Race and Worldview- Remarks from Citizen Action Leadership Summit – April 2007
Richard Kirsch, Co Executive Director, Citizen Action New York
Several years ago Citizen Action started down the road on our work on racial justice shortly after we started talking about what we call our worldview. Why, you might ask, did we just start talking about our worldview just a few years ago. Good question. The short answer is that we came to understand that it wasn’t enough to talk about our issues. We needed to talk about and organize on the values and principles behind those issues. That people see the world not through isolated issues but through a sense of how they relate to the world and understand their relationship to each other and to society.
One of the first things we did in figuring out our worldview was to look at what has become the dominant worldview during the past three decades, the right-wing worldview. And once we did that we saw that race is at the core of the right’s worldview.
The right has historically used race to divide Americans who share economic interests. We have seen this in many ways. There have been vicious anti-immigration movements, many with strong racial themes, since the 19th century. Slavery and Jim Crow have been used to direct the anger and frustration of poor whites in the South against Blacks. In the 20th Century, the right used race in the South to convince poor and working class whites to oppose social insurance and anti-poverty programs because they would benefit blacks. We have seen this clearly in the modern conservative era, in which race is usually unsaid but widely understood in the right-wing worldview.
Racism is embedded in the right-wind worldview. The core of the right-wing worldview – you are on your own and your success is your responsibility alone – blames anyone who doesn’t make it. It assumes that success comes from hard work and good character and that failure is the individual’s fault. So that if a group is falling behind, it must be because they have bad character and don’t work hard. Those individuals who do make it are that much more evidence that anyone can.
The right’s view of government programs as wasteful is really about government social programs – they don’t object to the military or farm supports or giveaways to energy companies. It’s about spending on “those people,” which means the undeserving blacks and browns who don’t pay taxes and don’t work hard and are leaching off the backs of “hard-working Americans”.
When it specifically addresses race, the right says that we are beyond race now. This is a trait that one social values measure has called “modern racism,”- the denial that race is a factor. The idea that we’ve overcome racism so we don’t need to address it. We look around and see successful examples of African-Americans as TV anchors, corporate CEOs, now a Governor and even a candidate for President, and we are assured that race doesn’t matter anymore. So affirmative action becomes reverse discrimination.
Because race is at the mostly unspoken center of much of right-wing views, we can not change people’s minds and move the political frame if we ignore what’s really there. The opposite social value to “modern racism” is “acknowledgement of racism.”
What about our worldview? When we look at our worldview we can see how the right-wing view is implicitly and sometimes explicitly rejected. At the center of our worldview is our common humanity, the view that we are all in this together, that we all do better when we all do better. That each of us has a divine spark and that role in life is to blow air into that spark in each and every one of us. That we are our brother’s and sister’s keepers.
Those core values allow us to put ourselves in other’s shoes. To understand that success is not just an individual factor but a communal, societal factor. And that race is one reason that people are not borne each starting from the same place and are not seen as we live our lives in the same way. That race is a key factor in both where people start, in how they are viewed and what opportunities they are given.
When we say that our values lead us to work for a government that works for all of us, we are empowered to support government programs that provide real opportunity for all of us, that acknowledge and work to tear down the barriers created by history and by ongoing, daily racism.
In our worldview we talk about “opportunity for all.” Research shows that when we talk about opportunity for all, people hear race in that.
What we are talking about this weekend is justice and power. And developing our leadership, united through our worldview, to organize and build power in white communities and communities of color throughout New York.
So our meeting this weekend is the next step of a process that we started several years ago, when we began to take a fresh look at our organizing strategy through worldview. In 2005 the theme of our Annual Conference was worldview, because we felt that it was essential that our leadership be able to understand and articulate our worldview.
As part of this process we also started to work explicitly on issues of racial justice.