“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” - James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
White people sure do love to show their support for bigotry under the guise of “freedom of expression” that is protected by the First Amendment. They will yell from the highest rooftops about ‘protecting’ their freedom of speech, all the while suppressing that same freedom for others to call them out for their (pardon my language here) shitty, hateful, irrational viewpoints. It isn’t their freedom of speech that is being threatened, however, but rather their ‘freedom’ to mock and intimate those of us who find them (and their viewpoints) morally repugnant and reprehensible.
They are protecting a mentality that traded economic success for humanity and enslaved hundreds of thousands; a mentality that saw Black skin, and said, “You are only three fifths of a person.” A mentality that made terrorism its specialty with state-sanctioned lynchings and church bombings. A mentality that unjustly polices the bodies of Black boys and men, shoots them unarmed in the streets, and blames the community as they take their last breaths. A mentality that will only ever see the Black half of my biracial nephews, but will never allow them to dip into the privilege my blue-eyed 2 year old already benefits from.
It’s a mentality that equates the alt-right with Black Lives Matter, even though the latter movement has never been responsible for a racially motivated murder. One that puts the KKK and Black Panthers on the same level, despite the fact that one group’s members rely on anonymity and the other does not. A mentality that says, “Let’s wait for the facts before we make assumptions,” when the perpetrator is white, but assumes them immediately guilty when they are a Person of Color. It’s a mentality that claims to weigh all sides equally, bu almost exclusively reserves the benefit of the doubt for the non-melanated population. A mentality that celebrates and encourages individualism and mediocrity in white men and boys, but forces exceptionalism and groupthink onto all Black boys and men.
No, this is not a system that today’s generation built. But when we watch it working exactly as it was designed to - to disenfranchise and oppress those deemed ‘other’ - and remain silent, we might as well have. We are complicit. And we don’t care because
We.
Don’t.
Have.
To.
We can turn off the television when we’ve watched the State murder another unarmed Black man. We can choose to ignore the past 400+ years of oppression we’ve doled out and continue to perpetuate because part of our privilege lies in the ability to distance ourselves from ‘those racists on TV’.
With all of that being said, some of you are going to read through this essay and STILL argue that your privilege doesn’t exist or that you don’t clutch your pearls when you meet a Person of Color on the sidewalk. You’ll read this and still sit silently through Thanksgiving dinner when your aunts, uncles, grandparents, and probably even your own parents spew racist shit you swear on social media you would never tolerate, but never confront offline. You’ll use coded language to claim and innocence our people have never possessed, and never will. And before you spew vitriol and vilify me for inaccuracy in the comments section, remember that I, too, belong to the non-melanated population. I’ve been to your cookouts, and I have sat in your business meetings. I have heard the words you speak when surrounded only by “your kind”, and I know the comfort you feel surrounded by your safety net of solidarity. It’s a solidarity that will no longer buy my silence. My only goal is to raze your system to the ground.
You don’t need to be a card carrying member of the KKK when you regularly break bread with those who are. White people, we have got to start collecting each other. And to those of us trying to work with our brothers and sisters who have had their humanity stripped away, we have to do more. No, we didn’t build this system, but we uphold it every time we let any form of racism go unchallenged. Like James Baldwin said in The Fire Next Time, we (white people) are “destroying hundred of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. . . But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
We did not build this system, but we are also not doing anything to dismantle it either. We are the authors of devastation, and it’s beyond time to claim responsibility and clean up our racist messes.
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