Race Relations and Asymmetry of Power: Looking at examples of majority-minority (or invader-invaded) relations outside familiar contexts might illuminate your assumptions about race relations. The invisible elephant in the room of this discussion is the historic asymmetry of power between majority and minority populations. Apply these basic protocols to examples far from American racial divides to tear the veil away from majoritarian assumptions about race relations that fail to address issues about power and how redressing historic injustice without redistributing power leaves that injustice in place:
1. Majority populations assume institutions are trusted and neutral. Minority populations know they aren’t.
2. Majority populations assume easy entry to understanding minority narratives. Minority populations see this as tone-deaf empathy-free arrogance.
3. Majority populations get defensive (“censor myself”) when told the minority population gets to control narrative and words with power.
4. Majority populations claim victimization by snowflakes when told to listen to minority population narratives. Minority populations rightfully view majorities who defensively complain about “self-censorship” as the real snowflakes.
Understand these four points by leaving the familiar American setting of black vs white or Hispanic vs Anglo. Majority vs minority, war between empire-building invader vs the indigenous invaded, enslavement or genocide is the modus operandi of humanity’s entire post-Neolithic history. Take a tour through our species’ blood-soaked history to acquire the detachment required to answer these questions:
1. Should Armenians listen to Turks about responsibility for the Armenian genocide or vice-versa? The absurdity with which the question is framed shows how the question answers itself.
2. Should we listen to Catalans and Basques or the Spaniards and the French to get the story of linguistic repression?
3. Should Estonians and Latvians listen to Russians or vice versa?
4. Should we listen first to Native Americans, north and south, about Europe’s lethal Columbian Exchange, or to American descendants of immigrants celebrating Thanksgiving’s myth of consensual colonization?
5. Should the descendants of the 18th century slave trader Edward Colston, whose statue was dumped into Bristol harbor, listen first to the descendants of the slaves, or vice versa?
6. To tell the story of Japan’s murderous rampage through East Asia, should we listen first to Japanese or Koreans? Japanese or Chinese? Japanese or Indonesians?
7. Should Japan’s atomic bomb victimhood belong to the narrative of WWII? If you don’t know whether we should ask the Japanese or ask the Chinese and Koreans first, we need to talk.
8. Should the bombing of Dresden belong to the Germans’ narrative of WWII? If so, can a German be trusted to tell and contextualize it?
9. To tell the story of the Soviet Gulag, should we listen first to a Russian or a Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Pole, Karelian, Chechen, Jew or Armenian?
10. Was the Soviet regime led by a Georgian psychopath and gangster an equal opportunity murderer, or was there a majority-minority component to Stalin's murderous paranoia?
These are complex and tricky questions that require careful distinctions and nuance, not loaded terms like “identity politics” and “snowflakes”.
For example, to tell the story of majority-minority relations in the 1700 years since Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, who gets to talk first about Christian civilization’s progression from forced conversion to ghettos, to the kidnapping of baptized Jewish children and pogroms to gas chambers, Jews or Christians? Who has a moral obligation to listen before talking?
If this question makes you uncomfortable, we need to talk. If you’re more ready to tell what you know before finding out what you don’t know, we need to talk even more. https://medium.com/p/59d81024c153/edit
