Q: It’s true, there’s all kinds of oppression going on, and all of it should stop! Why focus so narrowly on White racism and White people’s attitudes toward Black people?
A: Because for most people that’s the hardest knot to unravel, which is why so many people would rather focus on almost any other vector of oppression. Can’t we just address the forms of oppression in which I’ve been assigned the role of innocent victim?—please and thank you. As Charles Kreiner pointed out, oppressions are “all intertangled,” and as we already know, all of them are corrosive to the soul.
Luckily, all the healing modalities given here will work on healing from all the other forms of oppression directed against any arbitrarily defined group whatsoever. Antisemitism, for example, is so old and skanky that it has a peculiar stench all its own, and it’s always looking for excuses, because there is no excuse. It is also so often entangled with White racism that it can be hard to pick the two apart, even though Jewish people with European roots are also supposed to be White in the United States of America and therefore supposed to be willing to defend the kyriarchy against all non-White comers, not to mention having imposed on them the role of oppressor in Israel-Palestine, with what disastrous results we have seen—which in turn feed excuses to antisemitism, which then gets turned back around, weaponized, and used as an excuse for despoliation, dispossession, and murder on a genocidal scale, in an insanely vicious cycle. If antisemitism is to yield at all, it can only yield to a spiritual solution: it wants a miracle. Islamophobia is all entangled with White racism, too. All of it is creepy and lethal, and everyone is continually being pushed and pulled around it from all directions. The pressure and pull to join with Black people in the struggle to dismantle the kyriarchy is always in tension with the pressure and pull to preserve the kyriarchy and a potentially better position within it. And oh, how well “divide and conquer” serves the kyriarchy!
Even in places where other arbitrarily defined groups of human beings are assigned the lowest place in the local caste system, White racism as anti-Blackness may still need healing. In the same way that antisemitism without Jewish people is a real thing, there is such a thing as anti-Blackness without Black people, where folks who have never met a Black person in their lives believe sincerely that they know everything there is to know about Black people, and none of it is good. Once we’ve untangled the knot of White racism as anti-Blackness, the thought patterns—and the patterns of behavior—of all the other oppressive bigotries may become much more clear, and that much easier to get free of.
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