Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity, a film by Shakti Butler
The struggle against racism and racial inequities in our society is being fought on multiple levels. One of the key fronts in that battle is education. The acquisition of learning tools to initiate the often uncomfortable dialogues and conversations that lead to deeper understanding and self-awareness about how racism and privilege affect each of us individually and societally is an important part of a process of changing ourselves to change the world around us.
For those of you who are engaged in teaching, community organizing, workplace human resources, or who are just individuals who want to deepen your understanding of race and racism, I'd like to recommend the film Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity.
The film features stories from "racial justice leaders including Amer Ahmed, Michael Benitez, Barbie-Danielle DeCarlo, Joy DeGruy, Ericka Huggins, Humaira Jackson, Yuko Kodama, Peggy McIntosh, Rinku Sen, Tilman Smith and Tim Wise."
On the World Trust website, there is also a calendar of upcoming screenings/dialogue events and information about how you, or your group can get involved, along with links to related learning modules.
As a teacher, in both anthropology and women's studies, I'm always on the lookout for materials to use in the classroom to spark discussion and to illustrate in a more personal way some of the denser academic materials in textbooks.
We often speak of the need to deepen and broaden the national conversation around race and inequity in order to move forward, and those of us who are engaged in democratic movement building will find this film to be a powerful resource in that process.
Follow me below the fold more.
It isn't particularly difficult for most radicals/progressives/liberals/centrists to condem open and virulent racism, which we see a lot of these days. We can easily point to it in positions espoused by media figures like Rush Limbaugh, there is no debate about it when it comes to groups like the KKK, or on places like Stormfront. Many of us support groups that track it, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, or Right-Wing Watch. Others of us are engaged in grassroots movements directly confronting racist voting restrictions or immigration policies, or the criminal injustice system.
Too often however, on the left, it is only attributed to the right wing, or Republicans, or the tea party wing of that party. Our condemnation also becomes part of a blinders-on sweeping indictment of all things Southern, which includes a tendency towards "south bashing" which focuses the blame for racism on one geographical location in the U.S., effectively negating the need to examine the effect of and practice of systemic and individual racism across the board.
Where things become much more complicated is when the term "white privilege" is invoked, because many activists, liberals, progressives, and Democrats are classed as, or consider themselves to be "white." Therein lies the rub. Because the same person actively calling out racism on the right, may actively resist examining white privilege on the left.
I've spent many years fighting racism. I've also spent almost an equal number of years struggling with the effects of internalized oppression within the communities of color I inhabit. To borrow from 12-step program jargon, I've done a considerable amount of work on "taking my own inventory," meaning examining my own biases, prejudices, and my own deeply internalized reactions to race, ethnicity, skin color and privilege.
I don't have white privilege in this society—in most of the ways that one would define it, but growing up in a household with a grandmother who was afforded that privilege, simply because she was white, did have an effect on the economic status of my family. No matter that she was working class. I was born into a community where my light skin color automatically granted me a place in the colorized social hierarchy within the African-American community, which I didn't have to earn—it was simply a matter of birth to two parents of lighter hue. Nor did my skin color inhibit my acceptance in the two Latino communities I am involved in and tied to by marriage and religion—which are Puerto Rican and Cuban.
Of course all this is complicated by the intersections with gender and social class, but I was lucky to have a mother who stressed, at an early age, that the accident of my birth color and hair texture did not grant me the right to automatic superiority, and in fact she raised me to work actively against what was accepted by many of my peers. I refused to join, or participate in the activities of certain "light-skinned only" elite social clubs. I formed close friendships with young women who ranged in color from beige to ebony, which wasn't the norm at the time. I resisted having boyfriends who I knew were only physically attracted to me simply because I was a certain color with long hair, therefore becoming only a status symbol on their arms.
This was often uncomfortable, especially during my teenage years where peer-group pressures tend to regulate social acceptance. On the other hand I had the advantage of attending a racially mixed, politically progressive special arts high school, which was different than the local schools in my neighborhood which were de facto segregated. Looking back, I realize that even getting accepted to that school was influenced by the fact that my parents took me almost weekly to art museums from the time I could walk, and even when we had very little money, I always had paints, brushes and canvases.
Privilege.
Later in life, I chose to make this the focus of one part of my academic study. As a social science anthropology major, I concentrated on the academic study of "social stratification" both in the greater society, and in my own enclave of color.
I dove into both the study of Marxism and a class analysis (one way of defining social hierarchy) but also looked to Weber, who posited a theoretical analysis of status not tied to a relationship to the means of production. I then moved on to look at how "race" fit into this, as it is socially constructed in U.S. society, exploring parallels with, for example the caste system in India.
Sorry to go all academic on y'all today, but I remember having a light bulb moment in school, when I read the work of anthropologist Ralph Linton, and his theories on "achieved and ascribed" status.
How diving into this theoretical realm affected me in my practical daily life is interesting. In my pursuit of inner comfort, I had to recognize that I had no need to feel guilty for what was simply an accident of what family I was born into, of a certain class, and color. I did have a responsibility to examine my own thinking, including obliviousness and blindness about my unearned privilege (and the flip side of self-hatred) and to take up the battle to root out both the systemic and individually destructive results of how this stuff plays out in the lives of my friends and family, my community, and my students.
This was not just "academic." It was a real world, day-to-day challenge to confront.
