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Ricky Sherover-Marcuse’s Legacy: Unlearning Racism

by | Dec 19, 2009 | Health, Politics, Racism, Unlearning, Women

Ricky Sherover-Marcuse (1938 – 1988)

From Ricky Sherover-Marcuse’s
Unlearning Racism
Website

Towards A Perspective On Eliminating Racism: 12 Working Assumptions

— By Ricky Sherover-Marcuse

Because racism is both institutional and attitudinal, effective strategies against it must recognize this dual character. The elimination of institutionalized racism requires a conscious project of attitudinal transformation. The deliberate attempt to transform racist patterns of thought and action must be accompanied by political and social change. The following assumptions offer a perspective for beginning the work.

  1. The systematic mistreatment of any group of people isolates and divides human beings from each other. This practice is a hurt to all people. The division and isolation produced by racism is a hurt to people from all ethnic groups.
  2. Racism is not a genetic disease. No human being is born with racist attitudes and beliefs. Physical and cultural differences between people are not the cause of racism; these differences are used as the excuse to justify racism. (Analogy with sexism: anatomical differences between human males and females are not the cause of sexism; these differences are used to justify the mistreatment of females of all ages.)
  3. No young person acquires misinformation by their own free choice. Racist attitudes and beliefs are a mixture of misinformation and ignorance which is imposed upon young people through a painful process of social conditioning. “You have to be taught to hate and fear.”
  4. Misinformation is harmful to all human beings. Misinformation about peoples of color is harmful to all people. Having racist attitudes and beliefs is like having a clamp on one’s mind. It distorts one’s perceptions of reality. Two examples: the notion that “flesh color” is several shades of pinkish beige; the use of the term ‘minorities’ to describe the majority of the world’s people.
  5. No one holds onto misinformation voluntarily. People hold onto racist beliefs and attitudes because this misinformation represents the best thinking they have been able to do at this time, and because no one has been able to assist them to change their perspective.
  6. People will change their minds and let go of ingrained attitudes under the following conditions:1) the new position is presented in a way that makes sense to them;2) they trust the person who is presenting the new position; 3) they are not blamed for having had misinformation.
  7. People hurt others because they themselves have been hurt. In this society we have all experienced systematic mistreatment as young people- of ten through physical violence, but also through the invalidation of our intelligence, the disregard of our feelings, the discounting of our abilities. As a result of these experiences, we tend both to internalize this mistreatment by accepting it as ‘the way things are’, and to externalize it by mistreating others. Part of the process of undoing racism involves becoming aware of and interrupting this cycle of mistreatment in day to day encounters and interactions.
  8. As young people we have often witnessed despair and cynicism in the adults around us, and we have often been made to feel powerless in the face of injustice. Racism continues in part because we feel powerless to do anything about it.
  9. There are times when we have failed to act, times when we did not achieve as much as we wanted to in the struggle against racism. Eliminating racism also involves understanding the difficulties we have had and learning to overcome them, without blaming ourselves for having had those difficulties.
  10. The situation is not hopeless; people can grow and change; we are not condemned to repeat the past. Racist conditioning need not be a permanent state of affairs. It can be -examined, analyzed and dismantled. Because this misinformation is glued together and held in place with painful emotion, the process of dismantling it must take place on the experiential as well as on the theoretical level.
  11. We live in a multicultural, multi-ethnic world; everyone is “ethnic.” Misinformation about other people’s ethnicity is often the flip side of misinformation about one’s own ethnicity. For example the notion that some ethnic groups are ‘exotic’ and ‘different’ is the flip side of the notion that one’s own group is just ‘regular’ or ‘plain’. Thus a crucial part of eliminating racism is the acquiring of accurate information about one’s own ethnicity and cultural heritage. Reclaiming this information will show us that we all come from traditions in which we can take justified pride.
  12. All people come from traditions which have a history of resistance to injustice, and every person has their own individual history of resistance to oppressive social conditioning. This history deserves to be recalled and celebrated. Reclaiming one’s own history of resistance is central to the project of acquiring an accurate account of one’s own heritage. When people act from a sense of informed pride in themselves and their traditions, they will be more effective in all struggles for justice.

