December 30, 2009: The ‘Race’ Entry
I wrote a piece questioning the idea of a ‘post-racial’ America shortly after the election of President-elect Barack Obama. I argued in the short article, and this is a point I still maintain, that determining whether or not the United States had entered into a “post-racial” phase in its development was too soon, even though there are many people today who are persistently still trying to write that narrative. After I published the article in a variety of blogs, I received a response from a gentleman named Ray Zwarich who had some very interesting feedback.
In his response, Mr. Zwarich argued that race and racism are concepts that are were connected to human instinct. He also acknowledged the social, political, and economic aspects of the construction of race in the United States Zwarich maintained that as many individuals who secured resources needed to survive and ascended up the socio-economic ladder, they were less likely to hold onto such views. So, many people in the upper and middle classes were less likely to be racist while the various ethnic and racial groups among the lower classes retained this instinct. Ultimately, he concluded, anti-racist activists should focus more on eradicating poverty among the lower classes because racism is part of human nature and therefore immutable.
I agree with the premise that we should work to fight against poverty and I hope to spend more time talking about solutions later in this piece. However, I do take issue with racism as something that is so natural and ingrained in our consciousness that it is inescapable, and thus, a futile cause. When I hear the human nature argument or someone making the case that racial prejudice has existed everywhere for a long time, we tend to miss the point that racism, along with all of the other –isms, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ageism, etc., are phenomena that people learn (think Jane Elliot’s “Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes”). I would be hard-pressed to find a lower class child in the United States who was essentially racist from birth. I concede that humans in the modern periods of history have tended to divide and characterize themselves;, however, much of the categories we deal with today specifically emerged in the age of Western colonization and imperialism. I argue that if these present categories were not instilled in us, but created, resisted, and reproduced over a number of centuries, then why could we not struggle intellectually, psychologically, and mentally, to work through this discourse?
I also disagree with the implicit assertion that the richer someone gets, the less prone they are to prejudice. Racism in America is not just individual prejudice that is bigotry. Many virulent racists in the South and North did not fit the “ignorant, pot-bellied, and backward” stereotype that many people like to associate with individuals holding these views (this is a way for whites who are uneasy about their views on different groups to “other” whites and separate themselves from who they think are the “real racists.”). In fact many of the mouthpieces of racism during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements were prominent figures in their communities, some holding office, others wearing a sheriff or police badge, others descendants of prominent rich families. The assertion that racism is endemic in the prison population is not as clear-cut. While there is a history of bigotry inside prison walls, one must acknowledge some of the external factors of its development. At the height of black political imprisonment during the Black Power Movement, bigoted guards helped stoke racial division. As Staughton Lynd has written about, and many observed about the 1993 Lucasville prison rebellion, there are moments of racial solidarity in the fight against oppression. If poverty does not know race, then racial prejudice did not know any class, but neither does solidarity know any race, class, gender, or circumstance. And I’m sure, even in spite of all of the progress, we could find that point to be true. But just as race and racism were created, we must build solidarity across class, race, sex, and gender.
The confusion of systemic racism and individual bigotry also hinders discussion on race and prejudice. Many individuals tend to conflate the two concepts. Racism does not just include the individual bigotry, but it is also the historical and structural disadvantage that was built into American political, economic, cultural, and social systems and institutions. We have all heard the stories of the 3/5ths clause in the Constitution and the various other laws and court cases that solidified the racial boundaries in the US. We have also heard of the false science that was used to reinforce this notion. We all know that American democracy at its founding, was white, male, most likely heterosexual, and upper-class. Since then, however, the US has come a long way, from slave resistance and revolt, abolition, the struggle for respectability, the demands of self-determination, the Brown case, civil rights, black power, black entrance into politics, and finally the election of Barack Obama.
However, despite those gains, the rate of poverty among black Americans is higher than whites, there is a larger proportion of black men in prison than white men, the infant mortality rate is higher, etc., etc. etc. I have not even brought up disparities in education and in the professional arenas (not athletics or entertainment). It would be easy to explain these disparities by telling black people to be more responsible, but individual responsibility can only take a group of people so far. When Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP won the fight against school segregation, many whites in the north and south sought to blunt its impact. Black people still could not choose to go to a nicer school of their choice. Not every single black person had the means to move from a ghetto that was created by a variety of local, state, and federal policies. Only those who were lucky enough to be able to use their individual liberty and prerogative had the ability to get out.
