Obviously more people should take race equity training

Published 1:30 am Friday, October 28, 2022

A recent op-ed piece in the Review described Bainbridge Island’s recent racial equity training in stark terms as hostile, toxic, radical and out to destroy single-family housing on BI.

Having taken that training myself, I can tell you that is not true.

I have read such criticism before, many times, be it Victor Davis Hansen, the National Review, The Washington Examiner, and the National Catholic Register, and I have also been told this by a lot of people in my social circle. I sensed they were not honest because they either glossed over facts in favor of a myth. A lot are uncharitable assumptions about people they never met or cared to meet.

However, I had some unpleasant experiences with non-whites and the “woke” culture. Consequently, many times I just thought “to hell with it all.”

However, once I started reading up on anti-racism, racial justice, our racialized history and the myths of American exceptionalism, I was able to not only see the myths of “color blindness” and the hypocrisy that Critical Race Theory was “divisive,” but I also saw the hyperbole that any racial justice training is “racialized” politics.

In the first place, American politics has always been racialized, and it still is, and it was designed for the exclusive benefit of one race. Not only was it for one race, but it was also for those on top of hierarchy. The Constitution was strictly designed for the benefit of white, propertied men. Those of different races were excluded from voting or having any say in the matter, since it was by majority rule.

Supreme Court decisions strictly followed the same logic that only propertied white men were protected. Anything that hindered their rights, such as laws that actually gave non-whites, working-class people (white and non-white), and women any protections were simply struck down. Today’s court is doing the same thing to “correct” those “errors” made by “judicial activists.”

The idea of color blindness, the melting pot, and such platitudes are not lofty ideals but empty words to keep the status quo. The people who condemn “identity politics” are the same ones who use it to pit working-class whites against minorities in a sort of “divide and conquer” game that has been used so well by colonial governments, leading to such things like the Rwandan Genocide of 1994.

Anyone who says it was “ancient hatreds” is either ignorant or simply has cognitive dissonance. The truth is that “systems of oppression” exist and structural transformation is in order. Look around at how things are and how things went earlier in our society. An honest person would have to say that it isn’t going well and never has gone well.

We should be willing to do whatever it takes. This is not comfortable work, it is not pleasant work, and sometimes it isn’t all that rewarding. I do this because it is necessary work, and the truth is, all of us need to take part in this work. The price of inaction is simply too high, and there is no retreat to time and place that never was.

Francis Jacobson is a member of Bainbridge Island’s Race Equity Advisory Committee.