Evidently I’m a statistical outlier here, at least according to a recent diary, since I live in a predominantly Black Neighborhood in a City with a Black political leadership and work in a predominately Black workplace. Consequently, most of my neighbors, co-workers and a large number of folks I work with politically are AA.
I don’t know where the stats saying that most white folks here have only one Black acquaintance come from but if correct it certainly would go a long way to explaining why debates over racism here can take on such a distorted, “dialogue of the deaf” character.
It would also tend to explain why so many white folks here, IMO, talk about race and racism as though they were in a cultural studies class trying desperately to say what they think is the ”right” answer. It’s possible that the classroom may be the only place where they’ve ever had anything approaching a sustained dialogue with an African American. Needless to say, that can't really counterbalance a lifetime spent in an America where the colorline still divides and defines everyday reality. We do not live together so it follows that we do not know one another and no amount of formalized, class bound interaction in “safe” settings is sufficient to overcome this.
Their experience isn’t my experience, so my perspective isn’t their perspective. Neither is it the perspective of my Black brothers and sisters, though I hope their experience informs mine.
For example, I can’t for moment fault any AA for being alarmed at the prospect that the Democratic Party might be softening it’s opposition to white racism. It isn’t as though AA’s haven’t experienced such betrayals by political parties in the past and such betrayals were only possible because the majority of those classed as white were willing to put their own interests ahead of POC in general and AA’s specifically. This to the point that white supremacy became the ruling ideology in the US, enshrined in law and enforced by murderous terrorism.
Expecting Black Americans to shrug off this historical experience and accept, on faith, assurances that attempts to reach out to the WWC aren’t a replay of that past isn’t asking them to attend to the better angels of their nature. It’s asking them to behave as though they were angels.
This is something that has to be recognized and addressed by those who believe that we need an economic message that can speak across the color line. I happen to be one of these.
To those white folks who agree with me I have this to say: the concerns expressed by AA’s and POC are not the “problem”. White racism is the problem. While opposing white racism is a necessity for them, it is not their responsibility. It is a burden that has been forced on them that rightly belongs on our own shoulders. White racism is the responsibility of white folks and one that we have, as a class, historically shirked.
If we are going to argue that the message of economic justice is one that can unite us across the divisions of race and color, and I believe that it is, we better be prepared to demonstrate that we mean it. Not by lip service but by action. It up to us to articulate this message in a way that makes it plain that we will have no truck with the racial malice that underlies the whole notion of whiteness.
This isn’t going to be either simple or easy. We will be engaged in what amounts to a three front struggle. First, we must build trust and confidence with African Americans and POC. Second and necessary to the first, we must unflinchingly confront the corrosive racism among those classed as white. Third, we must confront and expose those supposedly liberal white folks who, because of their own complacent acceptance of the status quo, are perfectly willing to maintain and even aggravate the existing racial divides so long as they can point the point the finger at those they consider their social inferiors. The old game of the “good white folks” vs the “bad white folks.”
White racism is the responsibility of all those classed as white. We need to shoulder it without complaint and get to work.