One of the clips in the film that struck me was the simple description of a shopping experience related by Dr. Joy DeGruy, author of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (check out her full lecture on this topic) where her sister-in-law, who looks phenotypically "white" was treated very differently than she was in the same check-out line, when writing a check at the cashier.
Her sister-in-law wielded her "white privilege" on her behalf. I've done similar things for my public broadcasting minority training grant recipients, research study clients, or students, who were being mistreated by bosses, supervisors, welfare workers, or professors, intervening both in person, or on the phone, simply because I can "speak-white" and code-switch linguistically.
None of this would be possible for me to take on, were I not "self-aware" of my privilege.
Shakti Butler, PhD, filmmaker, founder
& Creative Director of World Trust
I think one of the things that has made
Shakti Butler such a key player in teaching about, examining and confronting privilege is her own accident of birth and her ability to border cross. Born as a "multiracial African-American woman (African, Arawak Indian, and Russian-Jewish)," she discusses in this
interview with Jen Chien, from the National Radio Project how her background and upbringing led her to the work she does.
JC: I am wondering about your own background as a filmmaker and doing this kind of transformative educational work. Where did that come from?
SB: ...Basically the content and my interest in the content comes from the fact that I am a mixed race African American women. Meaning, when I was born there was no such thing as a mixed race, you were either black or not. And I grew up in Harlem understanding very clearly what it meant to live where I lived and then go to private school from 3rd grade on being the only young girl of color in that school. I then I learned I had to have a different language different ways of being going back and forth between those two worlds. It was also the height of the civil rights movement and I also lived close to Malcolm X and I got to hear him speak all the time and I understood the issues I saw my people suffering and I saw the unawareness of that suffering and didn’t understand it. So I think just by how I am and having a deep yearning for justice. And having a deep interest also in love. The power of love. Not personal love or romantic love but the power of love to make change. How do I play a part in making the world a better place? And the rest of it just kind of unfolded.
Many educators and activists are already familiar with Shakti Butler's work. Her film,
Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible is widely used in schools, universities, organizations and forums to initiate conversations about race and privilege in the white community and "to help bridge the gap between good intentions and meaningful change."
"Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible is a moving call, long-overdue, coming from the heart of white people working to restore their own humanity."
-Van Jones
Founder, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change and Green for All
While those of us who are engaged in the struggle against what I call "The Isms" (racism, sexism, homophobism, classism, ageism, ableism) have no problem gaining agreement that they exist, and are damaging to both individuals and entire communities or sectors in our society, we meet resistance and outright denial when we turn the critical lens on ourselves, and our allies. These are things that those "other" people do (you know, those racist wing-nuts) and practice. Some of us have perhaps done a bit more reflection and are able to cop to these things existing within our own milieu, but it is still the minority of us who have become comfortable with accepting privilege, owning it, and realizing that there is no need to be defensive or guilty about it at all. Privilege does not accrue based on one's character. It doesn't make you a good person or a bad person. Bringing it up, and pointing it out makes many people feel they are being judged unfairly. When it is "white privilege" many white people equate it with being called a racist, which is
not what is being addressed. The almost automatic response is to bristle, and pushback, which then often leads to a variety of meltdowns and failures to communicate, sometimes escalating to rage. None of us likes the idea of being part of a hierarchy of oppression. It becomes too simplistic to simply define all the negatives of oppression as "the 1% versus the 99%." Very few of us fall into that 1 percent category but a very large percentage of us benefit from some form of privilege.
The sooner we all clarify, and accept where we are in that hierarchy (and often we occupy different or multiple levels depending on which systemic factor we are examining) and how we sustain these systems—often unconsciously—and the benefits that may or may not accrue from that placement, the faster we can do the work of engaging in dismantling those systemic privileges.
To have equality and to have access to equal benefits in a society, does not mean that all of us have to become the same. I have no interest in living in a "color-blind" world. However, my difference in skin coloration, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or social class from someone else should not automatically deprive me of my rights. The reality is that it does. Even within those groups that are ascribed, like gender, my being female doesn't automatically grant me the status that another female of a different race than my own gets automatically. Ignoring and denying this creates and perpetrates the inability to build strong coalitions. This schism was explored in depth here in recent diaries by shanikka, and hepshiba. There is no possibility of a coalition that will work when there is a power imbalance between the participating groups.
I've accepted being uncomfortable, at times, simply by posting here on a white majority blog. My choice. My decision. But also indicative of my own "used to dealing with white-folks privilege" so I can also understand bloggers of color who for a variety of reasons don't post here, or don't stay around.
I have black, Latino, Asian and Native American family members and friends whose life experience differs from mine who live out their entire lives having almost zero interaction with white people. I also currently have white family members and friends who have zero experience living in communities of color, have no people of color (other than me) in their intimate circles, or in their neighborhoods. I am the only non-white person in my local Democratic Party group, in a county in New York state which is 81 percent white, which hasn't been comfortable and is very different from what I've been used to in my far more diverse hometown of New York City. I am the only woman of color in both the academic departments I teach in at a state university.
For a very long time here at Daily Kos my signature was a quote from Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, "If you're in a coalition and you're comfortable, you know it's not a broad enough coalition."
I'm going to switch back to it.
It's to remind myself that though it may not always be comfortable here, or in other places on my life path, the opportunity to strengthen coalitions is worth it.