It's Christmas season once again, and everyone is dreaming and scheming about that perfect gift their heart desires, whether to give or to receive. Department stores across America have descended into war zones, with Black Friday sounding the call for screaming hordes of wild-eyed shoppers to descend upon the nation's retail landscape, grasping and clawing for that perfect widget all to the glory of God and Uncle Sam. If there really is a War On Christmas, the operating theatre isn't Fox News, it's Wal-Mart.
For some of us, the things we want for Christmas don't have a sticker price. These things often feel as unattainable as they do intangible; when innocent children wish for world peace, we laugh and shake our heads, our naiveté having absconded long ago to the dimmest recesses of memory. Yet, our dreams remain, their deferment relying almost entirely upon an unwillingness to speak them aloud.
Across the country, tens of thousands of people have found the courage to raise their voices as one and ask for something incredibly powerful this holiday season: the gift of justice. Justice for Mike Brown, justice for the people of Ferguson, Missouri, justice for Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Tanesha Anderson...justice for Black America as a whole. Dozens of protests have sprung up all over the country in the wake of their slayings, with the bitterly ironic rallying cry of “Hands Up, Don't Shoot” embodying a new spirit of civil disobedience that understands just how pervasive state-sponsored violence has become, and whom it impacts the most.
It's in service to that spirit that I share my Christmas Wish List for White America. To be fair, it's not filled so much with what I want for my fellow whites as it is what I want from us. We've taken more than our fair share, as it is; and what do you give to the race who has everything?
- I wish for white people to understand that protests and riots, no matter how problematic they might be for those that aren't involved, are symptomatic of the injustices that prompted them, and do not happen in a vacuum of context; and that rioting often achieves results when civility fails, because so-called “respectability politics” are designed to silence dissent, not encourage it.
- I wish for white people to realize that the exoneration of police for killing unarmed black youth, while also seriously problematic, is too a symptom of larger structural injustices, ones that we as whites have been collectively responsible for enforcing for centuries.
- I wish for white people to see that black people don't get their choice of martyrs. In fact, black people don't get their choice in much of anything in America, especially when it comes to the way they are perceived and depicted by us.
- I wish for white people to believe that many black people don't even see their dead kinsmen as martyrs, merely as grim reminders of a society that places no value on their safety; and that it's our fear and (often violent) suppression of black people's petitioning of their grievances that guarantees the ascension of dead, black iconoclasts for the public to rally behind, time and time again.
- I wish for white people to realize that there are no genuine qualifiers to the statement “(insert name of innocent black victim here) didn't deserve to die,” and that adding them serves only to allow white society justification for another black body in the morgue at the hands of some triggerhappy cop. See also: victim blaming.
- I wish for white people - white liberals in particular - to know that if it's not okay to blame innocent women for their own sexual assaults, it's not okay to blame innocent blacks for their own deaths, and that doing otherwise is the height of hypocrisy.
- I wish for white people to have some understanding of what it means to have their very ethno-cultural identity forcibly stripped away, commoditized, and sold back to them by the very people who stole it, an atrocity committed innumerable times without a trace of remorse, at the expense of the lives and limbs of millions of their kinsmen.
- I wish for white people also to understand what it is to be told that raising objections to such merciless and mechanical savagery is somehow perpetuating their own victimhood, accompanied by the cruel and mocking condescension of those who would have you “get over it.”
- I wish for white people to realize that, especially in light of what's happening in places like Ferguson, the way we treat people of color in this country completely fails to engender any respect for our nation from the rest of the world, and that many nations use our hypocrisy as cover to perpetuate their own domestic abuses.
- I wish for white people to no longer insist on drawing false equivalence between the injustices they face and those faced by people of color. While there is a certain level of intersectionality there regarding socioeconomic status, the reflexive recentering of black struggle towards white sympathies robs black people of their emotional agency, functioning as is one of the oldest tricks in the white supremacist playbook.
- I wish for white people to realize that telling black people “I don't see color,” isn't much different than telling them, “I don't see you.” We are not required to acknowledge our skin color as an existential threat to our lives, and to relay that to those for whom we have made it necessary to do so through thoughtless platitudes like this one is thoughtless and cruel.
- I wish for white people to realize that it's not only okay to believe what black people are telling them about the way white society treats them both individually and systemically are true, it's absolutely necessary if we are all to have a more free, just, and equal society.
This list is by no means complete, nor do I imagine it will ever be. There are just too many problems, and not enough solutions, or time. But hell, if I don't ask for these things now, I can't hope to get any of them in time for Christmas. Not as if there's any likelihood of that happening, but wishful thinking is just about the only thing standing between a lot of people and a lot of shit on fire right now.
To those on the front lines in Ferguson, New York City, Berkeley, and every other major city where protests are happening, and to all of those on social media who have been helping to coordinate protest efforts and are raising their voices in dissent with the black victims of state violence, I just want to say thank you. Thank you so much for what you've been doing, and what you will continue to do. Your courage and will to power have brought the presence of history upon us, and are a true inspiration.
As to the families of the victims – Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Tanesha Anderson, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, and the countless others who have fallen this year, and every year before – may you find even the tiniest kernel of peace and goodwill this holiday season in the middle of such tragedies, for you deserve it more than most. May this movement bring about lasting change of the kind we've not seen in decades, and may your children not have died in vain.