Have you ever been to an integral event? Workshops near Boulder, Colorado? Or ILP sessions in San Francisco or New York? Or Integral Leadership in Action in Texas? Or the Integral Theory Conference in Concord, California? I have not been to all of those, but I have been to enough to hear myself wondering, “Where are the people of color?” This is not a new experience. I had the same question when I attended the Organization Development Network conference, World Futures Conferences, or coach training events. In all of these cases I wondered how we, as thought and practice leaders around development and change, were isolated from the perspectives people of color might bring. Even more, it made me wonder about how we were dealing with the phenomena of oppression. Many of us were involved in the Civil Rights Movement (I am showing my age) or activities involved with opening opportunities to women or gay rights. Some have gone to other nations to work as Peace Corps Volunteers or with Habitat for Humanity or Doctors without Borders or similar organizations that offer support to those in poverty or suffering under economic and political oppression. But I have seen little energy for confronting such oppression since the anti-war movement in the Vietnam era.

My wife, Jeannie, has a passion for addressing the problems of oppressed people. She consistently stands with the working class in economic and political issues. And she has more recently been concerned with the cause of the Tohono O’Odham tribe in Arizona. It seems that efforts to fortify the border with Mexico has channeled would be immigrants through some of the most naturally dangerous land in the Southwest. More and more, would be immigrants are dying on the Tohono O’Odham reservation. Furthermore, the construction of fences through the reservation and along the border with Mexico is blocking the historic paths between family members in the tribe, some of whom live on the Mexican side of the border. Fifteen minute journeys now take hours, 150 miles each way. The US Government has issued cards of passage to the Mexican Tohono O’Odham tribe members, but this does not address the issues raised by fortifying the border.

In fact, the Tohono O’Odham reservation, the product of a treaty with the Tohono O’Odham Nation and the US government after the US and Mexico divided the tribe, is now an occupied land. Border patrols and Immigration and Naturalization Service agents roam the reservation’s lands and block the roads on the reservation. Members of the tribe have been assaulted by government agents. And the Nation, itself, is divided. Tribal leaders receive benefits from a close relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As evidence of their allegiance, they even gave $50,000 of tribal money to support an effort to keep an airbase in Arizona from being closed. And in the meanwhile, those members of the Tohono O’Odham tribe who oppose and resist the activities of the US Government on their tribal lands do not get support from leaders of the tribe.

These leaders have done little to change the culture of these oppressed people. As is the case among many who are oppressed survival habits lead to ill health and low education with high unemployment. Little is being done to address these issues in a way that would remove this tribe from their oppressed and demeaned status.

Jeannie and I are moving to Tucson one day, probably this year. She has talked about wanting to work with the Tohono O’Odham and I admire her for her passion and commitment. But I have a question that probably relates back to my experience in the Civil Rights Movement. During the early ‘60s I felt good about supporting civil rights and even taking to the streets for this cause. Later, it became clear that African Americans needed little of our direct involvement, while welcoming some of our support. Rather, what was needed, even from the beginning, was for us liberal (even radical) white folks to work in our own subculture to effect change. We did a lot of that, politically and socially. And even today the job is far from being done. We were seeking legislation and desegregation of schools – and more. And we got a lot of that. But very few of us effectively addressed our own oppression, the oppression of our own prejudices, biases and visceral responses to the diverse world around us.

It seems very important to me that those of us most privileged to be working with integral and developmental approaches need to focus our attention on our own issues in dealing with diversity without, but also dealing with the oppressive dynamics within. In addition to working to intervene within the system of the oppressed, it is as important to work with the oppression within our selves and our own communities. In the United States we have considerable evidence of the resurgence of the radical right, a mostly white movement. The center of attention in the media has shifted from the center of American politics to a contest between the radical right and the center. We privileged white folk have a lot of work cut out for us in our own communities. That is the important focus of our political work.

I suppose I have a lot to learn about integral politics. I have some wonderful reading to do with the recent publication of the Integral Review Special Issue on Integral Politics. I look forward to that exploration because I have some concerns about integral politics, even as expressed by thought and action leaders I respect. It seems to me that there is a conservative orientation to some of the things I have read. That orientation pushes back against my quasi liberal/radical politics of the last fifty years. It may be that my Green is showing or that I just don’t understand how more enlightened beings than I can take some of the political positions they do that on first blush sometimes seem to be amoral. Not immoral—amoral! And I have to own this confusion because it is grounded, at least in part, in my own internal dynamics. I have much to learn. If you resonate with any of what I have been saying, you may have much to learn, too.

Raul Quinones Rosado has much to teach us.

Rosado is the co-founder of ilé: Organizers for Consciousness-in-Action committed to community organizing and Latino leadership development. Currently he is the Director of c-Integral where he teaches, counsels and trains others in consciousness-in-action in Puerto Rico. As you can imagine, he is active politically and opposes US occupation of Puerto Rico.

His is the first thoroughly integral treatment addressing oppression that I have read. His work “has revolved around anti-oppression work through empowerment education, leadership development, community organizing and social action.” During this work in New York and in Puerto Rico, he managed to complete a PhD and his own transformative practice. These led him to ask the question, “What is the root cause of humanity’s current state of limited well-being and development?” His answer: oppression! His definition of oppression is “the system of differential power that privileges certain identity groups over, and at the expense of, others.” It negatively impacts each and every one of us. He goes on to say, “This relationship between institutional oppression and internalized superiority and inferiority, too, is central to what is addressed in this work.”

Rosado turned to the integral perspective in his own going work with these issues. From this perspective he found it important to move beyond the root cause question, which he discovered to be incomplete and limited. This has led him on a personal quest for consciousness while not diverting him from his concern for “oppressed peoples around the world increasingly threatened by the forces of militarism, globalization and cultural imperialism, currently under the guise of anti-terrorism.” He is thereby committed to the development of new knowledge:

• That is useful in disrupting the systemic forces in society that subjugate people everyday.
• That is effective in creating processes that alleviate and transform the devastating effects of oppression in our lives.
• That not only inspires much-needed hope, but also fosters in people a sense of personal and collective power to create life-enhancing alternatives for our communities and ourselves.
• That actually provides people with methods and processes to develop our own local transformative leadership that shall, in turn, help us be self-determining co-creators of our circumstance as a community, as a people.
• That contributes to the development of consciousness into an integral perspective, even if only for small groups of transformative leaders who might in turn influence institutional and cultural transformations. (xxi)

In the development of his work, Rosado has drawn on two models to address the fragmentation that can be found in efforts to confront oppression. One is the integral approach of Ken Wilber, particularly, quadrants, lines of development, levels, states of consciousness, and “the self.” For all he relies principally on Wilber’s Integral Psychology. He values the integration of Spiral Dynamics into integral, although his reason is that it addresses the worldviews “line of development.” This is at variance with Don Beck’s view that worldview is not a line of development but a constellation of variables, particularly values or vMemes that are the product of the interactions of lines of development with life conditions.Rosado has joined the integral perspective to the Lakota medicine wheel and the Four Worlds model that has been developed from it. The presentation of this model is too complex to address here, but I will provide some of the themes. Think of them as circles within circles and we begin with the inner circle. The First are the four capacities:

• Mental
• Emotional
• Physical
• Spiritual

These correspond to four aspects of potentiality and activity:

• dominant thinking patterns
• human relations
• physical environment and the economy
• cultural and spiritual life.

Further, the community one is a member of has four aspects:

• political and administrative
• social
• economic and environmental
• cultural and spiritual.

The wider world involves

• the political and ideological environment
• the social environment
• the economic and ecological environment
• the cultural environment.

These elements, and more, are the sphere of life in which our identities are formed and evolve.Our integral well-being involves

• self-concept
• self-esteem
• self-image
• self-love, all elements of our personal identity.

These elements arise within the social and cultural context of the collective. Social group identity is central for addressing oppression as well as in liberation and transformation. Our identity involves gender, class, race, nationality, sexuality, political affiliation, age and more. All relate to the model derived from integral and the Lakota medicine wheel.A consequence of using an integral lens to examine oppression and anti-oppression interventions is that we look at the individual and their context, as well as interiors and behaviors. Think of oppression as being an occurrence. As such, in applying the AQAL model it would be necessary to include the oppression within the individual and in their behaviors, as well as within the culture and the systems (institutions) that express or hold the capacity for oppression to exist in human systems. This is what Rosado offers. The result is not only a call for social and political action, but for self-examination. As Rosado notes, “the culture of imposition is internalized through internal representations (as images, sounds, sensations, even smells and tastes) associated with the various social group identities that are instilled and installed in both dominant and subordinated group members.” Thus, the call for learning and action involves attention to our selves as much as it involves working with collectives.

Political, social, psychological and spiritual acts of resistance by subordinated individuals are liberating to the extent they involve creative responses that move beyond mere unconscious reactions to oppression, or as in the case of dominant members, the adoption of behaviors, attitudes and trends established by the dominant elite.” Rosado goes on to point out the activities that he and his colleagues have engaged in to address these issues. He pointed to the Integral Transformative Practice of Michael Murphy internal change and notes that personal change is promoted further by the conscious, deliberate interaction with other people in a collective struggle. This is one of the great contributions of Rosado’s work. Aside from the many models that I think most interested in integral approaches to development and change will find highly useful (I have only highlighted a couple here), the challenge to move from an exclusive focus on self in development to self-in-context, self-in-action offers us a way of enhancing not only our own development but also that of the communities our social identities are related to. I hope we are going to see more of Rosado’s explorations. His perspective is creative and refreshing. Most of all it challenges each of us to consider how we are engaging with our worlds in leader, follower, and other stakeholder roles.

Review of Raul Quinones Rosado, Integral Leadership Review, March 2010

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TRUTHOUT ORIGINAL
Judge Sonia Sotomayor and the New Racism: Getting Beyond the Politics of Denial

Thursday 04 June 2009

by: Henry A. Giroux, t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Judge Sonia Sotomayor with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. (Photo: Doug Mills / The New York Times)

While many liberals suggest that with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency the United States has become a post-racial society, many conservatives have now taken the opposite position, prompted by the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, that racism is alive and well in the republic.(1)According to many right-wing pundits and politicians extending from Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich, Judge Sotomayor is a “racist” and a “bigot” because of a largely decontextualized 32-word quote abstracted from a speech she gave in 2001 in which she stated: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Gingrich ignored the broader context in which the quote appeared, arguing for critical reason over biography, going so far as to suggest that it was symptomatic of a new type of racism, exclaiming in Twitter-like fashion, “Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman’ – new racism is no better than old racism.” All of this saber-rattling rhetoric about the emergence of a new kind of racism, which insists rather ironically that whites rather than people of color are the real victims of personal and institutional racism, does more than suggest a kind of historical amnesia that actually rewrites the meaning of racism. It also points to a long-standing fear among many conservatives that diversity rather the bigotry is the real threat to democracy.

What the ongoing attack on Judge Sotomayor suggests is that the public morality of American life and social policy regarding matters of racial justice are increasingly subject to a politics of denial. Denial in this case is not merely about the failure of public memory or the refusal to know, but an active ongoing attempt on the part of many conservatives to rewrite the discourse of race so as to deny its valence as a force for discrimination and exclusion either by translating it as a threat to American culture or relegating it to the language of the private sphere. The idea of race and the conditions of racism have real political effects and eliding them only makes those effects harder to recognize. And yet, the urgency to recognize how language is used to name, organize, order and categorize matters of race not only has academic value, it also provides a location from which to engage difference and the relationship between the self and the other and between the public and private. In addition, the language of race is important because it strongly affects political and policy agendas as well. One only has to think about the effects of Charles Murray’s book, “Losing Ground,” on American welfare policies in the 1980s.(2) But language is more than a mode of communication or a symbolic practice that produces real effects, it is also a site of contestation and struggle

