Our #StopRacism calls are held every Tuesday. We’ve been having these calls for over 6 years now — and Ashok Selvam has been leading them for about 3 of those.
Ashok started the call by talking about how here we are at football season again. And he asked the group if they thought that the protests over the last few years had done anything to move the needle. He wasn’t sure they had.
I’m Lisa Hickey, and I’d like to highlight one small part of the discussion. This is about 19 minutes in, after several people had chimed in with their views.
Lisa: “When we started these #StopRacism calls years ago, they were started by a brilliant guy, Jackie Summers, a Black man who has written about racism and told these first-person points of view that are amazing. And what Jackie did when he started these calls was to go back to the Civil Rights movement and said “How did they think about these issues? How did they frame it? What did they do big-picture in order to stop racism? And what he found was a chart that has 5 groups that go on a spectrum from Active Opposition to Passive Opposition to Neutral to Passive Allies to Active Allies. His whole point was that you can’t fight the Active Opposition — not as just a regular person with limited resources.
So when you think about what Colin Kaepernick was doing, as soon as it became clear what he was doing, as soon as it was apparent that Kaepernick was actually drawing attention to racism, people actively started trying to shut Kaepernick down in every way they could. So they spread disinformation about what he was doing. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to look up why he was kneeling and whether that was a form of disrespect or not. They just got out there with a narrative that said he was disrespecting our flag and disrespecting our police and how dare he do that. So there was active opposition that was trying to shut him down. At the same time, there was a group of people like Carol wat talking about really who don’t care. And these are the type of people who say “Just don’t remind me about racism with my football game, ok.” It’s like, “sure, I care about racism, I know it’s wrong, but for god’s sake, not while I’m watching a football game.”
So those are the more passive opposition. They’re not the ones actively strategizing for how to shut this guy down — but their the enablers for the ones that do want to shut him down and have the power and influence to do so. Then we have the neutrals, the people who say they want to do what is right but can’t be bothered to take the action. And those people and the passive allies and active allies are the people we need to spend our time on — to move the neutrals and passive allies to become active allies. The people who will actually
Now I want to get back to what you said Tom, about reparations. Reparations are a really concrete thing that can be done that will substantially change things. They will move the needle. There is no doubt they will move the needle. And that is why the active opposition is fighting so hard to stop them.
But if you look at what happened with disability rights. I’m old enough to remember when “handicapped parking” was only the butt of comedian’s jokes. But step by step we changed the infrastructure to make everything more accessible for disabled people. And we did it despite pushback, despite people who didn’t want to spend the money, who didn’t think it was a good idea. And it’s not perfect — but the quality of life for people who are disabled is fundamentally better than before we changed the infrastructure.
And that is what reparations will do for racism. Reparations are what will visibly move the needle.”
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There’s more — much more! Listen to the whole call here, or join the next one!
Note: Please forgive the small amount of audio interference at the start of the call. It clears up very quickly.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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