram X Kendi	2020
Love	“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”	MLK
MLK/Assassination	“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”	MLK
PewDiePie ADL controversy	“Reinstalled Twitter to talk about PewDiePie's betrayal by donating 50k to the ADL. The company working with places like Twitter to get rid of anything "Offensive" @pewdiepie You just supported a group that even ruined even YOUR deal to Disney. Wtf? PewDiePie literally paid $50,000 to not be called racist anymore. And in turn- he just got so many people in the future censored off of places like Twitter and YouTube. Anytime someone gets banned for now on, I'll be sure to say "Thanks Pewdiepie"”	Brittany Venti	11 September 2019
Woke	“I’m increasingly embarrassed to be a white male these days with what I see other white males say”	John Brennan	March 2021
Malcolm X	“I do believe that there will be a clash between East and West. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don't think that it will be based upon the color of the skin....”	Malcolm X	January 1965

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Doreen and Karen – a tale of two mothers	article	15 August 2013	Francis Carr Begbie	A startling and telling comparison of the treatment of two horrific racially-motivated murders by the UK Establishment.
Document:House Negro	book extract	1 March 2012	Denis Rancourt
Document:Weekend Clashes Emblematic of Political Violence Around the Country	Article	16 October 2018	Anti-Defamation League	This ADL blog post from 2018 outlines instances of "terrorism", blamed mainly on the Proud Boys during first two years of the Presidency of Donald Trump. Since then, they were revealed to have links to FBI informants.
Document:Why We Need to Remember Srebrenica	article	3 December 2015	Zarah Sultana	Zarah Sultana, then a student at the University of Birmingham, wrote an article about her trip to Srebrenica

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