White People: Fall Back and Check Your Reflexes
To the Black Community: I will make mistakes. I will miss things and often not say the right thing or neglect the important things. I welcome your comments if you feel the need; my intent is to address white awareness and supply white people with actions in support of Black Lives.
Hi, fellow white people. This is a hard moment for us, but if Black people have endured 400 years of terror because of our ancestors and our systems, surely we can tolerate some discomfort. Time for us to face some painful facts about our lives. We have been very selfish, especially those of us who think we are woke. “The work” here is examining our own responses to the confluence of CV19 and Black Lives Matter protests.
Why am I qualified to relay this information? Practice, that’s all. I’ve had great Black teachers throughout my life. I read Black writers, I engage with Black community organizers, and serve the community through my trauma-informed teaching. If you can also check these boxes, then you probably don’t need my help — and I don’t assume I’ve got all the answers or that the Black community is a monolith. That’s why I refer to it as practice.
The first useless idea that we need to dispose of is that some of us are racist and some of us aren’t. We’re all fish in this bowl. We pay our taxes to a racist system. Despite my unique liberal activist education and upbringing, I’ve still managed to make racist choices, choices that hurt people. I’m still working to right those choices and so I’m not excluding myself when I say “white people.”
The only distinction we should be making is between blatantly racist white people and those of us working on our racism. That’s why I use the word “reflex” and that’s also why you shouldn’t take it personally. We’ve been swimming in this water our whole lives.
Let’s talk about bypassing, a term I learned from my activist friends. Here’s a common example I’ve heard lately: responding to the protests with a generic statement about racism being bad followed by, “but why the destruction?”
This question bypasses generations of state-sanctioned murder to talk about vandalism.
This single question says so much. It connotes a basic lack of understanding about trauma and poverty, a lack of recognition that the Black community has tried literally every way possible to correct these malignant inequalities baked into our system. This is the white brain lumping peaceful, organizers in with hate groups that infiltrate demonstrations to provoke cops and break shit. It’s an admission of ignorance about the culture of racist predation that built modern law enforcement. Statements like this also tell me that I have clearly failed to have these tough conversations with more of you before cops killed George Floyd.
Jay Edgar Hoover, the founder of the FBI, is smiling in his grave because his campaign to equate danger and blackness in the American mind is still working. (see COINTELPRO).
Activist Sonya Renee Taylor said in an Instagram post recently, “In a system that values property more than your life, the only way to change that system is to disrupt its relationship to property.” We are talking about broken windows when we should be talking about state-sanctioned white violence.
When Stephon Clark was cornered by cops in his grandmother’s backyard and riddled with bullets, I had white friends who watched the video and said things like, “Well, it’s hard to tell what was happening,” and “What was he doing out there?” These are very typical white deflections. We wouldn’t be saying these things if Clark had been white. Instead, we’d be asking, “Why wasn’t he entitled to be in his own neighborhood?” and “What about due process and innocent until proven guilty?”
Another example of white brain reflex is the “bad apples” argument regarding law enforcement. Most cops are good helpers, say white people. It’s just the bad guys that are doing this stuff. If you’ve had thoughts like this, then you are minimizing the grim regularity with which Black people lose their lives this way because you belong to the group that the cops actually serve. Cops, we’ve been taught, are there to protect us from thugs and criminals. And you know what that’s code for, right?
And consider this: over 40 percent of the people killed by cops each year are white, but because Black people compose 14 percent of the population, they are 2.5 times more likely to die due to an encounter with police.
Bypassing and minimizing are white diversion tactics: we skirt the suffering we are actively participating in, and we reduce the problem down to a few bad actors.
Transference is another protective instinct in our arsenal of white tools. We put the onus on Black people. “Why all the destruction?” implies that their actions are the real problem here. It’s classic gaslighting, and Black people have heard some iteration of this for centuries. How infuriating is it when someone does something purposefully horrible to you and then says calmly, “Wow, you seem really angry.” Again, broken windows < broken lives.
Yesterday on KDEE, a radio station produced by the Black Chamber of Commerce here in Sacramento, a white woman called and told the DJ that organizers at the protests had set up a separate event that was just for Black people. “That’s not unity,” she said. What she was really voicing there was her feelings of exclusion, and in doing that, she had recentered the conversation about race around herself.
We often think we are being kind and demonstrating solidarity when we tell stories about racism we witnessed, but if we are at the center of that story, we are really missing the point.
White people are often compelled to find a sole Black representative that validates their position, a kind of tokenism. I went on a date with a Black man who told me that Stephon Clark, “Shouldn’t have been out there acting a fool.” I was baffled by this until one of my activist Black friends kindly explained it to me.