We also tend to forget that, like wealth, poverty also reproduces itself, especially in tax-depressed areas. African Americans have only had the right to vote in reality for forty years and there is still only one, maybe one black person in the Senate, depending upon who ultimately replaces President-elect Obama, and it took the US forty years to elect its first black president. I have not even brought up the amount of governorships that people of color do not have. Ironically, if one wants to bring the idea of institutional racism into bold relief one should look to college football. A majority of the players are black and there are still less than ten black coaches with jobs out of the one hundred and eight Bowl Division schools. Major General William T. Sherman was aware of this after the Civil War (Special Field Order, Number 15 also known as “Where’s my forty acres and a mule?!?!”). President Lyndon Johnson knew that some sort of radical economic and political action would make it possible to shore up these inequalities (Johnson said, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”). I think we forgot this step on our way to electing Barack Obama. This is part of the racial reality that many Americans have discredited and/or refused to face.
So, why did I just spend a lot of time bringing up those examples? Racism, as well as sexism and class prejudice, is embedded in the American system. Yes, Mr. Zwarich is right. Anti-racist activists cannot change the hearts of men, women, and children. But that has not been my intention as one. Anti-racist activists must attack a system that reproduced, and continues to reproduce, inequalities, usually at the hands of non-racists. That is right. This country could be run by a bunch of non-racists and this system would still reproduce the inequalities and the discourse. Why? Because, as a point of agreement with Mr. Zwarich, many non-racists are usually conformists who may not see color, but who are well-adjusted to American institutions and society and are contented with working within the various structures of racial/free-market/patriarchal/heterosexual hegemony (not overt domination), not transforming them. Shockingly, we should be holding ourselves accountable as comfortable Americans for the historical inequalities and present economic mess as the “evil” and “greedy” investors on Wall Street and virulent racists. And another danger of ignoring racial discourse is if there is no one around to question the racial discourse, then there will be people around who would gladly write this post-racial narrative because it only allows those who are interested in these racial divisions to play all Americans, no matter what class, against each other.
The rewriting of racial discourse by conservatives—blacks and whites—has led to the desegregation of many schools, the assault on affirmative action (including the demonization of beneficiaries—except for white women), which helped Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice (and she virtually admitted it), and Barack Obama ascend to the highest political offices in the United States, and it further contributed to the dehumanization of black Americans. This dehumanization has allowed conservative Republicans to declare war on black male youth (the war on drugs) and paint black women as undeserving and perpetual victims (welfare mothers, “too aggressive,” etc.). And we wonder why Katrina happened, or why Michelle Obama was attacked for being “too aggressive”? Unfortunately, racial prejudice is not, as many liberals during the Cold War liked to assume, a disease that could be cured. Racism, or even race talk, in America is manifested in our language and discourse and it is used to discipline any aspiring stakeholders within the system. But, as the struggles against slavery and Jim Crow proved, the persistence of structural and discursive racism can be defeated through talking about race, political protest, and the eradication of (hetero)sexism and poverty.
In essence, I agree with Mr. Zwarich, poverty has to be among the first targets in the fight for political change and racism. We can take an approached that Paulo Friere and Myles Horton used in their book, We Make the Road By Walking. When it comes to eradicating racism, we may have to go through the back door. We take the fight to poverty-stricken areas. When we organize we must encourage people to analyze their immediate situations from not just class-based perspectives, but also race and sexed-based perspectives. Like I said, the fact that many black Americans were trapped in the ghetto in the first place was not just because they were poor, but because they were also black. Many black women found themselves in compromising positions not just because they were poor, but because of the circumstances of being black, poor, and female. Now, our analysis may pivot slightly when we think of a poor white person. But white men, women, and children are also raced and dehumanized by white people for not representing the “best “of America. We have not even brought up the historical circumstances of Mexicans (land taken), Hawaiians, Puerto Ricans (virtually colonized), and Native Americans (land taken, genocide, and hyper-concentrated on reservations). Our analysis of structural poverty would have to pivot along these points. Not one isolated “macro” theory such as Marxism or meta-language such as race, class, or gender, can convince me at this point because every layer of one’s identity helps to shape his/her life chances in America.