A Working Definition of Racism: Revised 7/88

— By Ricky Sherover-Marcuse

  1. Human beings are members of the same species. The term ‘racism’ is useful as a shorthand way of categorizing the systematic mistreatment experienced by people of color and Third world people both in the United States and in many other parts of the world. But this term should not mislead us into supposing that human beings belong to biologically different species. We all belong to one race, the human race.
  2. The systematic mistreatment experienced by people of color is a result of institutionalized inequalities in the social structure. Racism is one consequence of a self-perpetuating imbalance in economic, political and social power. This imbalance consistently favors members of some ethnic and cultural groups at the expense of others. The consequences of this imbalance pervade all aspects of the social system and affect all facets of people’s lives.
  3. At its most extreme, systematic mistreatment takes the form of physical violence and extermination, but it occurs in many other forms as well. Pervasive invalidation, the denial or the non-recognition of the full humanity of persons of color also constitutes the mistreatment categorized as racism.Putting the matter in these terms may clear up the confusion, which is generated by thinking of racism merely as ‘different treatment’. If we examine the facts, we will see that what is often called ‘different treatment’ is in reality inhuman treatment, i.e. treatment which denies the humanity of the individual person and their group.
  4. The systematic mistreatment of any group of people generates misinformation about them, which in turn becomes the ‘explanation’ of or justification for continued mistreatment. Racism exists as a whole series of attitudes, assumptions, feelings and beliefs about people of color and their cultures which are a mixture of misinformation, fear and ignorance.Just as ‘the systematic mistreatment of people of color’ means ‘inhuman treatment’, so ‘misinformation about people of color’ designates beliefs and assumptions that in any way imply that people of color are less than fully human. These beliefs and attitudes are not just neutral errors; they are impacted misinformation: ideas and opinions which are glued together with painful emotion and held in place by frozen memories of distressing experiences.
  5. Because misinformation about people of color functions as the justification for their continued mistreatment, it becomes socially empowered or sanctioned misinformation. It is recycled through the society as a form of conditioning that affects everyone. In this way, misinformation about people of color becomes part of everyone’s ‘ordinary’ assumptions.
  6. For purposes of clarity, it is helpful to use the term ‘internalized racism’ or ‘internalized oppression’ to designate the misinformation that people of color may have about themselves and their cultures. The purpose of this term is to point out that this misinformation is consequence of the mistreatment experienced by people of color. It is not an inherent feature of their culture.
  7. The term ‘reverse racism’ is sometimes used to characterize ‘affirmative action’ programs, but this is inaccurate. Affirmative action programs are attempts to repair the results of institutionalized racism by setting guidelines and establishing procedures for finding qualified applicants from all segments of the population.
  8. The term ‘reverse racism’ is also sometimes used to characterize the mistreatment that individual whites may have experienced at the hands of individuals of color. This too is inaccurate. While any form of humans harming other humans is wrong because no one is entitled to mistreat anyone, we should not confuse the occasional mistreatment experienced by whites at the hands of people of color with the systematic and institutionalized mistreatment experienced by people of color at the hands of whites.
  9. Racism operates as a strategy of divide and conquer. It helps to perpetuate a social system in which some people are consistently ‘haves’ and others are consistently ‘have nots’. While the ‘haves’ receive certain material benefits from this situation, the long range effects of racism short change everyone. Racism sets groups of people against each other and makes it difficult for us to perceive our common interests as human beings.Racism make us forget that we all need and are entitled to good health care, stimulating education, and challenging work. Racism limits our horizons to what presently exists. Racism makes us suppose that current injustices are ‘natural’, or at best, inevitable: “someone has to be unemployed; someone has to go hungry.” Most importantly, racism distorts our perceptions of the possibilities for change; it makes us abandon our visions of solidarity; it robs us of our dreams of community.
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