Racism and power In the 1970s the US academic circles studying racial relations and racism suggested a very simple formula to explain racism: Racism = Prejudice + Power. This equation has been contested since then by some, but what this idea rightfully does is to put power in the conversation about racism. What does it mean? It means that it is not enough to have a bias against someone, but it is also important to explore what the power relations between the groups are you both come from. This is extremely valuable, as it also allows to look at racism not just as an occurrence in the interpersonal encounters between two people, but to unravel it as a structural problem that is omnipresent in our societies.
What is power? To put it simply, power is the capacity to make rules in our environment and make decisions, including those about how resources are distributed and who can have access to them. To quote civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, “Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change‌â€?. In his words we see that one needs to have power to not only shape how our society works, but also to change it when we have evidence that it is not fair or just. On societal level power has different dimensions: Political power in representative democracies would determine who has the capacity (e.g. enough members of parliament) to pass a law. The theory of representative democracy implies that the representative body (e.g. parliament, city council) will mirror the representation of society. Alas, this is very rarely true. Racial and ethnic minorities are largely underrepresented in decision-making bodies across the world, regardless of what percentage of the population they take. As a rule, women which naturally represent more than 50% of every given country population, are widely unrepresented in power structures: as of 2019 in only two countries of the world female members of parliament are a greater number than men. LGBTI people also struggle to make fair representation even if some breakthroughs have been recently made (e.g. as of 2020 openly gay
Constellations . A manual for working with young people on the topic of racism and invisible racism
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