Correct analysis and responsible action (”responsible” not to be confused with refraining from mass protest, direct action, or even force) has to be coupled with dialogue (which is kind of indistinguishable from correct analysis) and popular education. Only through dialogue will we all be able to learn how to dismantle the discursive practices of race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality, or at least render those practices incapable of inflicting harm on human beings. (because if most people are on the same page when it comes to the meanings of particular terms, then there will be less conflict and misunderstanding). Political struggle is indispensible to political education and the formation of building solidarity, but discussion should not be dismissed as some sort of “utopian” ideal. We should take a cue from feminists and try consciousness-raising. These real conversations on race could allow us all to get critical, get real with each other, and grow together.
Activists for a more democratic community and union must also hold each other accountable. Today, former Black Panther Party member and U.S. Representative from Illinois, Bobby Rush, challenged the predominately white Senate not to “lynch or hang” Governor Rod Blagojevich’s selection to replace President-elect Obama, Roland Burris. Now, I respect Representative Rush and the contributions he made towards the struggles for black freedom and equality. However, his challenge did nothing to help the cause of black Americans. Why? Because he hitched the cause (that he helped fight for) to the criminal and politically toxic Blagojevich. By standing in front of that podium, Rush endorsed Blagojevich’s alleged attempts to sell Obama’s seat. Rush and Burriss’s attempts to cede Blagojevich’s moral authority is also deplorable and should be denounced. It is like I told someone in a prior conversation, each time a person of color uses race disingenuously, they make it difficult for a person of color victimized by racism to secure justice, it hardens the racial boundaries that we need to be more permeable, and it allows racial conservatives to reemploy their wannabe ‘color-blind’ and soon to be liberal and conservative ‘post-racial’ discourse. And these frivolous attempts to gin up support along racial lines distracts us from creating new knowledge and theories of American structures of domination, fighting poverty and homelessness, and fighting for a more humane health care, education, political and economic system, and sustainable environment.
So, in many ways, I agree with Mr. Zwarich and I hope to discuss the ways in which we can build knowledge and facilitate action in the future. Yes, during these times of economic uncertainty, we must fight poverty. However, I believe we can use the fight against poverty as an entrance point to eradicating racism, (hetero)sexism, and class prejudice from the American system, not necessarily from the hearts and minds of the people. We will win the hearts and minds only through democratic action, discussion, and reflection. If we have made it this far, then that is possible. But, remember, this fight is about the system, it is about the particular language we use to dehumanize different people. It is possible to empty these labels of their negative meanings. That was vital to the cultural flank of the Black Power Movement. “Negroes” made themselves into blacks and African-Americans, and they made “black” beautiful. Black was not beautiful in the “I reject white” way, but in the self-affirming, “this is the manner my higher power made me and I’m proud” way. Race, along with other forms of difference, has not ever been a zero-sum proposition for all groups of people. This is another reality that the comfortable American must come to grips with. Identity and difference does matter to everyone, whether it is a person embracing their racial identity in a self-affirming and non-oppressive way, or a person employing a ”colorblind” language in order to discourage another person from emphasizing their racial self-identification.
Ultimately, this fight must be all-encompassing as dialogue and the many available forms of direct action should never be taken off the table. So, if Zwarich is correct, and the more comfortable Americans who do not hold on to intolerant views actively participate, then we may be able to create the change we can believe in.
Filed under: Politics & Race
[...] It means a lot to me to have this opportunity to connect with like-minded people the world over Race, Racism, and the Prospects of Transformation in America – oneglobe.wordpress.com 12/31/2008 December 30, 2009: The ‘Race’ Entry I wrote a piece [...]
Yesterday a friend called to my attention Austin’s blog, “Race, Racism, and the Prospects of Transformation in America,” where Austin says, “…many non-racists are usually conformists who may not see color, but who are well-adjusted to American institutions and society and are contented with working within the various structures of racial/free-market/patriarchal/heterosexual hegemony (not overt domination), not transforming them.”
My reaction is that he’s getting at the point Mark Twain was making a century ago in his essay, “Corn-Pone Opinions.” Twain tells us that as a boy on his uncle’s farm he listened to a slave who preached sermons from the top of his master’s woodpile, “with me as his sole audience.” One of the slave man/preacher’s sermon topics was this: “You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, an I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.”
