Holes in the Safety Net: What Katrina Revealed About Social Justice

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Submitted by aclark on September 29, 2006 - 5:38pm.
We are in the midst of this panel,"Holes in the Safety Net...." I think we as a people, we as humans who live in the same space at this time in history... need to have a real conversation around race, class and poverty. I think this is what Katrina revealed. Not for New Orleans but for us as a country as a people. As an "other" in this country, we by default, learn about the majority. We need to learn from each other. It is the gumbo metaphor again. First, I ask you to read the message from the chair of Katrina at www.katrinsummit.uiuc.edu. A house divided.... Then I ask you to read an article written by Peggy McIntosh. It is called "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack". Check it out at http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html. Come back and let's talk.
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Posted on: September 29, 2006 - 6:06pm #1
Unpacking the Invisible
Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack . . . an excellent article. Paraphraising some thing I said earlier in the chat: I tend to think about the fact that whiteness is itself a racial identity, though we don't often identify it as such, and that this whiteness influences how we white people see things. A big danger in my humble opinion is when we don't realize this, and think that we're somehow seeing things from a "default" or "neutrual" or "without race" perspective. If someone else is "other" and we're "default" then we assume we aren't seeing the world through any particular filter, when we ARE. We have to know this filter is there before we can start to challenge how it affects our view.
Posted on: September 30, 2006 - 2:03pm #2
If I'm white, who am I?
I also suspect the racial category of "whiteness" deprives "whites" of any unique culture or identity. For example, Irish people who came to North America as an underclass eventually largely assimilated into the "melting pot" and became white. With all the privileges that come with the designation. And it seems only in america do we remember so little about where we came from, pretending we are part of one blended nation that is basically....white. Only not really, and we can't remain blind to this in the decades ahead. Change is coming, and we have to decide what kind of change it will be.