Dialogue: Racism
THE CENTER FOR THE HEALING OF RACISM
Dialogue: Racism
"Men hate each other because they fear each other, and they fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they are often separated from each other." --Dr. Martin Luther King
Dialogue: Racism provides a safe, respectful and loving atmosphere for individuals to learn new information, share their experiences, ask questions-to dispel the fears; get to know each other, and to stop the separation.
WINTER TWO DAY 2007 SESSION
3821 Caroline Street between Truxillo and Alabama St.
HOUSTON COMMUNITY COLLEGE CENTRAL CAMPUS
Saturday February 17 and Saturday February 24, 2007
9:00 am to 4:30 pm
TOPICS AND VIDEOS USED OVER THE TWO DAYS:
Defining Various Types of Racism: The film, "The Way Home" is a fountain of healing truths that dares to speak the unspeakable about the politics of oppression and race in the United States.
How Racism is Perpetuated: Childhood experiences, misinformation and segregation.
Unaware Racism and White Privilege: Confronting this country's history of White privilege.
Stereotypes and how they affect us: The film,"Ethnic Notions", shows the deep-rooted stereotypes and dehumanizing caricatures that have fueled anti-Black prejudice.
Cultural Racism: The film, "Healing the Hurts" depicts the effects of residential schools on Native-Americans
Internalized Racism: When the anger, hurt and frustration turn inward. The film, "The Way Home" goes beyond a basic awareness of racism to explore the subtle, rarely acknowledged roots of self-hatred and lack of understanding among even the most progressive people.
Institutionalized Racism: The systems that affect us daily: media, justice system, educational system, health care system, and economic system. The film, "Race-the Power of an Illusion" answers the question does the color of your skin play a role in America?
Race is a Human Invention: The video, "Race-The Power of an Illusion" asks the questions: "What if we suddenly discovered that our most basic assumption about race - for instance, that the world's people can be divided biologically along racial lines - was false? And if race is a biological "myth," where did the idea come from? How do our institutions give race social meaning and power?”
My Next Steps, Finding Allies.
The Center’s mission statement: To serve as a catalyst for the healing of racism through the education and empowerment of individuals.
So, I started my training with The Center these past few weekends. Damn, I was there FOREVER. 8 freakin' hours........that part sucked. But, most of the experience was absolutely fucking amazing.
There are so many things that really made me think, and really surprised me,and things that made me even more committed to this activism.
The first thing, I can't even remember now how it come about. But, we were talking about immigrants coming to the United States and how they had to assimilate to survive and/or avoid discrimination. I then realized that every person who have descendants who came to America who were not British.....we all have this in common. Unless your ancestry is British, your ancestors were discriminated against, and forced to assimilate and due to that....your culture was likely lost. This is many white people say they "have no culture." No, you had, but it was stifled out of your family line, and American culture is all the remains.
For example, my family is historically Czech (Bohemian), Irish, and German. On my Granny's side....her great-grandparents came here from Germany. As the line grew, the German language was preserved. My granny's mother and her sister could speak it fluently, as could my granny's oldest brother and sister.....before that started school. It is likely that when they started school, and maybe spoke German in class...maybe even too just each other, they were told not to speak it. My Granny never learned German, and neither did my mother, and neither did it. It was stifled. I should be speaking German right now, and I should be fucking celebrating holidays with some German fucking traditions. I thought about that, and the more I thought about it....the more it pissed me off. How dare anyone take away a part of my family history, a history that I can never fully know about now! I can't get it back....
We can't get it back.
Then we talked about different types of racism. The one that I didn't know a lot about was cultural racism (racism against a certain culture). I mean, I knew what it was, but I didn't know much about it. We watched a film called "The Way Home," which was about Native Americans. It talked about the Residential Schools that many Native Americans were put into as children to "civilize" them. One woman....it was horrible.
She had been in these schools since she was a child, and when she had her first period, she was strapped to a table....and a piece of metal was inserted in here, and twisted all around, in order to damage the reproductive organs. Not only did they do that, but they left her there bleeding for 3 days.
The video was a tape of a group therapy session that had been done for these survivors of these schools. Part of the therapy was to get out the anger (because of their treatment) they had been taught by these residential schools to hold in (beaten if they voiced it). It was horrible...the woman who had her organs damaged, she beat a mat. I mean, screaming....screaming like it had just happened, it was a scream unlike anything I had ever heard. Like, the scream of a hundreds of years of her ancestors scalped, raped, slaughtered, sterilized.....