Twain’s point is that many/most of us get our opinions from our friends, from our business associates, or from other such contacts. It’s rare that we have the courage to go against the common wisdom of our communities, our families, or our associates. I’ve spent a lifetime unlearning my family’s and my community’s racism. Some of that unlearning was easy — the culture around me was learning to eliminate its racism (that’s a big part of what the 1960s in America were about, and it made many white people uncomfortable). Other parts of my racism weren’t as easy to unlearn. I had to take the time to listen to people who said things that made me uncomfortable. I had to read authors like Malcolm X — people who passed on to me some uncomfortable truths.
A colleague of mine claimed, “to teach is an intransitive verb.” He meant by this that intransitive verbs describe our acting on ourselves. In other words, we teach ourselves. Teachers put out information and give us feedback about our work. We listen, and then we decide to teach ourselves.
The “conformists” Austin speaks of are, sometimes, the people who hang on to an old, racially prejudiced set of values.
Our task is to question, to wonder if the generalities we hear may derive from old, racially prejudiced corn-pone sources.
Many thanks to Austin McCoy for his deep thoughtfulness in responding to my remarks. I do think that either he has misunderstood certain key aspects of the ideas that I tried to get across, or else, (perhaps more likely), I did a poor job of expressing those ideas coherently. Nonetheless, it is an illuminating pleasure to read Mr. McCoy’s remarks here.
It always requires effort, and a sincere desire to understand, to even begin to grasp the viewpoint of another person from reading a few of her or his words, and I will continue to value every opportunity to read the work of Mr. McCoy. I am thankful that he offers us the benefit of his deep perceptions, and I certainly agree with much more of what he offers than I disagree on the narrow points on which we are focused here.
Mr. McCoy seems to have taken from my remarks the message that I think that racism itself is ingrained in human instinct. That is not (exactly) what I said. It is close, perhaps, but the distinction is crucial to my thesis.
After re-reading my remarks, I think that I made this distinction reasonably clear. What I said was that humans have the innate instinct, (like wolves, or elephants, for example, but unlike many other species of higher mammals, such as bears), to cooperate in groups in order to compete successfully in our environment against other groups. We use key ‘identifiers’ to define our groups, and race is one very obvious identifier that is, unfortunately, very commonly used. It is far from the only one, however, and the human prejudices and hatreds that are based on other non-racial identifiers can be just as tragic as is racism.
It is not racism, per se, that is rooted in our DNA derived human nature, it is our instinctive compulsion to identify ourselves as part of a group, in order to cooperate within that group to compete against other groups, (groups that we identify, according to key identifiers, as ‘other than’ our group), for survival in our environment. Humans have many contradictory instincts, and our instinct to cooperate in groups, measured against our instinct to compete, both for status within our groups, and to help our group compete with other groups, is one of the most basic dialectics that define our human existence.
This distinction between our root instinct to identify ourselves with a group, and our propensity to use race as a key group identifier, is a narrow but important one. We can surely see that race is but one identifier that is used, and that many others can be just as odious, and even deadly. The deadly enmity between Hutus and Tutsies, to mention an extreme example, has already caused the death of over a million people, and will cause the deaths of many more people this very day. One group regards the other as sub-human, (as ‘cockroaches’), though both groups are of the same race. The rivalry between Crips and Bloods, and/or between the urban gangs that form among poor people all over the world, are often between sub-groups of the same race, and they are often deadly.
My thesis, which to me seems completely obvious, is that following from this human instinct to cooperate in groups to augment our survival in our environment, racism is more widespread, and more virulent, among groups of humans who live in conditions in which they must fight a harder struggle for daily survival. Surely we are aware that the most virulent racism in America exists among impoverished people of every race, with, as I mentioned, the most extreme degree of all existing among prison populations, (perhaps the lowest, the most dispossessed, social order).
I did not mean to imply that relative economic comfort disposes people, in and of itself, to be less racist. In societies in which institutionalized racism is relatively unchallenged, (in America before the civil rights movement, for example), racism is clearly rampant among all social classes, and certainly even today, in whatever degree of ‘post-racialism’ we have accomplished, many people in comfortable economic circumstances are racists.
