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A Challenge to Institutional Racism
By Nada Khader
When someone mentions the phrase “the peace movement in the United States,” I think of older white folk holding up anti-war signs, asking for troops to come home from Iraq or Afghanistan. I think of a movement that is more focused on what happens outside our borders than on what is happening right now inside our own communities.
The image I have is changing. For that, I and my colleagues at WESPAC, a peace and justice organization in Westchester County, New York must thank the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond for sharing their powerful analysis of racism with us and for helping us transform the way we approach our work and our mission. We started our two and a half day “Undoing Racism” training with a discussion of why people are poor, including an analysis of power in our society. The training offers a crucial historical context of how race has been constructed in America and of how it is used to maintain and perpetuate a system that benefits people of European descent at the expense of other communities.
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Racial Justice 
