Recognizing Systemic Racism is a blog describing the study of systemic racism in the various domains in our society including health, education, criminal justice, social welfare, citizen participation, culure and sports, housing, employment, religion and social relations.
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Ruby Sales, Civil Rights Leader, "Where does it hurt?"
Friday, October 30, 2020
Symbols of Caste
Thursday, October 29, 2020
Is the caste system immoral and a sign of spiritual impoverishment?
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
What fuels the support for the Trumpist view of a racist America?
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Whiteness or democracy?
Is the United States a nation of hypocrites?
Monday, October 26, 2020
It is extremely important to vote in 2020 to undo the caste system.
Sunday, October 25, 2020
Are police killings of blacks today the same as lynchings in the past?
Comment - I finished the book yesterday, and I think I can comment on the number if lynching examples Wilkerson is giving. She equates them with the number of police shootings nowadays. As symptomatic of the same disease but adjusted for the times.
Response to the comment - I am not sure how the police killings today are the same as the lynchings of the past. They seem quite different to me. Lynchings of the past were intentional, premeditated, group mob mentality, and extrajudicial. The police killings of today seem in the moment, inappropriate behavior of State actors and are sworn officers carrying out official, state actioned activities of policing.
Police killings are governmental malpractice. Lynchings of old were people engaging in vigilante activities outside of the law. Jurisdictions where police killings occur pay huge civil penalties for wrongful deaths even though there rarely is a criminal penalty for the killers.
RSR book discussion for November 2020 - How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram K. Kendi
Saturday, October 24, 2020
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
The eight pillars of the American caste system
- Divine will and the laws of nature
- Heritability
- Endogamy and control of marriage and mating
- Purity vs. pollution
- Occupational hierarchy
- Dehumanization and stigma
- Terror of enforcement, cruelty as means of control
- Inherent superiority vs inherent inferiority
- How aware had you been of the pillars of our caste system in the United States before reading Wilkerson’s description of them?
- In what ways has being able to identify them led to your ability to manage them?
- Should this knowledge about our caste system be taught in our public schools?
Monday, October 12, 2020
Sunday, October 11, 2020
The goal is to change behavior not necessarily attitudes.
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
The Nazis learned much of what they knew about racial persecution from the United States
- To what extent do you agree with Wilkeron’s analysis that the policies that lead to the Nazi Holocaust were based on American policies and practices?
- Have you ever been taught or made aware of this connection before?
- We, Americans, embrace our exceptionalism when it comes to democratic values, but our economic system has been built on the most undemocratic practices of enslavement and separation of groups of people into a caste system which is rarely recognized and acknowledged. What do you think about reparations and nationally taking responsibility for atoning for our national sin of not only operating this system but exporting it to Europe?
Monday, October 5, 2020
What kind of a people are we?
The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to cover an owner’s debt or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil.
- How have you and your family benefited from the economic system based on slavery?
- What are the subtle ways that you have unknowingly participated in this system?
- To what extent do you believe in an economic system based on white supremacy?
- Have you read Thomas DeWolf’s book Inheriting The Trade about his family’s role in the slave trade in Rhode Island?
Sunday, October 4, 2020
The lynching of Isadore Banks
I have been listening to the podcast series Unfinished: Deep South which tells the story of a wealthy African American, Isadore Banks, who was lynched in 1954 in Marion Arkansas because he was ascending in America's caste system which would not be tolerated by the white dominant rank of this caste system.
This podcast series seems to fit very well into this month's book, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.
Unfinished: Deep South tells the story of a wealthy African American farmer named Isadore Banks who was lynched in 1954. He owned more than 1,000 acres of land along the Arkansas Delta until it all disappeared with his death. In a quest to find his killers and unpack how his murder shattered a community, we’ll get to the heart of America’s unfinished business by asking ‘Who Lynched Isadore Banks?’
Caste and race are two different things: race operationalizes the caste system in the U.S.
Saturday, October 3, 2020
Book discussion, Caste, Topic 2, The metaphors
- To what extent do Wilkerson’s metaphors for caste resonate with you?
- Would you take the red pill or the blue pill?
- How is caste different from race and how do they interact?
Friday, October 2, 2020
Book discussion - Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
-
The eight pillars of the caste system There are many aspects to a caste system but the most basic, the most fundamental are its structural c...
-
Topic two The metaphors In part one of her book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson introduces some interesting metaphors to elucidate the concept of “...
-
Of the 367 wrongful convictions that were exonerated since 1989 by the Innocence Project, 71% involved eyewitenss misidentification. 42% of ...
