The 21 Action Items you will be generating from the seven tracks outlined in your program will be submitted to members of congress, President Clinton and several government officials around the world. Just like Johnson, you must converse and think globally about race relations. Having a national conversation on race is simply not enough. We must take an international view as did Du Bois and Johnson about the worldwide issue of racism and how it mutates into things such as starvation, economic imbalance and destructive images of persons of color. If I study the weather only in the town in which I live, I will have a very limited view of the seasons and how my local weather is effected by weather patterns from around the world.
Race relations is like that.
As Du Bois and Johnson both said, the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. It is not a national issue, but an international one that must be studied as such. Functional white supremacy is a global problem that needs to be addressed by all those interested in not only handling the problems associated with the color line as Du Bois called it, but many of the world's problems. Rampant pollution of the air and water supplies, deforestation, imbalances in the world's food supplies, all have their roots in the European notion of consume at all cost, buy now pay later, and don't worry be happy. These deadly notions of unlimited expansionism are based on the old models of colonialism toward the darker peoples of the earth.