🔼: [[💡 Burdens 🪨#Legacy Burdens|🪨 Legacy Burdens]] # Racism Racism is almost always a [[🪨 Inherited Burdens|🪨 Legacy Burden]]. Typically it arises as a [[💡 Protector Parts|Protector]] who harbors racist beliefs and sometime says nasty things in our heads. Many of us are horrified by this, and our [[🛡️ Criticizing|🛡️ Critical Protectors]] force our racist parts to become [[💡 Protectors-in-Exile]], which only causes more inner and outer disharmony and more implicit racism as they become a part of [[💡 The Shadow]] -- which creates blind spots and keeps systemic racism going. >"I believe that you can’t grow up in a country with a long history of racism and not carry a racism [[💡 Burdens 🪨#Legacy Burdens|🪨 Legacy Burden]]. No matter our race, no matter how much anti-racism work we’ve done, we likely have a part who carries that burden. I love a story that Desmond Tutu tells about getting on a plane and feeling proud to see that there were two black pilots. However, during the flight, there was some technical trouble, and Tutu caught himself worrying that there wasn’t a white pilot! >That’s just to point out that racism is in all of us. I’ve done this practice with lots of people, and I find that even those who honestly aren’t aware of their own racism at first will find it if they are patient." >"...My parents were active in the civil rights movement and I’ve considered myself active or at least supportive of progressive movements all my life. Yet when I decided to work more directly on issues of racism, I found myself mortified to find a racist part inside of me. I’m not sure why, but it’s been one of the toughest parts for me to unburden, and I still get hits of it at times and have to gently counter that part’s impulses and beliefs. It’s so young and scared. I think it’s the same for a lot of people, and one of my goals here is to depolarize the discussion around racism in order to promote more openness and disclosure about what’s really going on inside of us." >- [[👤 Richard Schwartz]][^1] - [[🔑 We are all blameless]] – many of our ancestors were racist because western media portrayed people of color through minstrelsy (ie blackface and caricature), which continued on well after blackface was no longer politically fashionable. Instead, black actors were paid to portray themselves as the same caricatures. <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/l-w6luA54qU?feature=oembed" height="113" width="200" style="aspect-ratio: 1.76991 / 1; width: 100%; height: 100%;"></iframe> ###### Systemic Racism Systemic racism is structural. It abstracts and depersonalizes racism so that even people who have no ill will toward minorities can perpetuate racism just by doing using or participating in those systems or even just doing their jobs. You might compare it to working for a large corporation, like Amazon or Walmart or Coca Cola or Bank of America, which routinely screws people over or even commits crimes against humanity. Those corporations all have hundreds of thousands of employees who are all [[🔑 Everyone everywhere is doing their best all the time|🔑 doing their best]], and many of them either don't realize the problems they're contributing to or write it off as 'just doing my job'. ###### Related - [[🦮 How to Connect with Unkind Protectors]] - https://www.youtube.com/@GarrisonHayes [^1]: [[📖 🟢 No Bad Parts - Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model]]