What I tried to say, (and here I think the fault was clearly mine for having said this poorly), was that in societies that have achieved some degree of more enlightened ‘post-racialism’, as has ours, (though we obviously have a long ways to go yet), it is people who are relieved of the pressure and anxiety of competing for daily survival, people who have some degree of security in their lives, and especially people who have been afforded the benefits of education that more prosperous economic circumstances impart, who are much more likely to hold and express an enlightened (post-racial) consciousness.
People mired in poverty, (especially multi-generational poverty), people for whom every trip outside their own homes presents them with a degree of danger, people who are deprived of the dignity of education, and the self-respect engendered from the self-sufficiency of supporting themselves and their families at a dignified level of existence, are much more likely to seek refuge in the protection of groups that foster hatreds and rivalries that are based on nonsensical group identifiers, such as race, religion, or even merely the color of bandanna one wears.
I did not say that racism is “immutable”, (Mr. McCoy’s term). (Quite the opposite). Nor did I mean to say that a higher economic status in and of itself predisposes people to be less racist, (although, as I said, in re-reading my remarks, I do not think that I expressed the latter very well at all).
Early on in my previous remarks, I made the statement that, “Much of our struggle, as humans, to be ‘civilized’, is an exercise in trying to rise above our instinctive animal nature”. Our animal sexual instincts, for example, conflict with the cultural development of monogamous bonds, which allows for the existence of family groups, on which civilization itself depends. The behaviors and cultural attitudes that comprise what we call ‘civilization’, must be taught to each individual, as any parent who has done their best to accomplish this task knows very well. Civilization is dependent on the existence of these family groups, in which parents teach their children to be ‘civilized’, so every civilization, and even every tribal society, has fashioned ‘taboos’ against behaviors that satisfy our primitive animal instincts, but endanger the well-being of the group.
Hopefully, enlightened human civilization will someday succeed in fashioning a ‘taboo’ against this odious behavior we call ‘racism’, but my thesis is that this degree of enlightenment will never be achieved so long as people are forced to live in the undignified, and relatively uncivilized, ‘jungle-rule’ conditions of crushing urban poverty.
I do not think, as Mr. McCoy implies I do, that children are “racist from birth”. But as a parent who raised a few myself, and as a person who has worked with children extensively, I certainly know that children are ‘uncivilized’. Children are instinctively selfish and greedy, for example, until they learn the enlightened social benefits from sharing and being generous.
Very small children do not seem to have, (in my observations), any response to race at all. When children are very young, they are developing their personalities as individuals, and the group instinct is not much in evidence. It is only as they grow older, and as they learn to socialize themselves, that the group instinct begins to manifest itself.
But lest we idealize childhood in our efforts to understand human nature, we need only remember our own childhoods to know that the school playground can be one of the most vicious environments on Earth. Children use any identifiers available to separate themselves into groups, and sub-groups, and they compete viciously for supremacy between and among these groups. Kids that are fat, or ugly, or dumb, or weak, or have acne, or lack learned social skills, or dress differently, (often for economic reasons), routinely suffer great pain under intense cruelty. This is human instinct, human nature, undeterred, like the ‘pecking order’ that is established in lower species. (One wonders whether Mr. McCoy, or any other readers who are tempted to idealize children or childhood, have read Wiilliam Golding’s allegorical novel ‘Lord of the Flies’, which treats this subject with very discomforting lucidity).
It is only through the painstaking efforts of enculturation, efforts which seek to ameliorate these raw animal instincts, that children learn the benefits of enlightened self-interest that are the basic building blocks of Civilization itself.
When Mr. McCoy writes:
“I concede that humans in the modern periods of history have tended to divide and characterize themselves;, however, much of the categories we deal with today specifically emerged in the age of Western colonization and imperialism. I argue that if these present categories were not instilled in us, but created, resisted, and reproduced over a number of centuries, then why could we not struggle intellectually, psychologically, and mentally, to work through this discourse?”
……he makes a very glaring mistake that is very common among people on the Left. He wants to blame factors that are inherent in human nature on an external ’system’, on some ‘ism’ or another. Many people on the Left like to pretend that our human foibles are the result of ‘capitalism’, for example, when in reality, it is very obviously the other way around, the evils inherent in unbridled capitalism grew as an expression of the baser qualities in human nature. Here, Mr. McCoy wants to place blame on “Western colonization and imperialism” for qualities that are obviously intrinsic to human nature. In doing so, he completely ignores the known cultural realities among indigenous tribal people long before they were ever touched by Western Civilization.
