White Americans have essentially never internalized the Kerner Report. Assembled by
Lyndon Johnson to address what was laughably referred to as the Negro Problem, the panel
very quickly saw that this was a joke. There is no Negro Problem in the US, but rather a
white people problem. FIFTY years ago (let that sink in), it opined, “Our nation is
moving toward two societies, one black and one white–separate and
unequal…Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they
now threaten the future of every American.” The report explained that the race riots
were rooted in segregation, inadequate housing, poor access to quality education,
systematic police violence, and labor market exclusion. For these factors, the report
concluded, “White racism is essentially responsible.”
TWO GENERATIONS later (another pause for sinking in) and white Americans are still, in
large part, hard pressed to see it, scratching their heads to see just what black people
are so darn angry about. The pursuit of White Supremacy, both domestically and globally,
is the singular unifying engine driving the west’s ongoing hegemony around the world.
Reduced to the old canard of ‘race relations’–whatever the fuck that is supposed to
mean, it can be encapsulated in Rodney King’s much maligned plaint, “Can’t we all
just get along?” The answer, firmly, is no. Certainly not amid the flood of feigned
perplexion, mock incredulity and the toxic “both sides” rhetoric that still
spews forth from the mouths of whites (and not a small number of non-whites) at every
level of society, media, and social interaction. Not unless and until white people
change, and begin to see the structural and institutional evil that white supremacy
injects into every facet of American life. Basically, that is, until whites are
collectively ready to go at least as far as the Kerner report did FIFTY YEARS ago (time’s
up folks. It should have sunk in long ago).
This is not a demand or an expectation I take lightly; nor do I assert it without
burdening myself with the same task. I have had to change–and massively so–from what I
always thought was a forward-thinking, anti-racist, commie thinker in my early formative
years. It’s just not enough. Granted, I have the best tutor I could ever hope for. And I
chose to take the full immersion course. And I’m sure I have a lot of changing yet to do,
and it will never quite be the same as seeing the world as if I was born black. But my
ongoing education is as humbling as it is obvious to millions (billions, actually). You
just see things differently when your own children are targeted by police, by other white
people, by institutions. Wissen geht durch den Magen, as a famous German once said. When
you bail family out of jail for something they didn’t do, for example. Wisdom comes
through the gut.
When you lie awake at night worrying whether the kids have internalized the hatred you
try to protect them from every day, you are halfway there. When you walk into a store
together with your wife, and she is followed by a store detective while some old white
lady comes up to you and asks if she can put such and such on layaway, you learn that
maybe your eyes aren’t as open as they should be (and a bit more open than you wish they
had to be). When you are pulled out of a car and treated like a criminal because racist
cops assume that your wife of ten years is a whore and you her drunken john… you wake
up with the quickness. When cops investigating a fire separate you from your wife, trying
to force her to admit that she smokes when she doesn’t–come on, you smoke. You can tell
us. Fuck you. And as you wake up, you start to see things. You see that you go to the
same grocery store and pay with the same blue school check at least once a week–often
twice a week–or ten years. No problem. But the one time you bring your seven-year old
Haitian godson because he’s having a bad day, the clerk takes the check and leans over
the counter, asking “Is that WIC?” No, hon… that’s WACK. And on and on,
through literally thousands of examples, situations, interactions that become so
commonplace that you become almost immune–but that are also part of your awakening. And
ultimately you realize–you fear, you feel, you *know*–that Tamir and Trayvon and Aiyana
and hundreds (yes, hundreds) of others–could just as easily be Johnny or Marcus or
Hector or Herby or Funmi or Sammy–the family and circle who are my everything, and
without whom I am lost on this earth.
In the weeks since the unrest in Ferguson it has been painful to endure a barrage of
idiocy from white people, some despite good intentions, some ignorant, and some just
downright racist, most of whom probably wouldn’t know that my family is black. It is as
if nothing has changed–except for the worse. Racism is so deeply entrenched–and
ossified, it seems–that there is no longer even a veneer of understanding, and white
people who would have prided themselves in 1968 to side with the oppressed, now feel
themselves not only empowered but almost *compelled* to judge, moralize and hold forth
about an experience from which they are completely divorced. It is as if the whole
country has been transformed into the old Dave Chappelle sketch, and they “just know
black people.”