“He’s distancing. It simplifies things for him when he says, ‘that’s them, that’s not me,’ it makes it not his problem.” White people, we need to examine our reflexes here and understand that when our Black friends do this distancing, this is also a reflex. It does not let us off the hook because our one Black friend does that same bypassing. (I am not saying you should dismiss anyone’s perspective, just understand that it doesn’t solve the problem or exempt us of our responsibility).
Trump, for example, holds up Kanye as proof that he’s not racist. And Kanye distances himself from his own people by saying things like “slavery was a choice.”
Another white strategy is performative activism. Shining a flashlight at the sky for 8:46 is a private, effortless gesture mostly intended to make your white heart feel better. Voting District Attorney Anne Marie Shubert and others like her out of office is concrete action that will help our Black friends and neighbors.
We were super proud of ourselves when Obama was elected. But his presidency gave us an eight-year pass to ignore growing inequality, growing homelessness, mental illness, all issues that affect the Black community disproportionately. We also ignored some of Obama’s policies and choices that further threatened Black people: the water crisis in Flint. Botching the BP oil spill that destroyed the Gulf communities.
Then there’s the main thing that Trump capitalized on: the rise of white supremacist groups.
White people in 2016: Wait, what, there’s nazis again?
Black People: SMH.
Even here, neo-nazis provide us good white people with a convenient cover; they are the racists, we aren’t. Distancing again.
We have to dig deep now. As Big Daddy Kane once said: Ain’t No Half-Steppin'. We need to have some long-overdue discussions about education, gentrification, public health, domestic violence.
As we roll up our sleeves to do this work, be mindful of another thing we white liberal people like to do: take over. We devise our own charities and we impose our own plans. We must check these impulses for a few reasons. The point of all this is to relinquish control. Bespoke solutions are not the answer.
The Black community has had all this worked out in their minds for decades. They have studied this shit and they are actually the experts here. We need to vote them into office and back their policies. They are really, really clear on this. Let’s start with replacing Lindsay Graham with Jaimie Harrison (who is currently leading in the polls), and Mitch McConnell with Charles Booker. We must flood our government with Black leadership.
We tend to polarize when Black leadership says things like, “defund the police.” If you respond to this with “But there will be chaos in the streets!” um…that’s what we have now. Let’s do them the courtesy of hearing that plan out without rushing to judgment.
White people, deep in the recesses of our unconscious brains, we fear retribution. We fear our shit is going to get taken from us, that our kids won’t have opportunities if their kids do. These are ridiculous fears that have made life worse for everyone, including us. So many of our societal problems are actually racism in disguise. Imagine for a moment what life would be like if we irradicated poverty. If everyone had a home. If everyone in our neighborhoods felt safe and connected. Pretty fun, right?
I don’t assume to speak for the Black community, but here’s what I have witnessed. They are aching for acknowledgment. They are yearning for the chance to forgive us. They do it every day without us noticing. If there is one thing I’ve heard consistently from friends, activists, and leadership, it’s how heartened they are that so many white people are joining the movement.
A friend told me recently, “sometimes it’s racism, and sometimes it goes way beyond that to basic lack of self-awareness.” We need radical self-awareness at this moment. We need to listen to Black people without interrupting or recentering the conversation on ourselves. We need to really see them and see their pain without bypassing, minimizing, distancing, or polarizing. We need to commit to growing and reshaping our thinking by first unpacking the unconscious fears we’ve absorbed as white people. In short, we need to be as brave as they have been.
And understand this: we’ve been deprived of all the brilliant contributions our young Black people could have made if we had funded their schools instead of throwing them in prisons. We’ve failed them, and in doing so, failed ourselves. If we want a strong post CV19 economy we can start by investing in the Black community.
How nice would it be to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that we started the hard work of elevating our Black neighbors, rather than feeling guilty and sad that nothing can be done?
This is a marathon, not a sprint. You cannot read one book, or show up at one protest and be done. But we must start, and we can do this together. #BlackLivesMatter #NoJusticeNoPeace
Some good places to start:
reads/listens:
White Fragility by Robin DeAngelo
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome by Dr. Joy deGruy
The Fate of America Depends on Ending Its Culture of Policing by Tim Wise
On defunding law enforcement:
THE GEORGE FLOYD KILLING IN MINNEAPOLIS EXPOSES THE FAILURES OF POLICE REFORM
Growing Calls to Defund the Police, Explained
Organizations to support:
Other things you can do:
- Support Black Artists, Businesses, Civic Leaders
- Re-educate yourself and your children on the history of slavery and social justice
- Continue the conversation with other white people around you
- Learn who your local white supremacists are and exorcise them from positions of power.
