A little over a year ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates surprised himself (and everyone else) when he told Ezra Klein that he had become uncharacteristically hopeful. Coates initially referred to his father’s experience in Baltimore during the 1968 riots.
I can’t believe I’m gonna say this, but I see hope. I see progress right now, at this moment…
The idea that black folks in their struggle against the way the law is enforced in their neighborhoods would resonate with white folks in Des Moines, Iowa, in Salt Lake City, in Berlin, in London — that was unfathomable to him in ’68, when it was mostly black folks in their own communities registering their great anger and great pain.
I don’t want to overstate this, but there are significant swaths of people and communities that are not black, that to some extent have some perception of what that pain and that suffering is. I think that’s different.
The murder of George Floyd by police officers didn’t just ignite the Black community. White people all over this country (and around the world) rose up to protest yet another example of injustice. That inspired hope – even for a pessimist like Coates.
But as has always been the case, that turn of events also inspired a backlash. The protesters (who were almost exclusively peaceful) were called “thugs” and referred to as “violent.” Then came a right wing obsession with so-called “cancel culture” and attacks on the NYT’s 1619 Project. As Ibram Kendi noted, all of that eventually came together in an obsession with critical race theory.
And now the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, cancel culture, the 1619 Project, American history, and anti-racist education are presented to the public as the many legs of the “monstrous evil” of critical race theory that’s purportedly coming to harm white children. The language echoes the rhetoric used to demonize desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1954.
That is the context in which you should read a piece by Elie Mystal titled“My Black Generation Is Fighting Like Hell to Stop the Whitelash.” He sums up both the good and bad news.
My Black generation is doing everything we can think of to stop this. Our activists have used every tool available to start entire movements, like Black Lives Matter, to halt this onslaught of white rage. Our thinkers and writers are on fire: People like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander, and so many others, are producing the works that leave the white supremacists so unable to compete in the marketplace of ideas that their only resort is to try to ban these Black intellectuals from the marketplace. Black voting power is so strong and energized that white Republicans have decided to turn their backs on democracy all together. We are fighting. But we are also losing, primarily because the mass of white Americans has become inured to shame.
That takes me back to what inspired Coates to feel hopeful last summer…the commitment of white people to the cause of equality. Several years ago a friend of mine who went by the name Robinswing wrote a blog post titled “We Cant’ Fix Ya!” The point she made has stuck with me for a long time.
The blackwoman has been thinking it might be time to seek out some solutions for eliminating racism. A more difficult project than I imagined.
Race is a problem for white people to solve. If black people or brown people could have made racism go away it would have long since disappeared back into the nothing-ness from which it came.
Nah, it’s on white folks to make the necessary moves to kill and bury, once and for all, the notion of race. I think in a generation or two this just might happen…
We took what we could get…White people have to come up with the solution to racism. Some of these folk are family. Some are neighbors. Some are friends. Talk to them. Don’t let them get away with the stereotypes. Challenge them on privilege. Point out that as long as this privilege exists, racism has a home.
If all else fails, remind them that they are soon to be the minority and that karma is a bitch.
The first civil rights battle in this country ended slavery. The second eliminated laws that enshrined inequality. As Robinswing suggested, the next step is going to require white people to listen, learn, and change. This might be the hardest step of all because a major part of white privilege is the assumption that our experience is normative, so we already know it all.
We are at this point because, as Mystal wrote, the Civil Rights laws of the 60’s opened the doors of opportunity and his generation took full advantage. We even elected this country’s first African American president and now have a woman of color as vice president. In pretty much every field imaginable, Black people are succeeding. That sets off something Jonathan Chait wrote in response to the movie “12 Years a Slave.”
Notably, the most horrific torture depicted in “12 Years a Slave” is set in motion when the protagonist, Solomon Northup, offers up to his master engineering knowledge he acquired as a free man, thereby showing up his enraged white overseer. It was precisely Northup’s calm, dignified competence in the scene that so enraged his oppressor. The social system embedded within slavery as depicted in the film is one that survived long past the Emancipation Proclamation – the one that resulted in the murder of Emmett Till a century after Northup published his autobiography. It’s a system in which the most unforgivable crime was for an African-American to presume himself an equal to — or, heaven forbid, better than — a white person.
