Undoing racism begins with admitting it's still here

Cook County News-Herald
Last Updated: Friday, December 02nd, 2005 02:51:24 PM
Joan Farnam
Staff writer

Racism is an insidious thing.

It permeates our culture, making us act towards others in ways that are often cruel and insensitive. The problem is, those in the dominant, or white culture, are not necessarily aware of racism and how it affects our day-to-day lives, and this makes it even more difficult to undo.

But there is hope, said John Morrin, a nationally known core trainer for the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond and a member of the Grand Portage Tribal Council. Morrin gave a series of presentations on “Race, History and Culture” at Bethlehem Lutheran Church earlier this month.

If one studies history and culture in America, Morrin said, one can begin to understand how racism developed and is used to maintain privilege and power in American society. With that knowledge, one can begin to understand what must be done to undo it.

Morrin defines race prejudice as the classification of human beings which assigns human worth and social status using “white Europeans” as the model of humanity. He said this classification mode was first created in the 16th century to justify colonialism and the slave trade.

“They needed justification for breaking the sixth commandment — “Thou shalt not kill” — and the seventh commandment “Thou shalt not steal,” Morrin told the standing-room only crowd at the church.

But just defining people according to their skin color and ethnicity isn’t the only imbedded meaning of the term “racism,” he said.

Racism combines race prejudice and the access to power and the privileges that go with that power. In other words, racism has been developed in this country to establish and maintain privileges and power for a select group of people of Euro-American descent.

This means that the institutions in American society, including schools, the government and businesses, are set up to maintain access to power in the society to a select group. The other side of that coin, he said, is that people who are not defined as “white” are denied access to power and privilege — in short, they struggle with poverty in their daily lives.

Many Americans were forced to face this fact after Hurricane Katrina, he said, when the faces they saw on their television sets were black — the poorest of the poor who didn’t have the money to flee the storm.

Morrin also spelled out just how racism inserts itself in our culture in subtle, nearly invisible ways. Native Americans, for example, are not mentioned very much in history books that children study in school. In Cook County textbooks, for example, “there’s one page on Hiawatha and the Peacemaker, then we become invisible again until the Battle of the Big Horn. Indians are always depicted as obstacles to the program,” he said.

On the other hand, tribes throughout the United States have their own histories and sense of place in this universe, he said. “We had founding fathers, too,” he said.

In the case of the Anishinaabe, “We’ve got to be responsible for the earth, to protect and preserve it for future generations down the line.”

These cultural values are core to Native American culture and society, he said, and differ from those espoused by Europeans or Asians or Africans, and yet the average American child is not taught this.

To truly understand racism and how it was established in America and is perpetuated to this day through institutions and culture, one has to go back to the first days of colonization and see, in history, how racism has developed.

“We have to understand history and how it divides us,” he said. Take, for example, the term “white.” In today’s society, we all take that term for granted, but it is hardly a descriptive term, he said. It’s actually a political term that has been used to divide human beings in America since 1691 when it was first coined in a law banning intermarriage between European Americans and Native Americans or blacks. The court case described European Americans as “white,” and Morrin said that the term has been used to divide the peoples ever since.

Morrin talked at great length about how racism has been used by institutions to deny access to power — and privilege — to people over the centuries. It’s a deeply ingrained part of American culture, he said. One modern-day example is racial profiling by police or being followed in stores by clerks just because of the way you look.

Classifying people this way denies them their humanity as well as their cultural identity, Morrin said. “We have to understand racism, history and each other’s culture and how all these cultures contributed to the building of the United States. The Euro-Americans didn’t do it all by themselves.”

Morrin firmly believes that gathering that knowledge, seeing how it impacts every institution in our lives and then acting to change those institutions is the key to undoing racism. He said, “It might not happen in my lifetime, but it can be done.”

In order to continue that process in Cook County, Morrin will hold an Undoing Racism workshop this spring. To put your name on a list to be contacted for the workshop, call Morrin at 475-2378.