Being an agent for change

There was a profile of Horace Seldon, the founder of Community Change, Inc. in the paper today.  The mission of Community Change is to educate the public on institutional racism.  Something that Seldon said about the way people view discrimination I thought was right on target: 

"Seldon says the eagerness to use President-elect Obama as a sign of a post-racial society reflects people's misunderstanding about the causes of racism. 'Most white people still think of racism in terms of individual feelings and acts of prejudice and discrimination,' Seldon says. 'It's a much broader, institutional . . . problem than that. That kind of problem doesn't go away quickly.' "

To me that's useful not only in thinking about how tenacious these problems are, but also (especially as a teacher) thinking about how the way in which people perceive these issues "in terms of individual feelings and acts" winds up making discrimination an "us vs. them" issue rather than something which needs to unite people in combating it.  That attitude comes up most frequently for me when I teach Feminism.  A majority of students who sign up for such a course, I find, are women who have suffered from discrimination in a personal relationship.  I would not want to deny that the "personal is political," and that their individual stories are instances of sexism.  But then what I generally find happening is that most of them resist making the step into thinking of sexism as an institutional problem.  They use the context of feminism to view themselves as victims of a particular person (who becomes the villainous oppressor--the male chauvinist pig) and want to use the class as a gripe session.  And when they enter into a better personal relationship--feminism is forgotten.  I also used to see this a lot when I was a student and joined consciousness raising groups.  I sometimes thought of these people as "foul-weather feminists."  If instead one can take the personal story and think about how it's an instance of something much larger and ongoing of which individuals in the higher status group (in this case, men) are also negatively affected, I think it's not only empowering, but also helps one think in terms of forgiveness for whatever personal discrimination one has suffered. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Address at Seneca Falls," put what I'm trying to say above much more succinctly and elegantly:

"God, in his wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length..."

The profile of Seldon is here: "An agent for change"

I also took a peek at Seldon's blog, and one of his essays on "Guilt, Shame, and Responsibility" was a somewhat different take on some of the same issues: horaceseldon.com.