“Race is the child of racism, not the father” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015).
Race is one of the most tenacious signifiers. While it is common knowledge that race as a marker to categorise humans is biologically and scientifically incorrect, it is and will be a dichotomous tool to divide people. This section explores what race and racism means in 21c and how it -subliminally or overtly- is present in everyday life.
…“race is the child of racism, not the father. And the naming of “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the world and me, 2015
“For a white woman […] to imagine herself into a real-life black identity without any lived black experience, to turn herself into a black history professor without a history degree, to place herself at the forefront of local black society that she had adopted less than a decade earlier, all while seeming to claim to do it better and more authentically than any black person who would dare challenge her—well, it’s the ultimate “you can be anything” success story of white America […] Another branch of manifest destiny. No wonder America couldn’t get enough of the Dolezal story.”
— Ijeoma Oluo
“in een ander type samenleving, zou je dus met nieuwe helden moeten komen die andere functies hebben in de samenleving. Niet alleen ‘het veroveren’, maar ook ‘hoe leef je samen’.”
—Valika Smeulders
“Racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another, and so on.”
—Dave Chappelle
This privilege is felt in nearly every sector of society. In the workforce in employers choosing to interview candidates with “white” names over those with “ethnic” ones. […] And in the justice system, white privilege means African Americans make up 57 percent of the people in state prison for drug offenses, even though blacks and whites use drugs at similar rates and whites sell drugs at higher rates.
Originally associated with cultural mixtures of African, European, and indigenous ancestry, today, creolization refers to this mixture of different people and different cultures that merge to become one.
“I write “Black” with a capital B because this term addresses first and foremost political and historical dimensions of the concept of Blackness, and relates only indirectly to skin complexion.”
— Adusei-Poku
“By significant margins, white participants believed that the black applicant was lower status, with less education and less annual income than the African-American applicant.
Over Anchou Zhang zegt de jury onder meer “een banaan die heel goed geïntegreerd is, geel van buiten en wit van binnen”, “de mens staat bij Anchou centraal” en “een ondernemer met winnaarsmentaliteit.”
“Het is in Nederland hoog tijd voor een scherp, breed en inhoudelijk racismedebat. Laten we de Nederlanders die de discussie over het institutioneel racisme in dit land willen aangaan daarom niet langer wegzetten als ‘zeurpieten’ of ‘radicalen’.”
— Zihni Özdil in De Volkskrant
“Religie, politiek, kunst en kunst, de wetenschap, […], dat was allemaal een culturele productie bedoelt om ‘de Ander’ als minder te doen laten overkomen. En dat heeft vandaag de dag nog steeds een heel diepe uitwerking.”
My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic!
—Spike Lee