He is interviewed by Michael Flood. Victor Lewis is an African American activist, educator and writer. He has extensive experience in leading a variety of training courses in the United States dealing with racism, ethnicity and identity, multicultural violence prevention, social activism and alliance building. Victor provides an accessible and intelligent analysis of racism, a vision that can be applied also to other systems of social power such as sexism, classism and heterosexism. Victor was in Australia in July 1995, touring the country with Sharon Gollan, a Ngarrindjeri woman of South Australia.
Racism is primarily a system of social power.
It represents the systematic, routinised and normalised marginalisation of a group on the basis of their ethnicity. And in terms of the current world system racism is essentially and primarily synonymous with white supremacy. Primarily, racism is something we are inside rather than something inside us. Not only does racism as an oppression have the element of prejudice but it also has social power. And social power means that there are racist behaviours that are either condoned, encouraged or required by the culture.