Everything Is About Race

The Harvard Crimson ^ | 4/5/2016

[Altura Ct.]

“Don’t make this about race.”

I’ve heard this sentence a lot recently, read it a lot online. Saw its use launch a Facebook flame war while I waited for my plane to board at the end of spring break. It’s the easiest way for white people to invalidate experiences of oppression and avoid fraught debates about justice in America.

But of course it’s about race—everything is. Our country was built on oppression, and race is everywhere, at every moment on my standard trip back to Harvard.

The view from my airplane window is about race. Colonizers killed Indigenous people for those tidy plots of farmland. We profited from those fields by exploiting and terrorizing slaves. We rejected demands for land return and reparations, compounding racist domination based on the pretext of “free market” capitalism, and we devised new ways to produce and preserve systemic injustice. It is impossible to separate the wealth that paid for my plane ticket from structural oppression. When I land at Logan, it’s about race.

Sometimes, my uncle picks me up at the airport, and we drive into Cambridge on the Central Artery. The Central Artery is also about race. Its construction tore Chinatown apart in the 1950s and ‘60s. Land that was home to generations of low-income Chinese immigrants—who lived there because they were unwelcome in more desirable parts of Boston—was seized through eminent domain. Blocks of affordable homes were demolished, and more than a thousand residents were forced from the neighborhood. The Central Artery also severed present-day Chinatown from those who lived east of Interstate 93, dividing a whole community. Then, when the Massachusetts Turnpike followed in the 1960s and ‘70s, it further isolated the neighborhood from immigrants living to the south.

In combination with luxury high-rise developments, these infrastructure projects slashed away at affordable housing. This is not race-neutral. City officials knew these incursions would do irreparable damage, but the marginalized people of Chinatown had little political power. Today, low-income Chinese immigrants can no longer afford to pay rent in Chinatown. They represent less than half of present-day residents. A neighborhood that was built many years ago by people like them, for people like them, isn’t theirs anymore. That’s about race.

If my uncle can’t get off work, I take the Silver Line to South Station, then the Red Line to Harvard Square. The Silver Line’s about race, too. In the 1960’s, protests broke out in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and the South End when Boston started razing homes for another highway project. The people of color who inhabited these neighborhoods, primarily Black and Latino, knew their livelihoods and communities would never have come under such existential threat if they were rich and white. They forced the city to halt construction, but the deal stripped majority-Black Roxbury of its Orange Line access to the MBTA. The city promised to replace it, but residents are still relegated to the inefficient and unreliable buses of the Silver Line. Whether it’s retribution or negligence, that’s about race.

Right off the T station in Harvard Square, the benches on Mass. Ave are partitioned. Handrails also divide the benches at Trinity Church and Jamaica Pond, and solar panels segment flashy new seats in Central Square. This is hostile architecture. These narrowly spaced partitions—like concrete spikes on highway medians and iron studs on sidewalks—exist to keep people from lying down when they have no place else to sleep. Hostile architecture is designed to repel the homeless and others who “loiter” in public spaces. The majority of America’s homeless are people of color, the denial of economic opportunity is a function of structural oppression, and the fear that justifies hostile architecture is predicated on highly racialized stereotypes. These benches are also about race.

America’s wealth and power is derived from the violence of genocide and human bondage. We reify white supremacy through exclusion, eviction, and eminent domain, and we reinforce white supremacy by denying it. We say, “Not everything is a race issue. Don’t make this about race.” But Harvard exists on this land because of race, I pay for plane tickets because of race, and I get here on the Silver Line or by the Central Artery because of race.

Because in a country built on oppression, everything is about race. Including the benches.

[House Atreides]

BULLCRAP!!

[baltimorepoet]

My foot up his #*$ will be about race... race to see how far my foot can go. Morons.

[Roman_War_Criminal]

Boring and sophomoric.
Every nation has a race. If what they say is true, then everything done in every nation that is better than its neighboring nations is “racist”.

[ButThreeLeftsDo]

The female finalist on American Idol had better win tonight.

Just sayin’...

[PAR35]

They whine if you build a transportation corridor through their neighborhood, and they whine if you build it away from their neighborhood. You can’t win, so you shouldn’t even try to please the race baiters.

This story does remind me of one left wing idea I think I like. Let’s expropriate the endowment funds of the big universities - for the children, of course.

[VanDeKoik]

Tensions are already high among the special snowflakes due to that GAP ad.

[LongWayHome]

Read the comments under the article....great stuff. This little beta-puke is getting roasted.

[Roman_War_Criminal]

Afro and all or else

[doldrumsforgop]

BS.

