The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda V. Magee & Jon Kabat-Zinn

Author:Rhonda V. Magee & Jon Kabat-Zinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PARTICULARITY AS THE DOORWAY TO EMPATHY AND COMMON HUMANITY

It has taken me many years of intensive study and practice to be able to recognize and articulate how I am shaped by being white, and this in itself is an example of whiteness (while there are exceptions, most people of color do not find it anywhere near as difficult to articulate how race shapes their lives).

—ROBIN DIANGELO1

Being in Context

In understanding race and social injustice, context—time, place, history, and culture—matters greatly. As one part of that context, it is important to see the structural-economic problems causing material distress across all racial groups. A recent study showed that 43 percent of working U.S. households have trouble paying for both food and rent in any given month.2 It is important, then, to see that people of all races and backgrounds are suffering from food and housing insecurity in the United States and around the globe.

And yet, it is critically important to see that the pain of this insecurity routinely and disproportionately falls on some more than others. In Michigan and other states, for example, blacks and Hispanics suffer the highest rates of poverty and income insecurity.3 This is precisely why a focus on socioeconomic issues or “class rather than race” will not solve this problem. Our class system depends for its stability on racism, and vice versa. As experts on the intersection between poverty and race help us to see, “There cannot be racial justice without economic justice.”4 And in our age of surveillance capitalism, with implicit and likely explicit bias being built into the artificial intelligence by which predictions about human behavior are monetized and exploited, we are especially challenged to unpack the complex interaction of racism and capitalism in our lifetimes.5

Racism makes poverty more biting, and income, housing, and health care insecurity more precarious. It also means that even blacks whose incomes place them in the middle or upper class suffer higher levels of stress and worse health outcomes than others of similar means. Because of their vulnerability to racism in housing and other markets (combined with their proximity to a wider network of economically distressed family and friends), middle- to upper-income black people generally have lower levels of accumulated wealth than similar others. Thus, increases in wealth may soften the edges of our vulnerability, but do not protect any one of us or our children from the threat of racism. If we care about justice in America, then, we must confront the fact that racism at every level makes poverty and distress more likely. Otherwise, patterns like these will persist.

And yet, we are routinely led to think about these problems against a historical-cultural backdrop that favors whiteness, and increasingly, white nationalism. We are reminded on a near daily basis that “illegal aliens” are coming and “taking our jobs” and “bringing crime.” We hear such fear-based rhetoric, again and again, in tones often loud and shrill. Rather than addressing the real and devastatingly important underlying causes of societal problems, we seem

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