The charge that Judge Sotomayor is a racist suggests something about the changing vocabulary about race and racial injustice that has to be both critically understood and politically engaged. In fact, there is something called a new racism and it has been brilliantly explored by a number of writers including David Theo Goldberg, Elizabeth Ansell, Howard Winant and Manning Marable, among others, though not in the way conservatives are using the term. Unlike the old racism, which defined racial difference in terms of fixed biological categories organized hierarchically, the new racism operates in various guises proclaiming, among other things, race-neutrality, asserting culture as a marker of racial difference or marking race as a private matter. Unlike the crude racism with its biological referents and pseudo-scientific legitimations, buttressing its appeal to white racial superiority, the new racism cynically recodes itself within the vocabulary of the civil rights movement, invoking the language of Martin Luther King Jr. to argue that individuals should be judged by the “content of their character” and not by the color of their skin. What is crucial about the new racism is that it demands an updated analysis of how racist practices work through the changing nature of language and other modes of representation. One of the most sanitized and yet pervasive forms of the new racism is evident in the language of color-blindness and the ideology of privatization. Within this approach, it is argued that racial conflict and discrimination is a thing of the past and that race has no bearing on an individual’s or group’s location or standing in contemporary American society. Color-blindness does not deny the existence of race, but the claim that race is responsible for alleged injustices that reproduce group inequalities, privilege whites, negatively impacts on economic mobility, the possession of social resources and the acquisition of political power. Put differently, inherent in the logic of color-blindness is the central assumption that race has no valence as a marker of identity or power when factored into the social vocabulary of everyday life and the capacity for exercising individual and social agency. In an era “free” of racism, race becomes a matter of taste, lifestyle or heritage, but has nothing to do with politics, legal rights, educational access or economic opportunities. Moreover, as politics becomes more racialized, the discourse about race becomes more privatized. Veiled by a denial of how racial histories accrue political, economic and cultural weight to the social power of whiteness, color-blindness and the privatization of racism deletes the relationship between racial differences and power and in doing so reinforces whiteness as the arbiter of value for judging difference against a normative notion of homogeneity.(3) For advocates of color-blindness, race as a political signifier is conveniently denied, relegated to the historical past, or defined merely as an individual prejudice or simply a matter of individualized choices, allowing many conservatives to ignore racism as a corrosive force for expanding the dynamics of ideological and structural inequality throughout society.(4) Color-blindness is a convenient ideology for enabling whites to ignore the degree to which race is tangled up with asymmetrical relations of power, functioning as a potent force for patterns of exclusion and discrimination including. but not limited to, housing, mortgage loans, health care, schools and the criminal justice system. This is the issue missing from the current debate about the new racism being put forth by Gingrich and others.

If one effect of color-blindness functions is to deny racial hierarchies, another consequence is that it offers whites not only the belief that America is now a level playing field, but that the success that whites enjoy relative to minorities of color is largely due to individual determination, a strong work ethic, high moral values and a sound investment in education. Not only does color-blindness offer up a highly racialized (though paraded as race-transcendent) notion of agency, but it also provides an ideological space free of guilt, self-reflection and political responsibility, despite the fact that blacks have a disadvantage in almost all areas of social life: housing, jobs, education, income levels, mortgage lending and basic everyday services.(5) In a society marked by profound racial and class inequalities, it is difficult to believe that character and merit – as color-blindness advocates would have us believe – are the prime determinants for social and economic mobility and a decent standard of living. The relegation of racism and its effects in the larger society to the realm of private beliefs, values, and behavior does little to explain a range of overwhelming realities–such as soaring black unemployment, the stepped-up resegregation of American schools and the growing militarization and lock down status of public education through the widespread use of zero tolerance policies, whose most egregious effects are on poor minority youth.(6) Or the fact that African-American males live on average six years less than their white counterparts. It is worth noting that nothing challenges the myth that America has become a color-blind, post-racist nation more than the racialization of the criminal justice system since the late 1980s. As the sociologist Loic Wacquant has observed, the expansion of the prison-industrial complex represents a “de facto policy of ‘carceral affirmative action’ towards African-Americans.”(7) This is born out by the fact that while American prisons house over 2.3 million inmates, “roughly half of them are black even though African-Americans make up less than 13 percent of the nation’s population…. According to the Justice Policy Institute, there are now more black men behind bars than in college in the United States. One in ten of the world’s prisoners is an African-American male.”(8)

