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The tweets in this thread contain the central ideas of “Dismantling American Racism: Part 1.” ( http://gr.pn/troylaraviere )
Your learning goal for today is to be able to explain the origins of racism, the purpose it served, and who it was designed to benefit. #PassTheMic #BLM
Your learning goal for today is to be able to explain the origins of racism, the purpose it served, and who it was designed to benefit. #PassTheMic #BLM
Before the mid-1600s European and African laborers worked together in the same miserable conditions, and did not see themselves as part of color-based "races." They intermarried, ran away together, and rebelled together to escape their common oppression.
The idea of color-based race and racist ideas were created & promoted by wealthy colonists to pit European laborers against African laborers to make them less likely to unite against their common adversary: the wealthy planters who exploited and looted them both.
The desire of wealthy colonists to create a more stable and permanent workforce by intensifying the subjugation and enslavement of African laborers led them to develop the idea of color-based race and concomitant racist ideas to justify enslaving them.
Racism is not natural. Racist ideas were concocted to justify the absolute exploitation of African people and pit European workers against them, which facilitated the exploitation of both groups, one far more brutal than the other.
A function of segregation is to reduce the likelihood that white people will have enough experiences with Black people to contradict the false narratives they’ve been conditioned to believe about them.
Segregation is designed to reinforce and maintain the racially biased conditioning of a American minds. In other words, segregation creates a physical oblivion to buttress and maintain a psychological oblivion.
As a result, Black people hold many of the same negative ideas about other Black people that many whites hold, because we grow and develop exposed to the same false noxious images and narratives about people who look like us.
