Unless it is a label you are proud of, one you cultivate with attention and care, no one wants to be called a racist. It makes us wince and squirm. It feels untrue and foreign. I know I push against it with every fiber of my being. But if whiteness goes unexamined in America, if you can’t acknowledge how American law and politics has supported whiteness, racists we will remain. There are two (probably more but I’ll start with two) kinds of racists. There’s a committed, participatory racist who believes in racial superiority and might belong to groups that uphold it. Then there’s an incidental, passive racist - one who thinks that because she doesn’t participate in overt groups that practice superiority, one who thinks that because she has an African or Latin American friend that she’s not racist. I used to be this kind of racist. I didn’t think my friend Felicia in the 7th grade was any less than I. But I also didn’t understand then how the privileges we’d been granted gave us different access. I was taught that I was lucky. Did that make her unlucky? The kind of racist I became was an unexamined, inherited form. Now I’d like to think of myself as a recovering racist - one whose eyes have been opened to how the system benefited me despite not being any more deserving than anyone else. Now I’d like to think I’m working actively on behalf of antiracism despite still benefiting from system wide privileges.
Let’s look at it this way: there is no doubt in my mind that most of us can look at Nazi Germany and call it wrong. We don’t have to know one single Holocaust survivor to make such a claim. Most of us can say the same thing about Apartheid in South Africa. Many Americans celebrated Nelson Mandela’s freedom and the dismantling of a cruel system. Our own president at the time went straight to South Africa to clasp hands with Mandela. Can we, then, have the courage to look at our own systems of oppression - what is happening at the Texas/Mexico border, how the institution of slavery set up a racial hierarchy that we still maintain, how putting Native Americans on reservations was a form of ghettoizing - and call them wrong? We don’t need a Latino, black, or Lakota friend to discern wrongness here. That’s how friendship is different than solidarity. We should be able to agree on principles of equity even if we know no one outside of our race or culture. The next step is whether or not we can flex our imaginations to include everyone exactly as they are. Full stop.
My dad worked hard, usually 6 days a week. I used to think we had what we did just because he worked so hard. This is, of course, in part true. He is smart and extremely capable. But I began to look around and notice that other men around my neighborhood - mostly Hispanic and black men - were working equally hard but not gaining the wealth. Why? I asked this question a lot. One of the answers is that my dad had access to resources as a white man that black and brown men did not. I cannot ignore this as a foundational fact of our nation and even of my existence. So the next question I must ask is how have I benefited from and continued to contribute to upholding systems that prioritize people who look like my dad and me? This is harder, more complex, because it challenges me to look at how I prioritize my own security in ways I could not see before. Am I really ready to dismantle systems that uphold notions of my racial superiority? I think I am...but I’m still learning how to do this. I need to ask different whys and also hows. I have to be willing to work alongside notions of equity regardless of whether friendship is an outcome. I do believe things gradually change largely as a result of proximity and genuine relationship. But the fundamental belief in equity does not have to birth from relationship first.
Racism in this country is like a quiet agreement many of us didn’t know we made. It is in the founding DNA of America. It is both deeply personal and not your fault at all. The personal aspect is whether we choose to face it, work to pick it apart, and demand the ideals of freedom sprayed throughout our constitution. I cannot think of anything more American than to do just this.
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Helpful resources:
The New York Times 1619 Project
ProjectCURATE podcast, “The Relay”
Ta-Nehisi Coates Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations”
Colson Whitehead, Author
Eula Biss NYT article, “White Debt”
From the NYT article “White Debt” by Eula Biss. Click here to read.