Black Lives Matter

From one of the privileged

Ignorance. It’s the new white. (yeah, not really new, and it’s a strained bit of cleverness. sorry)

Let me start with some of the ignorance I’m seeing out there from my fellow white (mostly men). These are actual words from white people in our century:

· All lives matter!

· Blue lives matter!

· I’m still waiting for my white privilege check to come in the mail. I’ve worked for everything I’ve got.

· How come they get to have black pride, but I can’t have white pride?

· I’m color blind. I don’t see a black man killed by a white cop. I see a man killed by a rogue cop.

· Cops kill a disproportion of blacks because they commit more violent crimes.

· I never enslaved anybody. Why should I pay for the sins of my ancestors?

· My favorite recently played out on Republican Facebook page, suggesting that liberal hypocrisy told us that we shouldn’t blame all Muslims for 911. But they blame all cops for police brutality. (which kinda makes a point, but my first reaction was: “So, you’re admitting you were wrong to blame all Muslims for 911?!!!!)

· Why do you hate being white?

Here is my response to my confused white people:

Racism infects whites and blacks. Assholes, thieves and murderers as well as predatory cops reside on both sides of the racial divide.

But here’s the thing:

Our revered white forefathers stole this country from indigenous people and then enslaved Africans to make this thing work. When you enslave a people, you’ve not only stolen their lives, you’ve infected them and their children with the idea that they could be property. They could be owned. When we talk about “institutional racism,” that was the underlying premise in building America. White people not only wanted black people to work their fields. Even after Emancipation, white people wanted to ensure that the decks would always be stacked against blacks: in the workplace, in education and especially in the criminal justice. Our criminal justice system was built with both fear and hatred of blacks in mind.

Our systems were built by assholes. Racist assholes. We need to understand and accept that.

You may not be an asshole. But, if you’re white, you benefit from the racist structures and institutions that were built at our founding.

White privilege is not a scarlet letter to be ashamed of. It’s a debt our parents left for us to pay.

I once had a white co-worker insist that he’d never experienced this white privilege thing. I reminded him that he experienced it just yesterday.

“Remember when you were in that store and the clerk kept her eyes on you the whole time, like she was sure you were going to steal something?” I asked.

“That didn’t happen,” he said, confused.

“Exactly.”

When I worked at a newspaper, we would often be the first to hear about horrible things people did in our community.

Sitting at the desk next to me, my friend and fellow reporter Tanya had a mantra: “Don’t let them be black. Don’t let them be black.”

I got why she said that. She knew that every time a black person committed a crime, that reinforced prejudices and stereotypes.

It didn’t occur to me at the time to ask, “Why didn’t I have a mantra, ‘Don’t let them be white’?”

The answer, I suspect, is that whites remain immune to that kind of stereotype. Even when all of the major mass shootings involve white men, we don’t ask ourselves, “What’s the matter with white people?”

When we look at how we move forward from this, a lot of my white contemporaries think the answer is color blindness. They think they’ve internalized Martin Luther King’s ideal of judging people by the content of their character, not their skin.

I get this. I look at the prejudices of my parents and grandparents. The language we use now and even much of the baked-in fears and hatreds seem to have softened in later generations. But are we there? Have we reached that mountain top?

I think of myself as evolved. I think that skin color doesn’t matter to me. But what if I did a survey of all the newspaper articles I’d written? Would I find that I’d been equitable on the positive and negative stories or would I find that unconscious bias was at play?

When I taught college classes, and I called on students to answer questions, was I entirely equitable. I assumed I was. But I never looked at it.

Even my questioning about this now demonstrates my ignorance. There’s a strong “stop helping us” argument that suggests my wanting to make things better causes its own problems.

The issue can be confusing, and maybe it should be, because I think there are aspects of where to go from here that remain murky.

Starting with a look at institutions seems to be a good place to start. Clearly, because we all operate in institutions– and we’re not just talking about police — we can’t help but be affected by the way those institutions work, and they almost always work against blacks and other minorities.

The simple-minded look at all this and it seems that we’re putting halos on blacks and devil horns on whites. Blacks good. Whites bad.

When you look at this through the lens of stereotypes, that’s how it looks. That’s why I appreciated Ibram X Kendi’s book, “How to Be an Antiracist.” He suggests we look beyond good people and bad people, those who are racist and those who are not, and focus on rhetoric, laws and policies that promote racism and those that work against racism.

Through that lens, it’s easy to see the difference between a black pride parade and white pride parade. The first celebrates the struggles of the oppressed to rise up, and the second reinforces the racist institutions that keep minorities oppressed.

But that doesn’t mean that white people are inherently bad. We really are all created equal. Real pride for whites must reside not in embracing the sins of our past but in reaching for a better future, and that can only happen when we devote ourselves to fighting racism.

Not pretending it does not exist.

Looking back on my work as a journalist and educator, I now believe that equity shouldn’t have been my goal. I should have over-compensated, showcasing more of the good works by African Americans in our community and going above-and-beyond to help my students of color succeed. That’s what an anti-racist would do.

The sharpest nexus on this issue is how we look at police. The revolution in our streets demanding defunding and police reform is not saying that all police are bad. We know that’s not true. It’s saying that they exist in a broken institution.

George Floyd was not a statistical anomaly.

He’s a man that moved us all, struggling to breathe, as he was tortured and killed, not just by rogue cops, but by a system that didn’t give a shit about him. Or others like him.

Black Lives Matter — too.

We must get that. If police want us to see them in a better light, their path is clear. Take a knee. Join the revolution. That’s the only place where real pride lives.