I’m Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen We Langa, Mondo for short. This piece is “Clarity In Our Use of the Term Racism” is part one of a series in the Omaha Star newspaper.
What is a mouse? The answer to that question, say 50 years ago, would have been obvious, that it is a small rodent. With the advent of personal computers, mouse took on an additional meaning such that it could refer to an electronic gadget of about the size of an organic mouse, and having a tail. It would be difficult to imagine a person being confused about which mouse is which, but if there were to be such confusion, the results could be hilarious, or in the other extreme, disastrous, or anywhere in between.
To avoid confusion, the person speaking of a mouse does so in a certain context, so that the person listening to him knows which mouse he is talking about. Racism, like mouse, is a word, but unlike mouse, however, it does not refer to a material thing, but to an idea, a concept. Because of this, it can have about as many meanings as there are people speaking of it, and because racism is commonly placed in the context of life and death issues, it is crucial that we know what the hell we mean when we use the term, and that those we’re communicating with know what we mean. Understanding that there were specific historical events and development that led to its emergence and identified its character, we have to employ definitions of racism that include historical context and can reasonably be expected to actually help people identify racism, combat it, and find antidotes towards venomous effects.
In U.S. society, there’s a lot of sloppiness and laziness in how people use words, and sometimes this plays right into the hands of those who see it to be in their advantage, to mislead and confuse. Much more often than not, when there are discussions about issues of so called race, the terms racism and racial prejudice are used synonymously. They are not synonymous. Addressing the latter term first, it simply refers to an attitude of which a person of one so called race pre-judges/makes presumptions about a person of a different so called race, and does so based on this race. Person might prejudge others on the basis of gender, height, anything.
Racism is a far more insidious thing. One might say it is fundamentally more than just a horse of a different color. It is rooted, in part, in the acceptance and or promotion of the absurd idea that there are, at one and the same time, the human race and separate and distinct races of humans. It holds that there’s a hierarchy of these advanced races of humans, with one race being more intellectually and otherwise advanced than the others. And what race of humans is, conveniently enough, on top in this hierarchy? The Caucasian “white” race, but it is not only a matter of superiority and inferiority. It is an issue of which race has the “God given” birthright and destiny to hold dominion over the so called inferior races. Again, it is the “whites.”
Historically, there is a convergence between the birth and development of racism and other events and developments such as the rise in power and wealth of the Catholic and other European based Christian churches; advancements in the ability of maritime vessels to link to the Western Hemisphere from European countries; the increasing sophistication of weaponry, the gun in particular, possessed by European military forces; the existence of spices, gold, diamonds, and a variety of other natural resources in Africa, Asia, and the Americas that Europe either did not have or did not have in abundance; the emergence, also, of the capitalist economic system, etc. Eyen We Langa,, Mondo for short, and I’m calling from the State Pen in Lincoln Nebraska.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
