Title: “An Inescapable Network of Mutuality”: Martin Luther King’s Ecological Thought | Pray With Your Feet
Headings: “An Inescapable Network of Mutuality”: Martin Luther King’s Ecological Thought
“An Inescapable Network of Mutuality”: Martin Luther King’s Ecological Thought
“A Single Garment of Destiny”
Interconnectedness and Ecology
Individualism and Systemic Racism
Are you racist? 'No' isn't a good enough answer - Marlon James | Comment is Free

Content: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres observe that both liberals and conservatives endorse this same metanarrative: “ [ S]trategists on both the left and right, despite their differences, converge on the individual as the unit of power.” So many responses of Whites to anti-racism advocacy assume that racism is an individual phenomenon, not a collective phenomenon. Racism is understood by them to be a characteristic of individuals and manifesting as individual expressions of racist beliefs, like a White person calling a Black person the N-word. And this is why so many White people respond to ant-racism advocacy by saying, “I’m not a racist.” But such responses really miss the point. We can debate whether or not you, or any other individual, has implicit racial bias, but the real elephant in the room is systemic racism. Michelle Alexander explains in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness: “As a society, our collective understanding of racism has been powerfully influenced by the shocking images of the Jim Crow era and the struggle for civil rights.