Toward a Vocabulary for Understanding & Dismantling Structural Racism Inside and Outside the ELCA

For our readers information, below are four contributions on defining race and racism from: Alicia Garza, Black Lives Matter; Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia; The Aspen Institute on Community Change; and Dr. Maulana Karenga's Introduction to Black Studies, Fourth Edition, 2010.  The contributions serve as ADLA-Chicago food for thought in the process of moving the 2015 Baltimore ADLA Assembly resolution, dubbed: "African Descent Lutheran Lives Matter," to this summer's MCS/ELCA 2016 Assembly floor.

"In an alternative press video interview...(Alicia) Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter (organization), discussed how 'changing Black Lives Matter to All Lives Matter is a demonstration of how we don't understand structural racism (our emphasis) in this country.'  She went on to discuss how other lives are valued more than Black lives...and to take Blackness out of the equation is inappropriate."  -Wikipedia on the Black Lives Matter Meme (like team) and organization-

"Societal racism...has been called structural racism, because society is structured in such a way that excludes substantial numbers of people from minority backgrounds from taking part in social institutions."

"According to Dr. Walter R. Allen, racism can be categorized into five types:
1. Overt racism, for example, when an individual says something racist;
2. Covert racism, which is also an individual phenomenon;
3. Institutional racism, which is when institutions treat people differently;
4. Societal racism; and 
5. Civilizational racism."  -Wikipedia/on societal and institutional racism-

"Structural Racism.  A system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group iniquity.  It identifies dimensions in our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with 'whiteness' and disadvantages associated with 'color' to endure and adapt over time.  Structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice.  Instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist."  -The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change- 

"Racism is essentially a system of denial and deformation of a people's history, humanity, and right to freedom based exclusively or primarily on the specious concept of race (Karenga, 1981, 1985).  Stripped of all its cultural and pseudo-scientific mystification, race is a socio-biological category designed to assign human worth and social status, using Whites as the paradigm.  Racism, then, which begins with the mystification of race, is social thought and practice that expresses itself in three basic ways, i.e., as:
"1) imposition, i.e., conquest and oppression of a people, and interruption, destruction and appropriation of a people's history and productive capacity in racial terms;
"2) ideology,  i.e., an elaborate system of pseudo-intellectual categories, assumptions and contentions negative to peoples of color and serving as justification of the imposition and reinforcement of the institutional arrangement; and
"3) institutional arrangement,  i.e., a system of political, economic, and social structures which insure White power and privilege over peoples of color.
"Racism, thus, becomes a continuing problem, not only for social inquiry, but also for the equality of social life and the ongoing quest for human freedom and human flourishing.  And it is a problem that tends to appear at every level and in every area of social life (Seltzer and Johnson, 2009)"  -Dr. Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, Fourth Edition, 2010, Sankore Press-

Respectfully submitted: Pastor Joel Washington (Khunanpu Sangoma), Lead Pastor of Reformation Church-Chicago ("Young Barck Obama's sanctuary for community organizing") and Secretary Pro tem of ADLA-Chicago, 4-20-16.