And that woman's experience wasn't uncommon, it happened to so many. So many....
One other moment that really made me realize something was when we were asked by the facilitator to talk about discrimination that had happened to us. There was a black woman who told a story about there was a time when she didn't have insurance, and she went to an expenisive Dentist that she really liked. But, she couldn't afford them at the moment, so her husband suggest a cheaper dentist. She went to this dentist office, and did all the paperwork. The receptionist was very short with her....but she didn't really think anything of it. She got back into the room, and the dental assistant came in. She was very apprehensive. "What are you here for?" She was there for a cleaning. The assistant had her lay down...and started scraping off the teeth. Except, she was scraping just the teeth. She was scraping hard, unnecessarily hard. Not only the teeth, but the gums. She was making this woman bleed. If the patient could feel the blood in her mouth, the assistant sure as hell could see it.....and she wasn't stopping. At this point in the story, the woman telling it started to bawl. "Why did she have to do that to me? If you don't want to touch me, that's fine...if she would have just told me I would have left! She hurt me, why did she have to hurt me!" It got to the point where it wasn't even audible anymore, her words were some mucked up by the crying. Why would anyone do that? The most horrible thing to me that there was a window in the doctor's in the room where that was taking place. A window into the dentist's office....he looked on, and did nothing.
Nothing.
This is an extreme institutional racism, racism that is in our institutions.....that discourages people of color from being in certain places, taking part in certain things. Do you think that woman ever went back there? Maybe she told her friends, and maybe they won't go there either. Mission accomplished.
This was not just someone's individual racism (the kind most people think of when they hear "racism"). This was a system.....this was a receptionist, a nurse, a doctor. Most systems are not so blunt, most are incredibly subtle. So subtle you can't see them, even a person of color might not notice. Do you think you notice?
Most of the subjects talked about at this workshop, I already knew about. Apparently I've researched and know a lot more than I realized I did. I did find allies though, the faciliators of Dialogue: Racism, especially Chris Beam. He is a white anti-racist ally. It's really great to have someone going down the same path as you, someone to share your frustrations with, being a white person doing this work. I actually bought his book The Crazymaking Disease by Chris Beam. The book talks about how the effects of racism hurt people's mental and physical health. It is so damn interesting. I want every one of you to buy a copy!! You can also visit his site for a full discription.
The thing that I really learned from this workshop, is that racism is a disease. It is a addiction, a disorder of the mind. No matter what side you're one. You're either brainwashed to think others are inferior to you, or your brainwashed to believe you are inferior. We all are victims of racism, we just show it different ways. We are all hurt
I leave you with this thought;
Hurt people, hurt people.
Dialogue: Racism
"Men hate each other because they fear each other, and they fear each other because they don’t know each other, and they don’t know each other because they are often separated from each other." --Dr. Martin Luther King
Dialogue: Racism provides a safe, respectful and loving atmosphere for individuals to learn new information, share their experiences, ask questions-to dispel the fears; get to know each other, and to stop the separation.
WINTER TWO DAY 2007 SESSION
3821 Caroline Street between Truxillo and Alabama St.
HOUSTON COMMUNITY COLLEGE CENTRAL CAMPUS
Saturday February 17 and Saturday February 24, 2007
9:00 am to 4:30 pm
TOPICS AND VIDEOS USED OVER THE TWO DAYS:
The Center’s mission statement: To serve as a catalyst for the healing of racism through the education and empowerment of individuals.
So, I started my training with The Center these past few weekends. Damn, I was there FOREVER. 8 freakin' hours........that part sucked. But, most of the experience was absolutely fucking amazing.
There are so many things that really made me think, and really surprised me,and things that made me even more committed to this activism.
The first thing, I can't even remember now how it come about. But, we were talking about immigrants coming to the United States and how they had to assimilate to survive and/or avoid discrimination. I then realized that every person who have descendants who came to America who were not British.....we all have this in common. Unless your ancestry is British, your ancestors were discriminated against, and forced to assimilate and due to that....your culture was likely lost. This is many white people say they "have no culture." No, you had, but it was stifled out of your family line, and American culture is all the remains.
