Understanding Racial Identification and Institutional Power

Too often race is linked with an individual's actions, which is perhaps the biggest misconception about racial identity: that it is always a conscious individual choice.  This is why in my book project Beyond Oppression: Colonization and the Language of Heroes, the focus is on the structures of biased, institutional power that individuals become managers, slaves and servants to, and benefactors of.

If race does not exist - and biologically speaking it does not - what is race, and what exactly is racial identity?

Here's a brief except from the book's Introduction:

End products are the symptoms of a system – they can evidence a crime or the institutional cynicism of collective moral bankruptcy – and can sometimes be the beautiful fruit of healthy, loving relations.

We don't need to erase and forget disturbing histories.  We need to accept and live with them, even the artifacts and aspects that are quite loathed, lest we not recognize ourselves and ancestors in the mirror, however complicated and unflattering.

It is through acknowledgement and acceptance of what has happened that brings clarity and peace to what is unfolding.

In my ongoing research for this book, and for another book I'm writing, as well as my growing portfolio of scholarly critiques and articles on socioeconomics and the arts and humanities, the more I've learned, the more I see, and can share clearly.

The power of racism is institutional, not simply about a few people behaving badly.  And this leads to the fact that for a lot of people white supremacy is probably not what you think.

A sociologist that's on my radar these days is Robin DiAngelo, who in the following video she talks about the deconstruction of her identity as a white person - why white supremacy is not about being a bad person, instead that white supremacy is the manifestation of a powerful hidden set of structures that ensure certain people are held highest and [systematically] come first: