1. I will therefore take the liberty here to use many of your terms to briefly describe the way I and my partner Tony Harris – seen here – work. I met Tony in my vagabond years when he invited me to counsel prisoners who were drug addicts. When my slideshow American Pictures became a success in Denmark I invited him over as the first of several blacks to help present it in 14 countries. When we started up in America in 1984 we found it necessary to follow up the show with a workshop the next day. The show has an enormous impact on American students who usually come out devastated and crying at the end. They need to process the guilt about their racism and are suddenly motivated to work on it – usually skipping all school classes to participate in our often day or two day long workshops.

2. In the workshops we don’t talk much about racism. We listen to the pain revealed by for instance a trembling voice and call the person up in front of the others and ask everybody to give the client their undivided loving attention while we ask questions very much like DISPUK about the hurts that person went through. Often when we narrow in on a problem there will be a catharsis – we call it a discharge – which often sets in motion a catharsis in many of the witnesses who realize they shared the same oppression. We always see the oppressor as a victim too and therefore – like DISPUK – externalize the problem. How often have we not asked the client to repeat with us: "I love my father, but I lost my father to racism."

3. At some point we usually divide people into groups in terms of shared oppressions. The biggest one is usually "children of alcoholics" and the second biggest "incest or rape victims". If such deeply hurt victims do not receive help we know they will in various involuntary ways project the pain out on others in the form of racist, sexist, homophobic, islamophobic thinking. So fighting racism means to help people externalize their deeper problems – not out on other groups, but on various oppressions by helping them to identify them and understand how they work.

10. As we get older we get more and more hurt by all kinds of experiences in life. And finally we become chronic distress patterns; we can only act out in ways defined by all this hurt here. We can’t think very well about things around us.

Americans for instance have been deeply hurt by fear living in a very violent society. So they end up voting for capital punishment which other societies would never even think of. We become rigid in our thinking. We loose flexibility – a flexible mind – as we grow older when we become weird and rigid in our ways. When challenged we will defend ourselves and give a structuralist answer: "That’s the way I am."　
No way. That is not the way we ARE. That is the way they have become oppressed to BECOME.

12. Well, probably very early in their upbringing they heard the prevailing narrative from their parents like "Niggers are dirty" or "Don’t play with those children down the road. They will stab you!"　
This is totally irrational and insane information for the open-minded, loving, zestful child we have in all societies to begin with. They don’t understand it. Children don’t see in color or sex or sexual preferential groups, ethnic groups or religious groups or whatever until we hurt them like this.

"Niggers are dirty." What does that statement really mean? I noticed in all the black homes I lived in that blacks certainly wash as much as whites do. I never got diseases like flees, craps, lice from them – only in white hippie homes :-)　 And children don’t stab each other. So both statements are totally irrational. The child doesn’t understand them.

19. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish anthropologist who was invited to America in the 1940’s to do a big study on American race relations, came to the conclusion that all Americans have these double standards; they hold on to these lofty ideals, but deep down in their guts they have developed the feelings that some people are not so equal as others. And they have never been able to reconcile this gap – the American Dilemma - as he called his groundbreaking work which proved the government the moral foundation for initiating civil rights laws.

So whenever we are around those people whom we basically feel are not as equal as others, we can only act out in guilt patterns towards them. And guilt, as American blacks or immigrants in Europe will tell you, is the worst form of racism. They can’t stand our patronizing attitudes. We more liberal racists, we constantly act out in guilt patterns without even knowing it when we are around blacks (or in Denmark Muslim immigrants).

21. So all the time she had been drilled with the dominant narrative that some people are not as equal as others. And she never understood that information. Her thinking machinery shut down and therefore she was trying to act out her pain. All children everywhere in the world are being oppressed and act out their pain in so many irrational ways in the eyes of their parents. And for her it came out – at least on a racial level – in these racist slurs. Under the impact of many blacks in the audience she had a catharsis when we helped her reclaim the father whom she had lost to racism.

23. But the overall and most devastating narrative students reveal in the workshops is faintly recalling when they were 2-3 years old driving with their parents. Suddenly when getting too close to some black neighbourhood they heard the door locks go down, click, click, or they were on the bus and when a black guy stepped on board, they felt their mother pull them a bit closer to her – not even knowing she sent that signal. When a child is oppressed with such hurtful information before they can rationally understand it, they are for ever after guided by fear towards blacks. When they themselves have children, it helps them to determine where they are going to live, go to school etc. I never blame these students for being racist since all Americans are. For I know that if they had been given the choice in childhood whether or not to become a racist, they would have chosen not to be. But they never had that choice.
 

26. So let me now talk about the oppression of black children in this society. Here the damage is far worse, of course. For they go through a double form of racism. The first one is the overt racism they are subject to from us. We now understand what that is, the unhealed anger from us they constantly perceive and feel wherever they go, the guilt and fear patterns they feel from you liberals, the narrative they hear and see all around.
All black children very early perceive that. They grow up on the wrong side of the tracks in the south. From day one they know that everything about them is wrong when they see themselves growing up in dilapidated housing and see whites living over there in nice homes and see the hostile glares of whites when they walk into the downtown sections of town and so on. Or they grow up on the south side of Chicago and see millions of blacks around them – never a white face – until they turn on the TV and they realize that whites are in power all over in this society. This is deeply damaging for the self-esteem of a black child.
But today this more overt racism is not the worst. No, there is another more vicious aspect to it called "internalized racism." What is that? Let me try to illustrate it: wherever in the world we have a group being oppressed, the members of that group will further internalize the views of their oppressors and help to further drag each other down in oppression, hurt each other and instil these values in each other.
 

....just like internalised sexism
 

27. Women know it all very well. As a result of sexist oppression women everywhere in the world are the best examples of people telling each other that the woman’s place is in the home, in the kitchen or has to go trough e.g. female circumcision. Throughout history they have been in collusion with their oppressor about not taking male power in society.

....just like internalised homophobia
 

27. Art Fischer in his lecture yesterday mentioned how often he has colluded with heterosexist oppression to save his life. I know what he is talking about since I am often called to speak in universities where there has just been homophobic attacks or even murder such as when Matthew was killed in Wyoming. As a result of a rape by a self-loathing black homosexual on my first day in America I became active in the gay liberation movement from the beginning in San Francisco – 5 years before Harvey Milk came out of the closet.

....just like internalised anti-Semitism
 

27. Sarah Bloomington I had stayed with when she was a top grade student in Harvard. She has since earned all kinds of honours as a professor in China, Russia and the USA. But when I travelled with her in Peru studying the Incas every night she would be crying. She was depressed about her crooked nose and convinced that her ”uglines” was the reason she never could find a boyfriend. ”But I love your nose, I would love to marry you!” I said. ”Yes,” but you’re already married,” she said and kept crying.

Her parents - both leading psychologists whose entire families were murdered by the Nazis - gave up using psychology on their daughter. Instead they gave her a very expensive nose operation. And, wow, the same summer with her new looks, she found and got married to a Jewish professor with exactly the same problem. I have seen many other American Jews spend fortunes to overcome how they for centuries have internalized our violent attacks on their identities in Europe. In spite all their American success they are still not free.

36. If your mind is tied up in these angry knots you are not doing very well in school. A black scholar, professor Harry Edwards from Berkeley, is on the college lecture circuit often speaking about when he first entered university. He was sitting there just staring at the text books, he couldn’t understand them. Finally one day he gave up and started crying and crying realizing he had no future now. Afterwards he took a look at the books again and now understood, "this is a white man’s text and I don’t have to agree with him." This is the mental block American blacks have towards anything associated with the oppressor in the same way for years women had mental blocks towards science and math associated with the male oppressor. By discharging Edwards now somehow loosened some of these tangles which started the process making him one day to a leading scholar. But perhaps the majority of young blacks these days do not get help with their emotional tangles and their anger increasingly leads them into prison.

37. So why am I saying 5% here? Because – and it is only one way of measuring it - it reflects the overall success rate of blacks in America for centuries. This is the white median family income in America. Here we put it at 100%. In relationship to that blacks now make only 56%.

And this is the only reason I say half over here on the diagram. There is not necessarily any correlation. When I first came to America it was 63%. Since then blacks have fallen behind. Basically this was the same share they had during slavery. At that time they didn’t receive money, but food, clothes, housing and so on and since most whites were poor then, economists have concluded that blacks pretty much had half the living standard of whites.

40. And therefore I will now present a narrative with more hope; namely by looking at those blacks in America who are making it; those who come from other societies and have not been shaped by our racism. They have to come from other societies, because all American blacks have been deeply shaped by our racism. I am especially talking about the blacks who came from the Caribbean, West Indian blacks. How well are they doing economically in relationship to this?

