Thanks to rafter, michael, flick and others for making the effort to
introduce some good thinking on the topic of racism to us permies.
Here's my take on it: -
As a white man I am sure that, whether I want them or not and whether
I can see them clearly or not, I have been raised with racist beliefs
and patterns. Thus one of my current pieces of self-liberation work is
to explore how these destructive beliefs show up, how they were laid
in and how I can loosen their grip so that they do not interfere with
my capacity to create good designs that roll out well in diverse
cultures.
I have chosen to take what I see as a pretty logical stance on the
subject of myself and my oppressor beliefs and patterns. It goes like
this: - because I have been raised as a man I am bound to have hidden,
embedded oppressor patterns towards women (sexism); because I have
been raised as middle-class I am bound to have hidden, embedded
oppressor patterns towards working class people and people raised poor
and, further, to have internalized oppressions running around owning
class people (classism).
I also know that, as a man, I have been deeply oppressed by the
militarism, economic imperatives and emotional impoverishment that our
culture dishes out to us men.
It helps me a great deal to acknowledge these issues (and I did not
always have the sense to do this) because now I know that these
dysfunctional memes are hiding somewhere in my psyche I can go after
them in a systematic way and, bit by bit, eliminate their capacity to
corrode my integrity. Nowadays, instead of feeling bad about this
stuff, or wasting heaps of energy denying I have it, I feel positive
about my progress in facing up to it and stopping it running in my
life quite so much.
For me there is no way that I can expect to be truly effective in
facilitating widespread, integrative and constructive changes in the
world until I am ready to work on eliminating this nasty, de-
humanizing stuff.
I'm so glad to see this thread entering permaculture consciousness -
as Bill Mollison said, early in his permaculture career when asked how
he expected to transform the world's agriculture on his own, 'well,
now there's at least 3 of us'.
And, as for the hands-on bit, I am happy to share my (effective)
methods around understanding oppression and how to go about liberating
myself from being either a victim or a perpetrator ...