Seminar battles white supremacy
by Clayton Woullard
The Metropolitan
The United States was built on a foundation of white supremacy that still
governs the system today, speakers said at the third annual Confronting
Racism seminar at Auraria Oct. 6 and 7.
Danny Holland / The Metropolitan
Joseph Anrine speaks to onlookers about racism in the justice system Oct. 7 in St. Cajetan's. Anrine was released from death row in June of 2003 after spending 17 years behind bars. The Confronting Racism event organized by the Community Education Project covered topics regarding white supremacy in U.S. society.
Metro junior Bob Choflet, who heads up the Community Education Project,
the Metro student organization that has presented the event for the past
three years, said when you’re talking about racism in U.S. society,
you have to address white supremacy.
“Whiteness organizes this world,” Choflet said. “As
a group, we’re interested in changing this society.”
For the keynote address, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a historian and professor
of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies at California State University,
focused on the history of how whiteness was a founding principle of U.S.
society and how it’s more than skin deep.
“Whiteness as an ideology is far more complex than as just a skin
color,” Dunbar-Ortiz said.
Also, white supremacy helped guide the quest for expansion in the United
States, which she said was simply a euphemism for the expansion of slavery.
Her greatest frustration, however, is that this system of whiteness has
not changed much, despite the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights
Movement of the 1960s.
“But, still, the owners of power are still white,” Dunbar-Ortiz
said. “Who owns the means of production in this country? It’s
still all white.”
Joel Olson, a professor of political science at the University of Northern
Arizona, and Frank Wilderson, a self-described Black American who was
an activist and lecturer in South Africa for five-and-a-half years, debated
the merits of whether the struggle of whites to end white supremacy really
benefits blacks in society.
Olson, who has spoken at the previous two Confronting Racism seminars,
first addressed the faulty thinking that white supremacy and oppression
go against the ideals of democracy.
“The liberty of some has depended on the oppression of others,”
Olson said.
Mostly though, he focused on how being white in U.S. democracy is a label
of social status that provides what he calls an “invisible knapsack
of privilege.”
“Whiteness is an expectation of and interest in special treatment,”
he said.
Olson said that being white has for a long time meant that one is a citizen,
while people of color, including blacks and slaves, have been considered
“anti-citizens” who are almost considered to be working against
the system of white democracy.
Wilderson, argued that the actions of white activists like Olson are
inadequate and asked why blackness is not central to white radicalism.
“There are no feelings strong enough to change the structural relationship
between the living and the dead,” Wilderson said in his lecture,
using the metaphor to describe, in part, how white radicalism can really
never help blackness.
Olson did suggest in his lecture that the fight by blacks to become full
citizens in this country should be the focus of all other battles for
equal rights.
“The struggle for black freedom intensifies all other struggles
for freedom in America,” he said.
Wilderson later explained after the discussion that whites can’t
help blacks to regain what they’ve lost because blacks lost the
ability to name all that was taken from them over hundreds of years of
slavery and oppression.
“I guarantee that every political struggle is predicated on the
ability to name what they lost,” he said. “Naming what they
lost is something blacks can’t do.”
Furthermore, he said, whites can never fight for blacks to truly regain
what they’ve lost because it would mean whites would have to lose
everything they’ve taken.
Olson said he while he agrees with Wilderson that white radicals have
often done more to hurt the black freedom movement than better it, he
disagrees with Wilderson’s assertion that a society in which blacks
aren’t oppressed can’t exist.
Joseph Amrine, an African-American who was released from prison in June
of last year after spending 26 years in prison—17 years of which
were on death row—spoke at the seminar and said he was wrongfully
convicted of killing a fellow inmate by an all-white jury, even after
several witnesses, including an officer, testified he didn’t do
it.
“In our society now, if you’re white and you kill a black
person, you’re most likely not to get the death penalty,”
he said,
He blamed the media as a contributing factor in why much of society views
blacks in a negative light, and that it never shows positive actions of
blacks. But, he said, black people in the United States need to really
make an effort to change the system for the better.
“I think a lot of the black peoples’ problem here in the
United States today falls on the black peoples’ shoulders,”
he said. “They need to come together, they need to unite.”
What most bothered him, he said, was that the audience at the event was
predominantly white and there should be more people of color at a Confronting
Racism seminar.
“This place should be packed with black people,” he said.
CCD student Amanda Mason said she agrees with Amrine on how the audience’s
predominantly white make-up is a problem.
“There should be people who are not white at this conference and
there aren’t,” Mason said. “And that’s a failure
of the organizers. It’s also a failure of the college itself.”
She said the larger problem is white apathy, of whites not wanting to
deal with racism.
This has to do with whites having the privilege to not have to address
it and being white, she said she’s been trying to understand white
privilege, which is one reason she’s attended the seminar for the
past three years.
“There are very few spaces in our life where we can learn things
(like this),” Mason said, “and it’s great that the college
put resources out for things like this.”
CCD student Tobias Martinez, who attended the second night of the seminar,
said he appreciated the intent of the event, but he couldn’t really
understand the messages Jackson and Sexton, specifically, were trying
to convey.
“I couldn’t even understand the words because they were so
big,” Martinez said. “If you’re going to speak about
race issues...be simple, clear and direct.”
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