Have you ever seen Cruz use his Hispanic heritage that way?

Money is what it is all about.

Ask Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton or Planned Parenthood aborting black babies. Think they care a whit about race?

It is simply a means to an end.

[ButThreeLeftsDo]

Didn’t see it.

Enlighten me.

[ifinnegan]

This is stuff that used to be only in communist papers like Revolutionary Worker back in the 70’s and 80’s.

Now it’s mainstream.

[dfwgator]

Assuming this writer is white, may I suggest him putting his money where his mouth is, and kill himself.

[Jim Noble]

It’s not bullcrap, mein freund.

The 20th century was the century of ideology, The 21st century will be the century of the blood.

You may not be interested in race. But race is most definitely interested in you.

[dfwgator]

I pity from the bottom of my heart any nation or body of people that is so unfortunate as to get entangled in the net of slavery. I have long since ceased to cherish any [spirit]] of bitterness against the Southern white people on account of the enslavement of my race.

No one section of our country was wholly responsible for its introduction, and, besides, it was recognized and protected for years by the General Government. Having once got its tentacles fastened on to the economic and social life of the Republic, it was no easy matter for the country to relieve itself of the institution. Then, when we rid ourselves of prejudice, or racial feeling, and look facts in the face, we must acknowledge that, notwithstanding the cruelty and moral wrong of slavery, the ten million Negroes inhabiting this country, who themselves or whose ancestors went through the school of American slavery, are in a stronger and more hopeful condition, materially, intellectually, morally, and religiously, than is true of an equal number of black people in any other portion of the globe.

This is so to such an extend that Negroes in this country, who themselves or whose forefathers went through the school of slavery, are constantly returning to Africa as missionaries to enlighten those who remained in the fatherland. This I say, not to justify slavery — on the other hand, I condemn it as an institution, as we all know that in America it was established for selfish and financial reasons, and not from a missionary motive — but to call attention to a fact, and to show how Providence so often uses men and institutions to accomplish a purpose.

-Booker T. Washington

[Da Coyote]

Does one wonder why Harvard STEM students have an IQ average about 50 IQ points above that of the quota baby idiots being let in the door?

Yup, the colleges were the first to have open admission borders and the walking jokes you see there now are the result.

There Is but one way to deal with them.

It is not a pleasent way, but such is life.

[dfwgator]

Or as Muhammad Ali said, “Thank God my Grandaddy Got on that Boat.”

[2ndDivisionVet]

Activities: PBHA’s Small Claims Advisory Service, Queer Students and Allies, writing for The Crimson (and reading Renegade), giving tours for the company with the straw hats

Interests/Hobbies: Reading, social justice, running at night and in the rain, politics, queer stuff, sub-Saharan Africa, cityscapes, the Peters projection map, and cookies

Hottest Cause: Intersectionality and inclusion in queer orgs

Summer Plans: Promoting BGLTQ+ representation in public office at the Victory Institute in DC, living with friends, and eating lots of Ethiopian food

Favorite Metro Location: My grandparents’ house

Your Life (in a gchat status): Not sure…

Novel that you’d recommend: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Short Bio

Ted (he/him/his) is a rising sophomore in Quincy House from Raleigh-Durham, NC. He’ll probably study a social science but doesn’t know which one. Ted thinks a lot about social justice and politics – particularly intersectional, inclusive LGBTQ equality – and sub-Saharan Africa. He likes reading, flailing his hands in excitement, and tossing his luscious locks in the wind.

Activities: Undergraduate Council, Consent Advocates and Relationship Educators (CARE), Eating Concerns Hotline and Outreach (ECHO), Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program (UMRP), Institute of Politics (IOP), College Diversity and Inclusion Working Group, PBHA Keylatch Mentors, Asian American Christian Fellowship (AACF), Progressive Asian and Pacific Islander Alliance (PAPIA)

[IronJack]

Our country was built on oppression

Yeah, like the "oppressed" little snowflake (or is that racist?) who wrote this claptrap. I know I didn't go to Harvard. My sons won't go to Harvard. Nor my daughters. Nor anyone in my family, despite the fact that we've all worked pretty hard for the last 5 generations.

So tell me, Mr. Victim, what did YOU have to do to get into Harvard? Be black?

[aquila48]

I think the way to solve the race problems is separation, a friendly no fault divorce. Each race goes its own way that way to never be mixed again - problem fixed.

(by the way when people talk about race problem they actually mean the black race vs all the other races. Yellows and whites get along reasonably well. The cause of the problem can be found in “the bell curve”)