Sacred Headwaters #15: Systemics of Anti-Racism

Anti-racism activists and abolitionists have long recognized the systemic nature of racism and how other forms of marginalization and inequality are deeply intertwined with it.

Sacred Headwaters is a bi-weekly newsletter that aims to guide a co-learning process about the existential issues and planetary limitations facing humanity and about how we can reorient civilization in a way that will enable us to thrive for centuries to come. If you’re just joining us, consider checking out the first issue for some context and read through the other issues when you can. The newsletters are not strictly sequential, but this exploration is meant to build on knowledge and understanding over time. Subscribe below if you haven’t already, and please share with friends, family, and colleagues who may be interested:

Issue #15: Systemics of Anti-Racism

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the demand to “defund the police” in an effort to document its long history in anti-racism movements and explore what a post-police world could look like. In the introduction to that issue, I explained that I see climate change, gross wealth inequality, and most other civilization-scale crises as symptoms of the same causes that drive racism, police violence, and mass incarceration.

This may have sounded a bit radical, but it’s actually been recognized by activists for decades. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it succinctly in 1968:

The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.

Body cameras, chokehold bans, bias training. These are the police violence equivalent of “desegregating schools” while using structural mechanisms to segregate neighborhoods. They’re the equivalent of the incremental changes to the American health care system implemented by the Affordable Care Act. And they’re the equivalent of a nominal carbon tax, electric vehicle subsidies, and existing frameworks of pollution regulation.

You can’t transform the behavior of a complex system by nudging coefficients (see “Introduction to Systems Thinking”). You need to change the paradigms that underly the system.

Anti-racism advocates like Dr. King have known about and advocated against the systemic causes of racism for decades, but modern media coverage has lost that piece of the puzzle. To fill that gap, this issue looks at insightful arguments from abolitionists and activists about the systemic nature of racism, inequality, and marginalization, and why systemic solutions are needed — not incremental perpetuation of the status quo.

I think I need to issue this caveat again: the history and movements discussed in this issue are specific to the United States. But systemic racism and the underlying global economic and political structures of colonialism are not.

I’d also like to clarify that, even more than in most other issues, this is a line of inquiry that is relatively new to me and I’m inviting you all to learn with me. I’ve understood for some time that human marginalization and oppression are related to many of the same structures that drive environmental exploitation, but I’m only now learning the legacy of Black activists and authors who have been arguing these same points for far longer than I’ve been alive. I’m very open to suggestions for further resources, authors, and topics.

“How do we change America?” (25 minutes)

This piece is a systemic indictment of the American political system (and class) as a deliberate perpetuator of, essentially, genocide. It’s one part historical, covering economic and criminal justice policy from the 1960s to now and comparing our current moment to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and one part political, bringing the actions of many prominent modern politicians into a sharply critical lens. Bill Clinton said of Black Americans in LA in 1992, “They do not share our values, and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours.” Joe Biden wrote and passed a crime bill in 1994 that significantly contributed to the mass incarceration cycle. Barack Obama continues to call for “evidence-based reforms,” gaslighting the on-going protest movement. The stark parallels and word-for-word matchups between statements made 70 or more years ago and statements made today are deeply worrying and are strong evidence that something fundamental needs to change. Taylor ends on a surprisingly optimistic note: she believes that today’s protests are different, that there’s more solidarity across racial lines and that they represent a broad recognition that America has been looted by the “plutocrats and the plunderers.” We’ll see, I guess?

The Combahee River Collective Statement (20 minutes)

If the above link stops working, it’s also available here.

The Combahee River Collective was a group of Black feminists active in the latter half of the 1970s. In this statement, they laid out the reasons they felt a Black feminist movement needed to exist, outlining the three-faceted struggle that Black women face: gender-, race-, and class-based oppression. The statement establishes the idea that it’s impossible to solve the oppression of Black women without a total restructuring of society; that modern, patriarchal capitalism is inherently oppressive across all vectors and that incremental attempts to mitigate oppression along single vectors (race, gender, etc.) are inherently inadequate. The authors are particularly tied to Marxist socialism as an alternative model for society, but importantly, they make it clear that solving oppression and marginalization is not just about switching economic and political structures, it’s also about recognizing the right to autonomy of all people, regardless of their race/gender/class. I found it particularly notable that many of the phrases we hear today, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, were regular parts of the dialogue in the 1970s. For example: “eliminating racism in the white women’s movement is by definition work for white women to do.” These parallels are incredibly discouraging because they speak to how little has changed in the last fifty years.

Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (video, 16 minutes)

This video is a high level introduction to the concept of “racial capitalism” introduced by Cedric Robinson in the book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). The concept argues that racism is an inherent part of the structure of capitalism; Gilmore states it concisely in the video: “Capitalism requires inequality. Racism enshrines it.” This line of inquiry has been explored a lot more in the last two decades by long-time abolitionists like Gilmore and others, and as she explains, it has both historical and contemporary components. It’s one answer to the question that plagues our society’s battle against police violence and environmental racism: we’ve been trying to “solve” these issues for decades, but have made little to no progress. Why? Is the answer actually that capitalism requires racism?

This video is a bit of a departure from the more historically focused content of the rest of this issue. I am considering a deeper dive into the literature surrounding “racial capitalism” in the next issue, but if you’re interested in the short term, I found this recent (2016) paper, “Geographies of race and ethnicity,” valuable.

Book Recommendation: Black against Empire, Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.

This book is an overview of the history of the Black Panther Party, an American political organization active founded in 1966. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, and I’d imagine that my non-American readers have even less of an education about this history than I do, but I was taught (as part of a relatively progressive upbringing) about Martin Luther King Jr., sit-ins, and the Civil Rights Movement…but not about the Black Panther Party or the socialist “radicalism” that was deeply intertwined with both racial advocacy and the anti-Vietnam war movement. Nor was I taught, of course, about the US government and FBI’s deep involvement in dismantling progressive organizations at the time.

This book is an overview of the history, platform, and actions of the Black Panther Party. They believed that the US government and capitalist structure of society worked in concert to perpetuate the oppression of Black Americans (among other people). When we talk today about systemic racism, this is exactly what we’re talking about. Learning about the history of the Black Panther Party is an important piece in understanding where we are today, and importantly, in understanding why we’re still plagued by so many of the same problems.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Photo by Stephan Röhl is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.