42. So why is it so easy for foreign blacks who come here to "make it up the latter" and not for American blacks? Most West Indian blacks are living in the area from Washington DC, New York, Hartford and up to Boston. Most of the top black positions in that area – or a great majority - are held by West Indian blacks. People like Colin Powell, former secretary of state.

A lot of the West Indian blacks live in Brooklyn in New York and if you as a white person walk in there, you immediately feel like you are in some Italian, Polish or Irish neighbourhood: you see clean streets, thriving business, hardly any on welfare, prod home ownership – West Indians are staunchly opposed to welfare – and more young people in college than are in prison. But then you walk into the native American black areas in Harlem, Bronx or other parts of New York and you immediately see the stereotypical white racist ghetto image we have in our white mind….of dirty streets, broken glass and litter in the streets, burned out stores. In many ghettos I go to these days, like Detroit, almost the only stores left in the ghetto are owned by outsiders. Up to 40% are on welfare and more young people are in prison than are in college. Now we start understanding the tremendous damage we are inflicting on American blacks.

43. In this new narrative we are not talking about race any more, for the blacks from the West Indies came from the same tribes in Africa as American blacks, they went through the same type of slavery - namely the Anglo-Saxon form which was vicious. But there was one important difference. And what was that difference?　 That their slavery ended 150 years ago, it never ended in America!

44. After slavery ended in the West Indies most of the whites left the islands. From now on the blacks could start recoup all that which was stripped from them in slavery, dignity, self-reliance and pride which the American black has never been allowed to recover again. Plus they started seeing black role models all over in their societies which is extremely important for the motivation of black children. So when - a century later - they come into this very racist society in America you can say that they come here as recovered human beings. Even though they operate in a very racist society they somehow can now use it as a vehicle for success. It doesn’t seem to hold them back. Haitians for instance, make a joke out of racist narrative about a "white protestant work ethic" with their "black catholic work ethic". For they typically hold both two and three jobs at the same time while going to school at night. That is of course the way they make it.

45. Let’s just play on anti-Semitism here for a second to get a better understand of this. "Black Jews" – what does that mean? Here we are playing on the notion that Jews are successful in business because West Indians own and control most of the business in the black ghetto in Hartford. Also in New York City you see this. Whenever you walk into banks in New York and see black employees, ask them if they are from the West Indies….and you will see that it is usually the case. They are very successful in the financial world. So you see we are here really playing on anti-Semitism, the worldwide narrative about "Jews being successful in business".

46. So what happened to the Jews over the last 2000 years? Well, again and again they were forced to flee into foreign countries; often invited by the kings or rulers to make up an entering wedge between the rulers up here (showing on graph) and the masses down here. A low level anti-Semitic propaganda was kept alive all the time so if rebellion suddenly broke out in the masses against the rulers up here, they could manipulate the anger of the masses out against the Jews instead of against the real oppressors in society. And thus the Jews were forced into pogroms or Holocaust or forced to flee into new countries. Their sad history is well known. Then rulers in the new countries would invite them – again only to abuse them the same way as entering wedges. Often the only jobs they were allowed to hold in those days were in the financial world which is how one aspect of the anti-Semitic narrative comes from.

48. Now I am going to show something very interesting. There are 41 million blacks in America. Out of those only 800.000 are West Indians. In other words, they make up only 2% of all African-Americans. But one thing both I and Tony Harris were astonished to learn in our workshops in the most elitist schools was that up to 85% of the black students in these Harvard-league schools - where the grades or SAT scores are very high - are of West Indian descent - or have one parent who is West Indian. They make up only 2% of the black population out there and yet are totally overrepresented in higher education.
 

50. So that raises the question: what are we as whites doing to our native American blacks to so effectively screen them away from a good education and thus from high paying jobs and positions? Why is it so hard for the 98% native blacks to make it into Harvard, Yale, Stanford etc when it is so easy for blacks from very poor countries to do it? This is the damage our racism is inflicting on American blacks. Until this minute most of us had learned the negative narrative about blaming the victim for failing. We all knew it was happening, but somehow found all these structuralist rationalizations for it - that this was due to some inherent inferiority in blacks and so on. Now we see it is entirely the result of OUR oppression. We now understand that this has nothing to do with race or skin color, for West Indians are even blacker than American blacks since they were not so mixed up with our white forefathers.