For example, my family is historically Czech (Bohemian), Irish, and German. On my Granny's side....her great-grandparents came here from Germany. As the line grew, the German language was preserved. My granny's mother and her sister could speak it fluently, as could my granny's oldest brother and sister.....before that started school. It is likely that when they started school, and maybe spoke German in class...maybe even too just each other, they were told not to speak it. My Granny never learned German, and neither did my mother, and neither did it. It was stifled. I should be speaking German right now, and I should be fucking celebrating holidays with some German fucking traditions. I thought about that, and the more I thought about it....the more it pissed me off. How dare anyone take away a part of my family history, a history that I can never fully know about now! I can't get it back....
We can't get it back.
Then we talked about different types of racism. The one that I didn't know a lot about was cultural racism (racism against a certain culture). I mean, I knew what it was, but I didn't know much about it. We watched a film called "The Way Home," which was about Native Americans. It talked about the Residential Schools that many Native Americans were put into as children to "civilize" them. One woman....it was horrible.
She had been in these schools since she was a child, and when she had her first period, she was strapped to a table....and a piece of metal was inserted in here, and twisted all around, in order to damage the reproductive organs. Not only did they do that, but they left her there bleeding for 3 days.
The video was a tape of a group therapy session that had been done for these survivors of these schools. Part of the therapy was to get out the anger (because of their treatment) they had been taught by these residential schools to hold in (beaten if they voiced it). It was horrible...the woman who had her organs damaged, she beat a mat. I mean, screaming....screaming like it had just happened, it was a scream unlike anything I had ever heard. Like, the scream of a hundreds of years of her ancestors scalped, raped, slaughtered, sterilized.....
And that woman's experience wasn't uncommon, it happened to so many. So many....
One other moment that really made me realize something was when we were asked by the facilitator to talk about discrimination that had happened to us. There was a black woman who told a story about there was a time when she didn't have insurance, and she went to an expenisive Dentist that she really liked. But, she couldn't afford them at the moment, so her husband suggest a cheaper dentist. She went to this dentist office, and did all the paperwork. The receptionist was very short with her....but she didn't really think anything of it. She got back into the room, and the dental assistant came in. She was very apprehensive. "What are you here for?" She was there for a cleaning. The assistant had her lay down...and started scraping off the teeth. Except, she was scraping just the teeth. She was scraping hard, unnecessarily hard. Not only the teeth, but the gums. She was making this woman bleed. If the patient could feel the blood in her mouth, the assistant sure as hell could see it.....and she wasn't stopping. At this point in the story, the woman telling it started to bawl. "Why did she have to do that to me? If you don't want to touch me, that's fine...if she would have just told me I would have left! She hurt me, why did she have to hurt me!" It got to the point where it wasn't even audible anymore, her words were some mucked up by the crying. Why would anyone do that? The most horrible thing to me that there was a window in the doctor's in the room where that was taking place. A window into the dentist's office....he looked on, and did nothing.
Nothing.
This is an extreme institutional racism, racism that is in our institutions.....that discourages people of color from being in certain places, taking part in certain things. Do you think that woman ever went back there? Maybe she told her friends, and maybe they won't go there either. Mission accomplished.
This was not just someone's individual racism (the kind most people think of when they hear "racism"). This was a system.....this was a receptionist, a nurse, a doctor. Most systems are not so blunt, most are incredibly subtle. So subtle you can't see them, even a person of color might not notice. Do you think you notice?
Most of the subjects talked about at this workshop, I already knew about. Apparently I've researched and know a lot more than I realized I did. I did find allies though, the faciliators of Dialogue: Racism, especially Chris Beam. He is a white anti-racist ally. It's really great to have someone going down the same path as you, someone to share your frustrations with, being a white person doing this work. I actually bought his book The Crazymaking Disease by Chris Beam. The book talks about how the effects of racism hurt people's mental and physical health. It is so damn interesting. I want every one of you to buy a copy!! You can also visit his site for a full discription.
The thing that I really learned from this workshop, is that racism is a disease. It is a addiction, a disorder of the mind. No matter what side you're one. You're either brainwashed to think others are inferior to you, or your brainwashed to believe you are inferior. We all are victims of racism, we just show it different ways. We are all hurt
I leave you with this thought;
Hurt people, hurt people.