Tag Archives: White Privilege

A Government of, by, and for the people?

By Bobbie Kirkhart

Pho­to Cred­it: “Unit­ed States Capi­tol” by Phil Roed­er is licensed under CC BY 2.0

We Amer­i­cans har­bor a huge dichoto­my in our atti­tudes toward our coun­try. We dis­play our patri­o­tism in bor­der­line chau­vin­is­tic man­ner, play­ing the nation­al anthem before every major sport­ing event, and church ser­vices fre­quent­ly include impas­sioned praise of our nation and some­times pro­mote the idea that loy­al­ty to god must include equal loy­al­ty to the country.

We Amer­i­cans, myself includ­ed, love our coun­try. It’s sur­pris­ing that many of my fel­low cit­i­zens hate our gov­ern­ment. It’s a pejo­ra­tive to call some­one a politi­cian. Can­di­dates for office who have no gov­ern­ment expe­ri­ence proud­ly run as ‘out­siders’ and often eas­i­ly win a seat. Amer­i­cans do not rec­og­nize pop­u­lar pub­lic pro­grams as gov­ern­ment cre­at­ed and spon­sored by Wash­ing­ton. I’ve heard more than once the demand, “Keep gov­ern­ment out of my Medicare,” which is, of course, a gov­ern­ment pro­gram. Pres­i­dent Ronald Rea­gan was cheered when he told us, “Gov­ern­ment is not the solu­tion to our prob­lem, gov­ern­ment is the prob­lem.” Amer­i­cans per­ceive cor­rect­ly that the gov­ern­ment does not rep­re­sent all the people.

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A Call for 60s-Style Teach-ins on Anti-Racism

By Sabrina Völz

 

Pho­to Cred­it: “DSC8902 – The Ele­phant in the Room” by damienconway30

Let’s start off with a few telling facts: The ori­gin of the word “racism” stems from the French word racisme which appeared dur­ing the last decades of the 19th cen­tu­ry. In Eng­lish, how­ev­er, accord­ing to the Mer­ri­am Web­ster Dic­tio­nary, “Racism appears to be a word of recent ori­gin, with no cita­tions cur­rent­ly known that would sug­gest the word was in use pri­or to the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.” Now, let that sink in. The peo­ple at Web­ster are also quick to point out that just because the word is “fair­ly new” doesn’t mean that “the con­cept of racism did not exist in the dis­tant past.” No won­der we – and with we, I mean all soci­eties – have a prob­lem with racism. So let’s get to the root of it and root it out.

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