It all begins with an idea

It takes a long time to internalize the Undoing Racism Workshop. Even as I was one of the trainers in the workshop, I was constantly, in ways conscious and unconscious, internalizing the message. The founders would always say this is about organizing. We would all nod our heads, and when they asked how many of you are organizers in the room?

The truth is that this is a race-constructed nation, and we all know it somewhere in our psyche. And yes, there are other forms of oppression, but race is The Great Divide. It is the Rubicon we've never crossed.

Labor, for example–which from the early 1920s through at least the early 1960s was a major force for change in this country, in fact, one could argue there wouldn't have been the Civil Rights victories without a strong Labor Movement behind it. But Labor had its own issues with race and always had.

How do we explain the fact that President Obama, a Black man, has reached the level of power that he has in this country? What Obama proved was that good organizing is the only thing that trumps risk.

I'm poor for a whole lot of reasons. There are all sorts of things that can happen to me and sometimes I’m the object of discrimination, but never on the basis of race. It might be because I don't have the right credentials, or somebody might be prejudiced against short men, or whatever it might be. But the society doesn't work against me, it works for me. 

Men of color are not in charge of anything in this country. Never have been. So to include them in the category of privileged by virtue of their gender is to not understand history. That doesn't mean that men of color do not internalize the value system of white male dominated culture, but you cannot say that white men and men of color walk the same streets in this nation.