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Tackling racism requires more than protests - NewsDay Zimbabwe

BY TAPIWA GOMO WHEN one read the events of last year in the United States after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer and the ensuant global wave of protests against racism, there is an incontrovertible temptation to think that the time is ripe to tackle racism. The first quarter of the year kicked off with Merghan Markle and Prince Harry triggering the same debate on racism by alleging that some within the Buckingham Palace were concerned about the colour of their son during an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Indeed, it seems there is no better time to bring back race issues to the fore than now, mainly given that the issue has been raised by high profiles. The question now is that with all that happened in the US and the United Kingdom, probably the most powerful States in the world combined, what then can be done to address racism at whatever level and in whatever sphere? This is not an easy question to address. Most scholars have argued that race is about power and control of wealth using the racial shades as an excuse to manifest discrimination and marginalisation. It is not easy to track the origins of race, but in most societies, the poor, marginalised and/or those who looked different were forced to work as slaves. The premise for that was simply that they were assumed not to belong either to the families of power or to the society and hence their only use was to provide cheap labour. The central premise in this approach is that power needed to be propped up by converting certain people into labour to generate more wealth needed to sustain power. In the absence of power and wealth, there was no need for converting other people into slaves or lands into colonies. There would be no race. So, slavery was an easy way of securing free labour to avoid converting nationals into the same. Slavery and racism are caused by power and the desire to create and prop up wealth for the powerful. This script would be magnified in the 19th century with the colonialisation of Africa and other continents. The aim of colonisation was to amass power and wealth by the same countries we now call superpowers or developed nations. The first step by colonialists was to dehumanise those they found on what became colonies. This entailed treating them as non-human objects that could be converted to labour during slavery and that could be dispossessed of their land and asserts during colonisation. What ensued soon after these notions were normalised was the brutalisation of non-white races for no other reasons related to their colour, but that they needed to acknowledge and submit to the whims of the colonial power and contribute towards its wealth generation. This came with its own power structures, culture and administrative systems that ensured the delivery of allegiance and wealth to the central powers. To put this into a clear perspective, if Europeans had found another white race in Africa during colonialism, they were not going to stop their advances on the continent on account of having found people that looked like them. T

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