alexandraerinr: "Few are guilty, but all are responsible."
Rejecting one’s complicity in a racist system is not the same thing as dismantling it.
By rights we should all be terrified that a sitting Supreme Court justice volunteered the opinion that there’s nothing unconstitutional about executing an innocent person. But white folks, we don’t have to be afraid of that. When Justice Scalia reserved the right of the state to execute an innocent man, he was doing so on our behalf. We don’t live in a world that treats us as interchangeable, dangerous, and suspect by default.
We aren’t all Troy Davis, we are all the state of Georgia. We are the model of “citizen” that the system is designed to protect. Any tragedy of errors that could lead one of us to be sitting on death row for a crime we didn’t commit would have to be a lot more complicated and at each step along that path our chances would benefit from the racism—blatant or subtle—of anyone in a position of power.
The cops who talk down white kids with guns and gun down unarmed POC, the court system that treats white kids with drugs as kids with a problem and POC with drugs as a problem, the court system that weighs Visible Otherness as a threat to public safety, the trading of an actual man’s life to salve an abstract concept of justice in a case with far more than a “shadow of a doubt”… we can be disgusted by these things, but disgust is not an end in itself and it’s not even a means towards an end. It is at most a motivator.
So what do we do? Stay involved. Don’t let your activism consist of occasionally noticing something bad is about to happen and then feeling histrionicallyvterrible when it does. Realize that The Bad Thing is an ongoing state and fight it. To fight racism as a white person requires a willingness to deconstruct and tear down whiteness itself. If you’re comfortable proclaiming that racism is bad when someone dies from it but you’re not comfortable challenging it when it’s “just little stuff” or “only a joke” or “there could be other reasons”, you aren’t fighting racism, you are being complicit with it.
Racist systems depend on the ongoing dehumanization of the Other, and the ongoing reinforcement of thoughts like “well, even if I don’t have a problem, but other people might be uncomfortable” and “It’s not that I think she’d do a bad job, it’s just that she doesn’t exactly project a professional appearance.” and “Clearly everyone knows/thinks this, so they’ll have my back when…”
Racist systems, in other words, depend on racist thoughts.
As we start becoming more willing to talk about systemic racism—and there is a lot of resistance there, because it makes racism the province of all of us rather than the people clearly wearing evil uniforms and shouting epithets and slogans—one temptation is going to be to keep viewing racism as something external to us. It’s the system! No one person is actually racist!! Especially me!!! The other temptation is to adopt an extreme martyr pose.I’m part of a racist system! I’m so bad!! I feel so disgusted to be complicit in this system and I don’t even have a choice!!!
I say again, disgust is not an action. Disgust is not progress. And when we treat it as an end in itself, it impedes progress. It becomes a way of doing good works that don’t actually require work or do any good.
So what do we do instead? I don’t know. Not in total. The problem is big and it’s complicated it’s part of us, so we have to start by being willing to question ourselves and being willing to be questioned. We have to start revoking each other’s license to be racist, which means not letting the “little things” pass. We have to be willing to make things uncomfortable for ourselves and for each other, which shouldn’t be surprising because the system we’re trying to dismantle here
But here are three things we can do:
First, don’t confuse attacks on whiteness with attacks on you. Whiteness isn’t a color. It’s not a race. It’s a social construct designed to divide humanity into categories that can be set against each other to maintain the benefits for Us to the detriment of Them. Today, it’s also a means of masking dehumanization into something palatable to our “enlightened” minds.
Understand that when people talk about dismantling whiteness or even abolishing the white race, they aren’t threatening you with genocide. They’re threatening your privilege.
Second, don’t confuse rejecting whiteness with rejecting racism. Saying “I don’t think of myself as white, I think of myself as German-Italian-Anglo-Austrian, and I think there might have been a Cherokee princess in there somewhere.” or “I don’t think of myself as white, I think of myself as human.” doesn’t change how people react to you or the licenses that society gives you.
Third, by all means go ahead and feel bad that racism happens. Feel guilty about being complicit in it. You should feel good about that? But realize that our bad feelings here don’t rate. They don’t cancel out the actual horrible things that happened, they aren’t more important than how the actual victims of racism feel… they only matter at all if they’re motivating us to do something.
As James Baldwin said, “As long as you think you’re white, there’s no hope for you.” But you can’t abdicate privilege. Rejecting whiteness is a first step, not the end of a journey.
Also, on the subject of things to do:
Here is a post with ten ways to address the death penalty specifically.
(The quote in the subject line is attributed to Abraham Joshua Heschel.)
Source: alexandraerin
