Racism: What is it?

[cleanheart.396]

I've been thinking about this question for a very long time, and I've come to the conclusion that racism, like alcoholism, is a sickness, or rather the symptom of an illness. The illness is "powerlessness." I know its sounds funny to say that people who happen to be rich, and can use their money to control the outcome of policies, etc., which effect millions, even billions of people, and who also happen to be racist, feel powerless. But why else would you have to control everyone and everything? Power is not something that grows from the things you acquire. In our world, only control grows from those things. Power is something entirely separate, and grows out of the things you overcome, rather than the things you achieve.
To many, this seems like an oversimplification because we like to believe that what we perceive of as power, or tools to attain power, like money, college degrees, lofty affiliations, etc., are too complex to be understood. And if its too complex, then it is too dangerous to be challenged. If it's too dangerous to be challenged, then we must in some way go along with it, even reinforce it, and we excuse this by saying that these people are just too powerful to ignore. That to dismiss them is to set ourselves up to be a target. Is that why we fight in wars for profit? Because we would rather someone else die than us? It's like the wife of a serial killer who suspects her husband is killing people, but will not challenge him because she's afraid he might kill her. Or the pimp whose "bottom woman" accepts her pimps behavior to wards herself and the rest of the "stable" because if she doesn't, he might hurt, or even kill her. And we perceive these people as powerful people. But they are controllers who control us through our belief in our own powerlessness.
Racism, like class ism, like all other isms are symptoms of an illness which has its foundations in self-hatred, shame, rage, and egocentricity. YOu don't poison the atmosphere for money unless you hate yourself. YOu don't set yourself up to be the target of angry, hungry, disillusioned people unless you hate yourself. You don't equate the acquisition of goods with real achievement unless you hate yourself. You couldn't be ready to jail the drug dealer or addict who robs you, while at the same time allowing the insurance companies to rob you, and the bank who really owns your house and charges you 3 times its value, robbing you with the sanction of the law__unless you hate yourself. You couldn't believe in, and commend a system that treats you as if you deserve to lose your house, car, everything, just because you lost your job, or got sick__unless you hate yourself. You couldn't believe that your college degree really entitles you to a better house, better food, more trips, a nicer neighborhood unless you hate yourself. I mean, does a doctor really work harder than a garbage man, and can he really prevent illness without the garbage man or the housekeeping staff? The answer to both questions is no. And we wouldn't need to believe the lie that we are somehow superior because of money, "achievement" etc., and accept that someone else starves, not because he or she doesn't work hard, but because they don't have a degree, if we didn't feel so empty. And in this way we are no different than the rich guys. We condemn people to a lesser life because they don't have a degree, because they test lower on SAT tests when we know a test can't possibly measure a person's worth. Yet we accept it because it gives us one more thing to feel superior about; one more thing to buffer the pain, the shame we feel, that a million degrees, dollars, or whatever, will never heal.
It is this emptiness which makes us need racism, class ism, etc., and they, in turn, make us need capitalism, make us support imperialism, by our participation in war__for any stupid, refutable reason they give us, just so long as we don't have to face ourselves without the confusion and chaos that war brings. We're racist, cl-assist, elitist because the confusion it causes keeps us from never having to face ourselves without all these covers for souls that are young, undeveloped, crude, and dangerous to ourselves and others.
An undeveloped soul, is one that is virtually empty. This emptiness is the creator of ego. An ego will help you to survive, but unless it gives way to the development that builds character, you will never cross over from merely surviving to really living. Because that's what it means to love yourself. Character is merely the ability to love truly love yourself, your whole self, to forgive yourself, and to love and forgive others. Loving ourselves would make these so-called "complex issues" so much simpler. But we haven't learned that yet, and until we do, ego is all we have to fill the empty places in our hearts, our souls.
It is this emptiness which is the foundation of our compulsion to compete, to risk everything decent to prove we are the greatest at something. When you really believe in yourself you don't have to prove it to anyone. All one needs to be worthy of a good life is decency, the willingness to take part in the healthy development of his community, city, or county, and the unwillingness to support that same community, city, or country if it does anything less than promote healthy, loving, non-violent, equitable development. If we truly believed in our hearts that we were decent, honest, and loving people we wouldn't need any of the accoutrement's of capitalism to prove that we are smart, or talented, or able. In fact if we were nice people we would not be able to stomach capitalism; because capitalism is the most toxic stage of the sickness of believing oneself to be powerless.
What would happen if we just stopped? What would happen if we recognized the part of each of us that is predatory? What would happen if we finally saw and felt our insanity, an insanity that only feels sane because everyone else is just as insane? What would happen if we just stopped taking part in this madness, for our good, and the good of the capitalists and their cohorts? If we just refused to enable them to kill themselves and us along with them? Would they try to hurt us? Yes. Would they kill some of us? Yes. Would we use violence against them? No.
This is not martyrdom. It's called stopping the cycle, even if it means death. It is called recognizing the sickness in others as our own sickness, and seeing that we all reinforce each other, and to kill is to just keep that cycle of self-hatred and shame going, killing someone else for the things we are all guilty of.
Yes. Some of us will die. But given the state the world has been in (with all these "smart", and here of late, college degreed people running it, by the way) I'd say that there are a lot of things worse than death, and that death would be a small price to pay for the legacy we would leave to those we leave behind.

[msgadget]

1. Mostly,

imo, its about inflexibility and man's natural tendency toward hierarchies that are the most comfortable.