Toward a Working Definition of Racism, Part Three
Originally published at Possible Impossibilities. You can comment here or there.
Some weeks ago, I received an email from a reader in Sil Mason, Australia, making a request:
Have been reading your blog, could you explain to me in simple language what your definition of racism is? We doing a project in class, and I’d like you to give me a clearer explanation. Not so many big words. Many thanks.
I’ll admit that at first I bristled at this, flashing back to junior high classmates telling me to “speak English” when I used words like “unobtrusive.” I thought of T.S. Eliot writing nearly a century ago that the complexity of society made it necessary for poetry to be “difficult.”* Racism has that kind of complexity. Can “simple language” encompass the complexity of a systemic problem with such a long and fraught history? And then I thought of George Orwell‘s “Politics and the English Language,” an essay about how unnecessarily complex language can make meaning unclear. (I almost wrote “obfuscate meaning” - see, I’m trying!)
So I’m going to try, but I’m pretty sure I’ll need help. First go:
Racism is a system of prejudice and bias against a racial or ethnic group that historically has not been privileged - that is, in a position of social or economic power. It originates in a belief of the intellectual and/or moral inferiority of a particular racial or ethnic group, but it continues to exist even when most people do not consciously hold this belief. This is because the dominant social and economic structures developed when racism was part of everyday attitudes. Decades with few members of a minority racial or ethnic group in positions of social or economic power create the perception that members of such a group simply do not belong in such positions. This is called institutional racism. This perception is internalized - unconsciously made part of people’s attitudes toward the unprivileged group, even if they are part of that group or part of another unprivileged group.
What do you think? Can you make my big words smaller?
*Leading me away from this line of thinking was a question** that, ridiculously, I had not thought to ask before: Why is it necessary or even artistically advisable for the work of a single poet to encompass the whole of society? I thought of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, who wrote about their singular experiences, adding to the overall conversation of poetry. It’s the synthesis of many voices that can reproduce the complexity of society and culture, not the work of a single voice. I love poets like Yeats and Eliot and Auden, but the “universal” poet is a relic of High Modernism.
**”To lead you to an overwhelming question” - heh.
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