The story of the fight for civil rights in this country has always included a severe backlash anytime white supremacy is challenged. So when you see right wingers frothing at the mouth about things like critical race theory in an attempt to shut down the movement that began after the murder of George Floyd, remember that those folks are scarred shitless of the fact that a majority of people in this country might take the next step in realizing the promise of equality at the heart of our founding ideals. They’re doing anything and everything they can to shut that whole thing down.
Having grown up in a white working class neighborhood, I get it. We were poor and white. As a child I felt in some way superior to black kids. I was Jewish and felt superior to non-Jewish kids too. I thought my tribe was smartest, most clever, most virtuous, etc. It was a childish way of looking at the world so my excuse is that I was in fact a child. But it’s also a statement of bad character. I wasn’t taught to think differently and at that point I’d not figured it out for myself.
Later, as a young adult, I met black people who were smarter than me, who were wealthier, who had better character and I remember thinking about it and having to face it. My response was to step back and say, “Well of course. There are always going to be those who are smarter, richer, better in some way and some of them will be minorities.” I realized that there was no way to live in a world that matched my values without being cool with this. So I shifted.
It didn’t happen all at once and it’s not so simple. It began in grammar school and continued into college. I learned about the Civil Rights Movement and was deeply impressed. I was being pulled in multiple directions.
Later on, I had a friend once I was in college who was from an inner city neighborhood. There were black people at the elite university I attended but they were culturally integrated. This guy was stereotypically black. I walked into my apartment with him and my girlfriend turned around and got really scared. Her eyes got wide and she reacted with shock, even emitting a noise. I introduced her and she calmed down but when we left, he said “Man, that’s not okay. Your old lady, her reaction was no good. That can’t happen again.” I saw that he was hurt by it and it surprised me. This guy was really tall and muscular. He towered over me. He looked scary. I thought him invulnerable and here he was expressing pain. I began to understand the challenge of being black in white America in a deeper way.
I’d take him to the school library and people would look at me like I was insane. Their expressions said, “What the fuck are you doing bringing him here?” Same thing in his neighborhood. People spoke in code but the meaning was “What the hell are you doing with this white guy?” I saw how deeply cut off our worlds were from each other. The friendship didn’t last. I perceived that at some point he tried to rip me off. But those insights never went away. They deepened through the years as I met other minorities. Native Americans in Arizona. Later I was attracted to Sufism and, with it, Islam. These days my closest friends are middle eastern. They have such great character. I prefer the cultures they come from to ours. People emerge with far more open hearts and a desire to do right. I know that’s not about skin color though. It’s culture. Skin color is completely arbitrary.
Thank you, Nancy. I linked to you often on FB when you and Martin were gracing WMPA’s pages – a post by Nancy LeT was a staple of the opinions I gather. I appreciated your recent acknowledgement of the stress of these perilous times, and see this post as a nice bounce-back. Take care and I will keep reading and posting snips’n’links.
We should understand there are white people committed to the Big Lie. It may have little to do with the fact it is a lie and everything to do with white intolerance or as Noah Berlatsky wrote in “Think” recently:
” In other words, when intolerant white people fear democracy may benefit marginalized people, they abandon their commitment to democracy.”
Imagine that a ready made fascist audience. CRT or no. But we knew that, right?
I don’t doubt that Republicans are manufacturing this issue for political reasons. Steve Bannon has always claimed that race was the winning issue for Republicans. In one way or another, Republicans are going to frame both the midterms and 2024 in a way that the call to “vote white” resonates with voters. Voter suppression plus gerymandering plus a blatantly racist appeal equal the only way Republicans think they can win.
How do Democrats deal with “vote white”? I don’t know.
I agree with the point that only white people can solve the racism problem. I just don’t know how we do that. When I am in a group and somebody makes a racist remark or joke, I usually object even though it never does anything positive. I don’t think we can influence a racist.They are committed to the view that POC are authors of their own misfortune, and nothing can sway them.
I do think we can do things around the margins. For example, we can discuss the idea of white privilege in our social groups. “I am not a racist,” an acquaintance might say, “And I can honestly say I have never done anything bad to anyone else because of the colour of this skin. But you lose me when you talk about white privilege. My family was poor when I was growing up and nobody helped me become who I am. I overcame a lot. Where was my privilege?”
That’s a debate I can win (given that I am talking to someone who is reachable). Does that – convincing a few people that white privilege exists – even move the needle? It doesn’t feel like much.
If anybody has any good ideas, I’d like to hear them.
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