Racism: What It Is and How to Deal with It - Uned

A Guide to Talking about Racism | 30
2.4. Racism: Maintaining privileges and power
Because of this, one of the most important consequences of understanding what a
racist or xenophobic mechanism is must involve acknowledging the privileges that
some of us have over others because we belong to groups that are considered to be
better or worse by society (see Activity 1. Invisible privileges in everyday life). If we
compare our trajectory in life to a race, it is as if we become conscious of the fact that
we do not all begin at the same starting line: the privileges of some and the initial
disadvantages of others place some of us in an advantageous position and others
farther behind with respect to this starting line which is the attempt to reach a specific
objective in life. In addition, our personal merits also intervene, afterwards. The
privileges and disadvantages that we acquire by using racism as an argument are
previous to personal merits and capabilities, and they place us invisibly ahead or
behind with respect to the starting line, because we do not acknowledge them. This is
because racist arguments allow us to assume and make everyone else believe that
we are all starting out from the same place, that we all have the same opportunities,
they act unconsciously, from the hidden mass of the iceberg.
When we deal with the world of school, work, economy, health, etc., the conditions
are not the same for everyone nor do we all have the same opportunities: we do not
all have the same possibilities of success in school, we do not all have access to the
same job positions.
This might be a good time to return to the questions that we formulated earlier, to
relate the direct or visible manifestations of racist mechanisms, such as insults,
physical aggression, ridicule, contempt, nastiness, or hate, to other more indirect and
invisible ones, such as colonialism, inequality, generalizations, undervaluing, in
addition to clarifying when, how, and why we can describe behavior as racist or
xenophobic. We propose the following explanation: behavior is racist or xenophobic
when the objective is to justify an unequal distribution of privileges, based on the
attribution of real or imaginary differences. This unequal distribution which assigns
privileges to some and initial disadvantages to others, is based on the merits or
demerits associated with the differences that we attribute to each of the groups. In
other words, using another metaphor, it is a way of cheating in society, crossing the
starting line a few seconds before the starting signal, and no one can catch you,
because the victim is always blamed for the disadvantage.