In fact, the caste system of racism is maintained by all
of us, in the same way the rest of the status quo is
maintained. Mostly just by people being comfortable
enough with the status quo that they don't try very hard
to change it
Thank you for posting this. This is so important for people to realize.
This finally "clicked" for me a few years ago when somebody explained it to me like this:
Murder is problem, right? And each of us knows that we have to go beyond simply not murdering people. We instinctively understand that if we witness an attempted murder in progress, we must do something: help, or call for help. We know that we need to punish murderers, maintain a police force to catch murderers, and hopefully defuse situations before they get to the point of people murdering each other.
Problems like racism are similar in one way: it's not enough for each of us to simply "not be racist."
(It's not an exact analogy, I know: racism is institutional whereas murder often isn't. However, it got me to think about racism differently...)
This finally "clicked" for me a few years ago when somebody explained it to me like this:
Murder is problem, right? And each of us knows that we have to go beyond simply not murdering people. We instinctively understand that if we witness an attempted murder in progress, we must do something: help, or call for help. We know that we need to punish murderers, maintain a police force to catch murderers, and hopefully defuse situations before they get to the point of people murdering each other.
Problems like racism are similar in one way: it's not enough for each of us to simply "not be racist."
(It's not an exact analogy, I know: racism is institutional whereas murder often isn't. However, it got me to think about racism differently...)