On my run today, I listened to this excellent, revelatory podcast, entitled “Race Traitor: Who Taught You To Be White?” the first of a miniseries, from The Heart, a community of writers, radio makers, and artists committed to radical feminist artmaking. I highly recommend it.
And I also recommend this article on the history of the concept of race from Aeon and how race is a late-medieval invention that was seized upon by the modern scientific community to further a racist agenda.
“There are no biological races, and attempts to define race socially inflate the category beyond recognition. Races are not modern, because races do not exist.”
I first learned about the history of the invention of race in this mind-boggling and essential podcast which I’ve recommended before and can’t recommend enough: Seeing White.
Here’s the description from the Scene on Radio website:
Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it’s an old story.
Why? Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?
Scene on Radio host and producer John Biewen took a deep dive into these questions, along with an array of leading scholars and regular guest Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika, in this fourteen-part documentary series, released between February and August 2017
Buon giorno! Jenny.
I am looking for your video you posted of the black professor I believe from Albany who talked about how to be actively involved not passively in racial protests. The white guy put his hand on the pole so the police or whomever wouldn’t stun the woman who had climbed it. If you have a moment could you forward me the link. I am so sorry to bother you about this but I have searched and searched and it is such an important message.
Thank you for all your doing!
Arrivederci,
Deborah Hobbins
Hi Deborah, here’s the short clip https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4804332/user-clip-conspirators but you can see the whole thing if you google Bettina Love, Schomberg Center. She’s awesome. We should all read her book.