A Quote by Steven Biko
The fact that apartheid has been tied up with white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, and deliberate oppression makes the problem much more complex. Material want is bad enough, but coupled with spiritual poverty, it kills.
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…“white supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e slavery, apartheid) than the term “internalized racism”- a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term “white supremacy” enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise “white supremacist control” over other black people.
Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake. If material poverty is to be avoided, spiritual poverty is to be abhorred. For it is spiritual poverty, not material lack, that lies at the core of all human suffering.
If we're united, I wouldn't care about a White school board getting me a little something. The hell with the school board; that's the White supremacy board and the White supremacy board wants you reading stupid books rooted in the idea of White supremacy. I don't want a thing to do with White supremacy.
For years now, I've been talking about the rise of the extreme right in the U.S. Since 9/11, white nationalists have killed more Americans on U.S. soil than any foreign or domestic terrorist group combined. It's something we don't categorize as terrorism or extremism. We often brush it off as mental illness - things like Oak Creek Wisconsin - and these people are certainly tied to white supremacy, have written manifestos. We've got a major problem in not calling that terrorism.
White nationalism is in fact white supremacy. It's understandable that white supremacists would want to be called nationalists, but that doesn't make them any less supremacist.
The problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.
Why do people think the spiritual life demands withdrawal from the ordinary? Because they've been taught, at least by implication, that the physical is a block to the spiritual. When we assume that the spiritual, unlike the physical, is impervious to corrosion, then we assume that all things material are not to be honored. But the fact of the matter is, the material is the vehicle of the spiritual.
On certain continents poverty is more spiritual than material, a poverty that consists of loneliness, discouragement, and the lack of meaning in life.
More than this, even in those white men who professed religion we found much inconsistency of conduct. They spoke much of spiritual things, while seeking only the material.
All talks about legacies of white supremacy must be tied to empowering the lives of poor and working people as a whole. The black agenda - from Frederick Douglas to A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr, Fannie Lou Hammer to Ella Baker - has always been tied to race talk inseparable from expanding possibilities of democracy, expanding empowerment of everyday people.
Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual, spiritual, and moral problem.
As the country has become more diverse, not just states like California and New York, but throughout the nation, it's no coincidence that we have seen a resurgence of white supremacy and violent extremism. And history's clear: voter suppression is rooted in white supremacy.
It was with the Industrial Revolution, as society plunged ever more eagerly into the conquest of material riches and bent all its energies to the accumulation of goods, that material poverty became a major problem. Obviously, this meant abandonment or downgrading of spiritual values, virtue, etc. To share or not to share in the increase of the collective wealth-this was the Number One question. It was the desire to acquire wealth that prompted the poor to start fighting.
If we ask for more and more material for the construction, i.e. more and more choice, we're likely to end up with a lot of combinations that don't do much for us or are far more complex than they need to be.
We're all in the race game, so to speak, either consciously or unconsciously. We can overtly support white-supremacist racial projects. We can reject white supremacy and support racial projects aimed at a democratic distibution of power and a just distribution of resources. Or we can claim to not be interested in race, in which case we almost certainly will end up tacitly supporting white supremacy by virtue of our unwillingness to confront it. In a society in which white supremacy has structured every aspect of our world, there can be no claim to neutrality.
Something is amiss, deeply wrong, something is deeply wrong with the way we're living our lives collectively, with the way we are creating our collective experience on earth. And we are coming to the conclusion that the problem after all is not political, that the problem after all is not economic, that the problem after all cannot be solved with bombs or missiles or bullets, but that the problem in fact is spiritual, that the problem with the world today is as it has always been, a problem of our most basic beliefs. Without a doubt it`s a spiritual awakening and a spiritual revolution.
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