All the material in Module 1 was thought-provoking, and a lot of it stunning and horrifying. I've seen plenty of statistics about the USA's practice of imprisoning SO MANY people, and obviously, it's mostly about locking up people of color. Wow, 78% of males of color. But this video and the others show a compelling picture of how all these forces are interrelated: imprisonment, for example, has a much wider effect on the rest of the marginalized communities of color, too. For example, the THREAT of imprisonment, or worse, hangs over Blacks in the USA at every turn, whether it's making a lane change without a turn signal, or bird-watching in the park, or jogging -- any of which can cost someone their life. So that's what puts the ORDER in Law & Order.
But the way all the individual limitations and oppressions work together to form one whole, inescapable, intractable Whole System is when their effects become so awesomely horrific and relentless. There's nowhere to turn to escape it. Wearing black skin in our culture is like wearing the star of David in the Third Reich: immediately all the combined forces of suspicion, coercion, hostility, ostracism, denial of due process, due respect and protection all team up at every turn.
This helps me to see my white privilege, which I so take for granted that it just seems nonexistent to me -- it seems normal to me. But the contents in Module 1 -- though I've seen all this stuff before -- being presented all in a short period, in a few hours focused on just these issues, really help to illuminate what the truth is. The White systems of oppression, like the "adoption" that's really abduction of the children of the indigenous people, function as they're designed and intended to function, systemically and irresistably. With deniability . . .
