I’m involved in a group that’s digging into American white racism, and I gotta say, there are times when I feel so discouraged that I feel like giving up. It’s too hard, it’s too much to deal with, it’s so overwhelming—and no one’s really a racist, anyway, except for maybe some white people in the South with CBFs on their pickup trucks. Or something.
What I saw was some white people saying “Is it really helpful to call anyone a ‘racist,’ when that could just push them away from wanting to change? Calling someone ‘racist’ isn’t going to get us anywhere, and besides, you might be tempted to call me ‘racist’ and then we’ll just have to stop being friends.”
Well, maybe it wasn’t so blatant, but it’s how I read it.
One thing that has really helped me to dig into this is found in my recovery program, which teaches me that I must look at who I am, completely and honestly, if I want to be healed completely and in honesty.
It does not harm me to be called a racist, because I am. I am raised in a poisonous culture that pushes racism into our souls—into my soul—and I can’t escape the poisoning because I don’t like the medicine or even the label on the bottle.
Name-calling doesn’t have the sting for me that it once had, and I don’t have the defenses I once had. They’re still there, the defenses, and the stings still happen—but I am grasping that nettle so that I can yank it out entirely, root, branch, trunk, and fruit. It’s coming out slowly, and may never be fully removed, but I can’t be in denial because it’s inconvenient for social acceptance.
I mean, good Lord, if I’m not dealing with real racism that’s in me, that it’s somehow not part of me—then why do I keep making racist decisions? Am I somehow possessed by aliens? It’s not some giant set of repeating coincidences that just happens to me. There isn’t some ghostly hand holding mine and forcing it into actions my soul doesn’t agree with. My repeated decisions to avoid the critical hard work of choosing anti-racism is a very obvious sign that, under all the words and claims, I’m choosing racism. It is my default. It is me. The work is in the choosing to behave not according to my defaults. The work is in brokenness and asking God’s Holy Spirit to heal me and help me, today, in this walk. It is okay to call me racist because you are not lying. Go ahead. I weep that I am broken, but I am holding on to the Someone who is always there when I ask for help.
This recovery is what works for me. I’m not advising anyone else to do it this way.
For me, that there is a stigma attached to the word “racist” means that it is a word used to describe moral depravity. And we know racism is a sin (well, most of us–there are more than a few who delight in their racism). And Sin is Bad. And we’re capital-G Good. So we can’t be racist.
Shrug.
Good people can be racist, and are. Racism is a sin, but it’s freely consumed and distributed by everyone, whether they are on the pavement or in the pulpit. We swim in it so freely we think that we are free of it because we’ve shunted aside certain words, but it is endemic and systemic, and there is a chasm between us white people and everyone else in America that is caused by more than economics or class. The chasm is caused by white racism. Full stop.
Someone is perpetuating racism, and I cannot believe it is being done by the victims of that racism. The only other party who could be part of this propagation are the ones who benefit from racism, and I gotta say, that’s us, the white people. The good people with good intentions and good words.
If we’re not going to face this head-on, if we’re going to avoid the hard work of looking at ourselves, if we’re going to talk and feel and commiserate, but not actually break racism—then why on earth are we wasting our time on stuff that doesn’t matter because it’s never going to change anything?
If racism exists, it comes from somewhere. If it exists in the human world, it can be resolved by humans. If it comes from one set of people versus another, then that set of people is responsible for destroying it.
That’s us. The not-racists, I guess.
IMHO, the challenge there is that we use the same word to mean multiple, conflicting things. Racist = a system, intentionally created to stomp on people of color. It is hateful and malignant. Racist = a person who likes that idea. Racist = a person who hates that idea but happens to have been born in a place where the idea already had control of things. When someone uses the word, the listener has to decode which of those meanings is intended. I believe, when I hear you say you are racist, you mean #3. But when it is hurled at someone, it is a guess – and two of the three options are an accusation of intentional malice and toxicity.
And then we wonder why communicating about it is hard.
A terrific diversity trainer once laid out *her vocabulary for me – and I found it seemed to work much better with the groups she worked with, at least the ones I observed. She said:
“ISM is systemic. It’s about using the structures of power to create oppression. A PERSON cannot be an “ism.” A PERSON of any color can be a biased, malignant BIGOT. Racism is bigotry made systemic. Reverse racism is a myth – ISM is about power structures, and only one side can be in power at any time. The side that isn’t in power cannot exercise the systems in their interest. Only the people in power can do that. A PERSON who is NOT a BIGOT can still be a part of and benefit from a RACIST system.”
And in so doing, she managed to express those things in a way that let people distinguish:
– Systemic abuse – which can be happening, and which you can be a part of even without knowing
– Bigotry that has the power of oppression behind it
– Bigotry that has no power
She made it easy for listeners to comprehend that ‘discussing their participation – active or passive – in a racist system was in no way related to “assessing or judging them as an individual to be a bigot.” At the same time, she was able to draw out cultural behaviors that participated and supported the ISM, with or without bigotry. And she was able to call out bigotry.
I was discussing this with a friend of color the other day. Her feeling was that was just “sugar coating to make it easier for white people to deal with.” I can understand that position, and still disagree with it. Language matters. Our ability to make someone understand is rooted not in insisting that they call it by a word we demand, but in our ability to communicate the needed information in ways that the audience can understand and process. When we use language in a way that makes it inherently feel like an attack, like any other animal, human listeners put up their defenses. That’s not just fragility – it’s human nature. When we ignore that, we limit the word’s ability to communicate anything else beyond the initial threat. The words we use shape what we are able to think and envision. At the moment, we often seem to be in the conversational version of “slap the hysteria out of her” mode. That only works in movies.
To destroy it, we must get a larger number of those folks to a place where they understand the nature of the systems, and that allowing the systems to remain in place = supporting those systems. Cuz enough people who see that – is what is required to demand it be changed.
JMHO.