COMMUNITY

Principle of Community Work

Principle of Community Work

In thinking about the community groups that you belong to, what models/theories of community work help you understand these communities and the role of community work?

The growing divides between whites and non-whites in economics, social mobility, and political voice make the seemingly sempiternal nature of American racism and the material privileges of whiteness of importance to scholars of leadership and transformative political engagement. Because race has remained an obstacle to the at-large political participation of non-whites in America, it seems only fitting that this handbook address that reality. After all, the problem of race and the consequences of racism are what continue to impede the abilities of policy makers, political representatives, and government administrations to effectively address the concerns of all Americans. This chapter will focus on three post-civil rights notions of race. First, I distinguish between our contemporary discourse of race and the material reality of racism. This distinction is of the utmost importance in moving beyond an ethics of racial compassion to an actionable antiracist philosophy.

Because racial eliminativism is understood to be an effective strategy for thinking about racism, my second section will briefly address the disadvantages of looking at the rhetorical disempowerment of race as a viable solution to racism. The third section will build off the insights of Black theorists such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Frantz Fanon, and Derrick Bell and their reflections on racism during the civil rights era and argue that a structural or systemic analysis of racism as a product of colonialism and white supremacy is a more effective foundation for antiracist engagements and leadership. And, finally, I advocate understanding racism as a type of “necessary knowledge” about the world and as a foundational perspective for any attempt to make real social transformation and change.

Community

I belong to the Black Community (Black female community). Black is typically seen as the antithesis of light and therefore is readily available to symbolize antithetical and negative qualities. Black signifies death in the West (although in China the colour of death is white); we thus learn that the 'Black Death' devastated Europe in the fourteenth century. Black and blackness have been appropriated by racial ideologies and ascribed stereotypically to a wide range of different groups and peoples (typically framed as 'races' or 'species of mankind'). Infamously, the term 'negro' (derived from European expressions for 'black') has been used as an ideological construct to homogenize the diverse experiences of the black populations of the USA, the Caribbean and the countries of Africa. 'Black', as a denigrator signifier of innate inferiority, is the core sustaining presupposition of ethnocentrism, racist essentialism and systems of apartheid. Racism begins with the simple, if fallacious, idea that there are innate differences that can be traced to skin colour (or, in its modern biological variant, to genetic information that determines skin pigment).

The violent history of slavery, imperialism and colonialism is inextricably linked to the stigmatic binary grammar of 'blackness/ whiteness' ('blackness' ...