My black partner, Tony Harris, usually says something I can’t say: "We blacks are ALL mentally ill." The narrative I just presented in this model is the only one I know which can lift them out of their permanent depression caused by their feelings of inferiority and not belonging. But it gives whites just as much hope.

The curve of racism
 

Racism = Prejudice + (social) power

Such a hateful language against whites I often hear referred to as “reverse racism”. “The blacks are just as racist as us,” they say. No, this is internalized racism. Let me describe it. You have a black man in America walking cheerful down the street. A white man comes up and slaps him in the face. He keeps walking. Another white comes up and slaps him in the face. By the sight of the third or fourth white man the black will raise his arms to protect himself and after a while this reflex becomes internalized at the sight of any white. One day it will then change to a clenched fist and may turn into criminal anger or even terrorism. It took three centuries to create this internalized racism in American blacks. It took just one generation to create the similar response in immigrants in Denmark. But it is not racism, for racism means to have power to affect the life of the target group. American blacks and Danish Muslims have of course prejudice against us as oppressors, but they have no power to, say, force us to do bad in the school system. What happens if all blacks or Danish Muslims really hated us? The only power they have is to give us a little fear, but how do we deal with that? Fear is just some emotional stuff and we can just move further away from those we fear. Or we can pay our way out of it by going to the shrink….yes, by trying to externalize the whole problem in DISPUK But what happens if we don’t like them? Well, then we end up discriminating them in education, health, housing and especially jobs. They have to come to us for all those tangible things. This creates tremendous pain if you don’t have equal access to those things and this they can’t pay their way out of some emotional trouble in DISPUK. Because part of the problem is that we make them poor with our racism. No, reverse racism you can't have in a country where whites are solidly on top. Black Americans or brown Danes do not have the power to force white children behind in school. But I found such a situation down in Costa Rica. In the 1870'es - after slavery ended in the West Indies, Trinidad and Barbados - the freed slaves came over to work for the United Fruit on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica. Little by little they started buying up small plots of land and by the 1930'es many of them had become fairly affluent landowners. At that time we saw a migration of poor whites up from the highlands of Costa Rica to look for work out there in the Limon province. So suddenly we see a reverse situation in which black employers are giving work to poor whites. And once such a system of oppression has been set up it tends to get worse just like we have seen it in America between blacks and whites. So what you see there now today is something which has really astonished me. When I sat around with these affluent, cultured and extremely conservative blacks and listened to their narrative - well, listen to what they are saying about those poor whites, they have to hire: "When I meet two whites at night, I immediately cross over to the other side of the street." or "Whites are prone to violence, whites carry knives, whites will backstab you. Don't ever trust whites." or the best one is "Whites are oversexed. Whites have got too much sexual drive."

So what happens to the poor white children in that society down there, who are forced to internalize all these negative narratives of them. Well, they fall behind in the school system. The blacks often make it up to university; the whites don't make it, fall behind, stay back on the plantations or go to prison. As I said, once a system of oppression has been established, it tends to get worse and worse. The blacks have now become so rich that they do the same as the rich all over Latin America. They send their children to be educated in the United States and there they often come up and tell me about this when they participate in my workshop. Up here they have become a part of the successful West Indian community. In fact, you can hardly any longer see this reverse relationship in Costa Rica because most of these rich blacks end up staying in the USA after studying here 


When I asked black parents in Costa Rica "What do you hope for your children?" they usually answered "I hope my son will become a lawyer, a doctor etc."  If I asked white parents, they usually said something like "I hope they will survive." This is the complete reversal of parental expectation in America. So this is a system of reverse oppression and it is extremely important narrative to tell my students in America – both black and white – to make them understand that the problem is not race or skin color, but oppression. Until I tell them this they despaired. They did the same mistake as the frog sitting in the bottom of the well here (showing a ring). They looked up at the sky up there and concluded: "The sky is no bigger than the opening of the well."  They had no better information in a racist society, so they came to a structuralist conclusion that "this is the way blacks are, this is the way whites are." What I just did here was to show you a little bit of the sky which was denied them in their upbringing. That is why I can never blame any American for being racist, for they had no better information.

Yes, how really could WE avoid becoming racist?
See here how I became one myself:

Case stories