Excellent article, Paul.
When I immigrated to the United States, I experienced being cast by other people (other people in general) something I had not experienced back home. As a white person, I was not cast as a white person, but often as a person from Germany (I am not). When I was with people from Germany, I noticed that they would receive a different 'treatment' than I would after telling where each of us was from. This type casting was something new to me, a layer placed on me (slightly negative when folks expected I was from Germany, and a bit too enthusiastic when I mentioned where I was from). I may have been typecast in my old nation, but I did not experience any effects with this much clarity as here in the USA. I am totally used to it now (I don't give a jiffy, positive/negative, but I am aware of my white status as more positive than negative).
One of the things I had to learn in the USA is that race is deeply important, almost a bit like a booby trap because in my naiveté I would never say the things exactly right of course. I kind of can't discuss race, partly because there is only one human race. But also because I wasn't trained in doing that.
Yet like war leaving its scars, slavery and deep-deep suppression have left scars that are not easily erased. Having to accept that people can consider other people to be bad, and then becoming bad in their own behavior against these others while receiving the benefits of that bad behavior, that is deeply troubling. It is not easy to get rid of a scar in which folks are made unequal, where winners are made, and losers are required as well as part of the setup.
That brings me to Anglo culture, of keeping the scar intact, of keeping suppression alive, as in always and forever. My pet peeve is voting because it is really bad here in the USA; we receive representation, but in Anglo nations there is nearly always a game of divide-and-conquer in the voting booth. It is horrible and nobody talks about this something that is really important to everything we are. It will keep the future bleak for all minority losers (majority wins).
Minorities (all political minorities) do not receive representation. Only the majority gets to pick 'their' representative.
That means that those that lose end up not being represented by the one they desire to represent them. In worst case scenarios, the representative does nothing for these voters at all. So, losing out is extremely negative, politically spoken. Your needs may remain unaddressed in perpetuity.
Where I am from, all voters are represented by their own choice; there is no Anglo winner-take-all because that is not considered right at all. It is fascist (which is a good European word) because the leaders get to declare all, the losers get to shut up. Only one direction (or only two directions, controlled by two political elites) are considered; the minorities made unimportant.
The point I am trying to make is that racism is not just something within people, but also is strengthened by the voting system that declares who gets to make the political decisions.
No surprise, out of 100 Senators, there are about 10 folks non-white and/or Hispanic as Senators. Meanwhile, there are about four times as many folks that are non-white and/or Hispanic in the USA. The difference is not explained by voters not-showing up but by the divide-and-conquer setup that happens in the voting booths.
If we want to live in a better nation, we need to start with the root of power; remove the injustice of a voting system that leaves, as example, 40% of the voters for Senators, going home empty-handed after they cast their votes.
This is what John Stuart Mill said back in 1861:
"Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people, exclusively represented. The former is synonymous with the equality of all citizens; the latter, strangely confounded with it, is a government of privilege, in favor of the numerical majority, who alone possess practically any voice in the State. This is the inevitable consequence of the manner in which the votes are now taken, to the complete disfranchisement of minorities."
Freedom is not an automatic result. It is the result of what was negotiated, it is the result of the system in place.
The USA today is not based on political freedom. We are herded into a voting booth where only the majority (60%, for instance) ends up occupying all 100% of the seats.