As one of the most powerful ideological and institutional factors for deciding how identities are categorized and power, material privileges and resources distributed, race represents an essential political category for examining the relationship between justice and a democratic society. What the Sotomayor debate suggests is that far from being relegated to the past, racism in its various forms can be resurrected for both attacking minorities of color and for appropriating victim status for whites, while suggesting that people of color are the “real” racists. How else to explain Newt Gingrich’s charge that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist” or Karl Rove’s charge that she is “not necessarily” smart, resurrecting elements of genetic racism. Rather than simply defend Sotomayor against such racist charges, it may be time for progressives and others to take the debate about racism a step further and engage in a real dialogue about the historical legacy of the new racism and how it functions in American society, particularly as it seeks to suggest that the main victims of racism in its various rhetorical and institutional guises are white men.

Bob Herbert has recently responded to the attacks on Judge Sotomayor by arguing that:

Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing! Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery…. Where were the howls of outrage at this strategy that was articulated by Lee Atwater as follows: “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff.”(9)

Herbert is only partly right on this issue. The right-wing attack on Sotomayor is about more than “the howling of a fading species.” It is about how racism takes on different forms in different historical contexts and the need for it to be challenged critically and politically. Of course, Herbert is correct in suggesting that the conservative appropriation of the new racism is not just disingenuous but hypocritical, and that even a minor lesson in history reveals the bigotry behind the strategy. But he is remiss in not suggesting that we actually take up the discourse of the new racism and do it in ways that give it real meaning and substance, so it can be both easily recognized and politically challenged in terms not set by conservatives.

(1) For a critical summary of the ongoing racist and sexist smear campaign waged against Judge Sotomayor, see Faiz Shakir, “Right-Wing Hate Machine Launches Vicious Campaign of Racist and Sexist Attacks On Sotomayor,” AlterNet (May 30, 2009). Online: www.altenet.org/story/140248.

(2) Charles Murray, “Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980″ (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

(3) This issue is taken up brilliantly in David Theo Goldberg’s, “The Racial State” (Malden, MA: Blackwell Books, 2002) and David Theo Goldberg’s, “The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism” (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).

(4) Manning Marable, “Beyond Color-blindness,” The Nation (December 14, 1998), p. 29.

(5) For specific figures in all areas of life, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era” (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001), especially the chapter “White Supremacy in the Post-Civil Rights Era,” pp. 89-120.

(6) I address these issues in detail in Henry A. Giroux, “Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

(7) Loic Wacquant, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘Race Question’ in the U.S.” in New Left Review, (Jan-Feb 2002), p. 44.

(8) Paul Street, “Mass Incarceration and Racist State Priorities at Home and Abroad,” DissidentVoice (March 11, 2003), pp. 6-7 Available on line at http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles2/Street_MassIncarceration.htm. See also, Jennifer Warren, “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008″ (Washington, DC: The PEW Center on the States, 2008).

(9) Bob Herbert, “The Howls of a Fading Species,” New York Times (June 2, 2009), p. A23.

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Henry A. Giroux holds the Global TV Network chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Related work: Henry A. Giroux, “The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence” (Lanham: Rowman and Lilttlefield, 2001). His most recent books include “Take Back Higher Education” (co-authored with Susan Searls Giroux, 2006), “The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex” (2007) and “Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed” (2008). His newest book, “Youth in a Suspect Society: Beyond the Politics of Disposability,” will be published by Palgrave Mcmillan in 2009.

© 2009 TRUTHOUT