Native Americans, for example, were for the most part a warrior culture in which it was common that members of one tribe considered members of rival tribes as sub-human. As long as there was plenty of space in the environment, so that each tribe had its own reasonably secure territory that provided well for its existence, tribes co-existed well enough, but whenever and wherever the environment became crowded, or natural calamities like drought threatened the security of a tribe to a degree that their survival was at stake, they were quite capable of perpetrating what we would consider to be ‘genocidal atrocities’ on weaker tribes, and suffered no guilt themselves for the suffering they imposed on these ’sub-human’ (to them) groups.
And tribes in which technology advanced to a degree that imparted them an advantage over other tribes, as it did among the Maya and Aztecs, for example, exploited their advantage to a stunningly shocking degree of cruelty to the tribes around them, which they subjected to every form of suffering, and even slavery of the cruelest kind. Their ‘accomplishments’ in the cruel exploitation of other tribes measure up quite well against anything done by “Western colonization and imperialism”.
I do NOT argue that we cannot “struggle intellectually, psychologically, and mentally, to work through this discourse”. I believe that we MUST engage in EXACTLY this struggle. My argument merely concerns the conditions which are prerequisite to having our noble struggle meet with success.
Our struggle as a species now is to learn from these facts of History, not distort them with idealizations that can only lead us to false conclusions. We must learn the lessons that History offers to teach us, (and it certainly teaches us plenty about the pitfalls of human nature), so that we can adapt our instinct to identify with our own groups, (to compete with other groups), to the changed conditions of our environment. With the expansion of the human population, (until the world is bursting at its seams), and with the development of technology, (especially as applied to devising ways to kill each other in order to compete in our environment), our instinct to divide ourselves into inter-cooperating groups, to compete against other groups, which is a large part of what made our species so successful in taking over the Earth, now clearly threatens our species with self-annihilation.
While some do think that human instinct is “immutable”, and that the human species is therefore doomed, I am not one of them. I believe that Humankind can learn to control its basic instincts to ever higher degrees, and thereby achieve a higher ‘enlightened’ consciousness. What this must obviously entail is learning to identify ourselves as ALL being connected to ONE large interdependent group, the human species itself. We must realize that we’re all in this together, (black or brown or white, and all shades in between, and American or Palestinian or Israeli or Hutu or Tutsie), and that NONE of us, in our sub-groups, are likely to see our groups survive unless we ameliorate the competition between us with an ever more civilized consciousness of our complete interdependence.
Quite the opposite from Mr. McCoy’s apparent assumption that I think that racism is “immutable”, I closed my previous remarks with this statement, “We will never eradicate racism in America, (or anywhere else), until we eradicate the ghettos of poverty and deprivation where it thrives and festers”. It sure seems to me that this statement makes clear the assumption that we CAN eradicate poverty, and therefore that racism, rather than being “immutable”, can be eradicated as well.
This statement also declares, of course, that as long as humans are made to compete for daily survival in uncivilized conditions, such as those that exist is so many impoverished urban environments all over the world, human instinct will always have the upper hand over enlightened enculturation efforts that try to ameliorate it. Individuals will always choose to behave in a fashion that seems (to them) to give them the best chance to survive, and their instinct to seek the protection of inter-cooperative groups, (which feeds and nurtures racism, as well as other forms of bigotry), is very likely to prove to be “immutable” under those primitive and ‘uncivilized’ conditions.
People will always compete. We might perhaps evolve biologically as a species over time, (assuming we survive long enough to do so), but until we do, competition will be an immutable part of our nature. We will compete for status, for power, for the prettiest girl, or the hottest guy, etc. It will always be “still the same old story, the fight for love and glory, a case of do or die”. But surely ‘Civilization’, in its truest sense, demands that people should not have to compete for basic survival itself.
It is my thesis that not until Humankind achieves true ‘Civilization’, not until human societies divide the wealth that they produce in an equitable manner that allows for even the least capable and talented to live dignified and prosperous lives, will we be able to achieve a generalized enlightened human consciousness from which the tragic foibles of racism, and other nonsensical prejudices, are eradicated.
Zwarich