Mixed Race Studies

Blackness Is The Fulcrum

RaceFiles: On Race and Racism in our Politics and Daily Lives
2012-05-04

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Partner
ChangeLab

I’m often asked why I’ve focused so much more on anti-black racism than on Asians over the years. Some suggest I suffer from internalized racism.

That might well be true since who doesn’t suffer from internalized racism?  I mean, even white people internalize racism. The difference is that white people’s internalized racism is against people of color, and it’s backed up by those who control societal institutions and capital.

But some folk have more on their minds.  They say that focusing on black and white reinforces a false racial binary that marginalizes the experiences of non-black people of color. No argument here. But I also think that trying to mix things up by putting non-black people of color in the middle is a problem because there’s no “middle.”

So there’s most of my answer. I’m sure I do suffer from internalized racism, but I don’t think that racism is defined only in terms of black and white. I also don’t think white supremacy is a simple vertical hierarchy with whites on top, black people on the bottom, and the rest of us in the middle.

So why do I expend so much effort on lifting up the oppression of black people? Because anti-black racism is the fulcrum of white supremacy…

Read the entire article here.

Afraid of the Dark

RaceFiles: On Race and Racism in our Politics and Daily Lives
2012-10-15

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Partner
ChangeLab

Reports of rapid demographic change in favor of people of color in the U.S. seem to have caused a reaction among many whites bordering on panic. Explosive increases in participation in white nationalist groups, the proliferation of vigilante border patrols, and the return of overt racism in mainstream politics all smell like fear to me. This reaction got me to thinking, why? Why are they so afraid of the possibility of becoming a minority?
 
Here’s my take. But first, a reality check. White fears are of becoming a minority are over-blown. As I’ve written elsewhere in this blog, whiteness has shifted to envelope those formerly deemed non-white many times throughout history. The Irish weren’t always considered white, nor were Jews. They were included among whites in order to maintain white advantage.
 
As racial demographics shift, so-called white Hispanics and certain Asian American ethnic minorities are likely to be enveloped by whiteness. Whether we think of ourselves as white or not, accepting the privileges already being extended to us—being cast as the “good immigrants” or buying into the idea that Asians are a “model minority” relative to so-called “problem minorities,” for instance—will put us on the wrong side of the color line. And when the stakes are so high, we can hope folks won’t take the bribe, but I wouldn’t advise betting on it.
 
So white folks can rest easy. Armageddon is probably still a way off…

Read the entire article here.

Scot Nakagawa: Dismantling the Fulcrum of White Supremacy

GRITtv
2012-08-24

Laura Flanders, Host

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Parner
ChangeLab

Race, according to activist and writer Scot Nakagawa, was an idea created originally to justify the enslavement of a people, and has displayed pernicious staying power in the centuries since. That’s why, as Nakagawa explains in this video with Laura Flanders, he believes that his liberation and the liberation of all people of color in the United States is tied to the liberation of African-Americans. For Nakagawa, anti-black racism is “the fulcrum of white supremacy.”

The Durability of Race

RaceFiles: On Race and Racism in our Politics and Daily Lives
2012-10-05

Scot Nakagawa, Senior Partner
ChangeLab

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of racism. Many believe that as the global demographics change and Generation Y rises, racism will fade in significance. Some even suggest that what we are witnessing in the Obama backlash is just death throes.
 
That argument ignores history.
 
Here’s what I mean.
 
Neither the Emancipation Proclamation nor the abolitionist movement were enough to end slavery. Slavery was defeated in a Civil War that was fought not over race equality nor just for the cuase of freeing slaves, but over federal authority. The cynicism at the root of the “war against slavery” is revealed by the fact that when legal race slavery was finally defeated in 1865, the culture of  white supremacy survived, both in the North and the South.
 
Southern state governments, determined to maintain white supremacy, pivoted after the war and took advantage of an exception in the 13th Amendment that allowed for the indentured servitude of criminals. They created a set of legal codes that criminalized Black people. Crimes included changing employers without permission,vagrancy, and selling cotton after sunset.
 
Once imprisoned, African Americans were subjected to neo-slavery in the form of labor camps and chain gangs. But the impact of neo-slavery was not just on those enslaved. The system terrorized Blacks throughout the South keeping them subjugated to white employers who in many cases were their former masters…

Read the entire article here.