As one who has made and is making that journey, I see it as the duty of white people–at
the very least–to avoid these pitfalls. Listen. Open your eyes. Learn and know supremacy
for what it is, and understand it and expose it. The black girl who made fun of you in
middle school may have been racist; but she probably doesn’t have the power to take your
job, or your home…or to kill your child with impunity. The difference is what defines
supremacy. And when our eyes are open, we can see the nuances that make the system what
it is. We can and should speak out as long and as loudly and forcefully to other white
people in whatever forum and from whatever platform we can access until the very second
the mic is wrenched from our hands against a supremacist system from which we benefit
unequally… after all, we are mistakenly seen as the store manager, and not the thief.
And when you know, you can’t un-know. You can’t be assuaged by half measures that support
the system rather than change it fundamentally. More body cameras for cops? Are they
serious? What a crock of shit. Tamir was shot on video. Eric Garner was choked to death
in front of a dozen witnesses. Rodney was beaten half to death on camera, and a white
jury still couldn’t see it. And on and on and on. Just another bullshit chapter in the
hopeless neoliberal delusion that technological advancement–tweaking the numbers–can
solve problems that require systemic change. Cowardly, righteous, and deliberately
obtuse–and giving *more* resources to police who are already militarized and armed to
the teeth.
Don’t be drawn into the tired and corrosive Good Negro/Bad Negro paradigm that
supremacist logic has always used to derail attempts to expose white supremacy for what
it is. Dr. King was wise and calm, Malcom X was crazy and violent, conveniently ignoring
and distorting the radical legacy that both men left us. After all it was Martin, not
Malcolm, who said “riots are the language of the unheard.” And it was Martin,
not Malcolm, who was quick to expose the hypocrisy of condemning his own people as
violent savages amid the slaughter of nonwhite people in Vietnam: “I knew that I
could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos
without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today–my own government.” Martin today would understand the rioters–not shame
them.
Sadly, the Groundhog Day time bounce that governs these things replays the loop without
the slightest hint of irony: white people tut-tutting about looting and violence while
undoubtedly saluting the flag and sporting support our troops paraphernalia. The King of
Drones blathers on about how ‘violence is unacceptable’ while raining death on nonwhite
children and wedding collaterals the world around. Par for the course for the
Supremacist-in-chief. The office really is colorblind, as it turns out, and this
portfolio must be filled at all costs. This is what accounts for the radical difference
between the Obomber’s rhetoric and that of say, another Black elected official, Deval
Patrick.
Especially at the national level, there is no escape from The American Nether, that
perverse intersection of race and class. I would, however, caution those who try beyond
reason to make it first about class in a misguided attempt to promote a false ‘unity’ or
to blunt their own complicity. In our own example, Julia is just as likely to be followed
by the store cop whether she is in a do-rag or prepped out. We are both educated
professionals, and play the part quite well. It didn’t save us–my wife was knitting
(KNITTING!!) in the front seat when I was pulled from the car and mistaken for her john.
Is it all about race? Maybe not. Is it only about race? Hardly. But it is, was, and shall
be *always* about race. Falling isn’t only or all about gravity either, but only the very
stupid would discount it–and at their own peril. It is the not-so-well disguised secret
that defines This American Life, the reality that has defined our experience since the
arrival of Europeans, and the fuel that fires the twin engines that guide the separate
systems about which Kenner and company warned when I was three years old. This is
America. It is 2014. Wake the fuck up. Our kids’ lives depend on it. And they matter.
(c) 2014 Daniel Patrick Welch. Reprint permission granted with credit and link to
danielpwelch.com. Political analyst, writer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch
lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde.
Together they run The Greenhouse School. Welch has also appeared in numerous television
and radio interviews, and can be available for comment and analysis as his day job
permits.
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