Please Read This Article. African Americans, having experienced hundreds of years of racialized oppression as a community, look at particular incidents and recognize the continuity of systemic oppression, which merely has mutated shape and form, often becoming more sophisticated and structural in nature along the way. With that observation we say that a particular situation is racist and needs to be addressed. However, the moment that race is brought into the conversation, many from the white majority label this move as ‘playing the race card’. By doing so, they suggest that race is being brought up inappropriately. The wrong card is being played. More foundational, and at the heart of the matter, it suggests that the African American interpretation is subjective or manipulative, and that by categorizing an event as racial in nature, it must be called out and dismissed. What I would like to suggest, since I am playing along with the white dominant cultural linguistic system that dismisses racism in any given moment by the discernment of the dominant group, is that white folks are the only ones considering a single card. White folks typically are obsessed with interpreting the meaning of individual cards (incidents). They look at the isolated card, and then judge it by their whims and standards of acceptability, which no surprise always works out in a manner in which no one is ever racist. For 400 years, in any given era, white people always created a definition for their time that absolved them from charges of wrong doing and racism and reaffirmed their innocence amidst ongoing hegemony and oppression. The white dominant standard rarely spots white racism, while simultaneously deciding that the specific card played was falsely made into a “race card”. An individual moment, event, or action is judged by looking for KKK rhetoric, or maybe the N-Word, or some cross burning in the yard, and if the hate crime prominent in the early and mid-20th century are not proven, then the racial component in this reasoning must be dismissed. Unlike the dominant culture tunnel vision that is consumed with focusing on one card, the Black community is usually considering the entire deck (ongoing history and current widespread social patterns). We have laid out all the cards in front of us on the table. Rather than zooming in on one card, we have zoomed out and look at all the cards together. All of a sudden, just like any deck, you begin to pick up patterns. 4 Aces, 4 Kings, 4 Queens, and 4 Jacks. Our definition of racism is not based on limiting our judgment to a subjective moment according to the standards of a definition that dominant society has created. No, we refuse to “play their game” even if we work with their cards. Instead, it is only after looking at the reoccurring patterns, studying the whole pack, and then gathering the entire deck back in order, do we claim to make sense of any individual card. We aren’t playing the race card; we are analyzing the racialized deck. It is this very phenomenon, the systemic racial components of our society that the majority of white America has refused to examine carefully, and patiently. Choosing to trust their own intuitions based on their personal subjective assessments (which are socialized in dominant culture) of an individual card (incident), they attempt to make sense of how that card fits into a larger set of cards. via Drew G. I. Hart and the Christian Century
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 22:03:07 +0000
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