White people, while adamantly proclaiming their lack of personal racism, completely lose their shit when they think someone might have just called them a racist.
And, I know, your brain has already flagged my first line, vehemently protesting that I didn’t make the statement conditional.
“Not all white people,” you shout.
As we always do, anytime we are challenged.
The deflection allows us to kick back in our comfort, convinced we are never personally the problem. It is always someone else.
Racism isn’t lying in wait, hoping someone comes along to flip the “I am racist” switch so it can pounce freely back from the 1960s, the time a lot of white Americans blindly think it somehow died. We killed King, but we eventually gave you a day off work, so racism must be a relic banished to the brief mentions in history books.
We are immune, we say. Although we live in a country that only reluctantly, through years of bloodshed, decided owning other humans should be frowned upon. A country that even then, when forced to abandon slavery, only shifted our racism. To segregation, lynching, voter suppression, gerrymandering, racial profiling, prisons.
How can we grow in this country, as white people, and think our work is done? That we somehow avoid racism with our good intentions, like a backpack full of kryptonite that keeps it from coming within arm’s reach. That we should never be questioned. That we can never improve. There is no racist bone in our bodies, we contend, in a country built on the murdered bones of those whose bodies held a different hue.
Of course, we claim, history and culture hold no influence over us. No subtleties have worked their way unknowingly into the way we interact with the world.
If we truly want to be anti-racist, it takes more than good intentions. It takes effort and examination, and that is often uncomfortable. And if we are called out on something we say, our first response cannot be spewing hateful words to show them how wrong they are that we aren’t a perfect person.
Our first response has to be to seek to understand how our actions or words could have appeared problematic, despite our intentions.
If we have built protective walls blocking any chance for self-examination, then we will end up as woke as Garfield
…after three pans of lasagna.
30 Jan 2020
