This is a prescient verse from 3000 years or so ago:
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
Joshua 24:15, AV
White people are gonna have to choose, every single time. Every single time we choose complacency and choose safety and choose white solidarity we are choosing wickedness and cruelty and destruction. Whether we want to be honest about or not, whether we want to expose our dalliance with evil or not–it is still there. Silence is not a cover. We all see it. There is no corner to hide in, no place to be safely racist hoping that we will not be required to stand up for what we believe in, for good or for ill.
There is no Switzerland for the moral cowards.
I’m afraid it has to be that stark. It has to be that confrontative.
You, as a white person, may be working towards a better way, but without wanting to make that hard commitment to break with your whiteness and your racism. Good for you, but you need to be told that you haven’t really broken from it yet.
I’ll encourage any of us to abandon our commitment to racism and white supremacy. I’ll work with anyone. I’ll listen to almost anyone.
What I won’t do is pretend that you’ve arrived, that your half-way measures are good enough.
We have to be completely bold and honest here. We have to grasp that nettle. We have to embrace the stings and the sorrow and we have to dig into ourselves so that we might repent.
I can make it a bit clearer for you, and help you find a path that has fewer detours.
But I am going to insist that you go all the way to the end. There is no half-way point that’s good enough.