This is a love letter. Really. And it comes from someone who has committed every sin that’s listed here—and many more that are not. I embrace you and love you and care for you, and I think you’re fabulous in what you intend. You’re so kind and generous at times!
But we need to talk about some stuff. We need to be real. We need to do something that we just don’t know how to do as white people: talk about ourselves without all the fronting and anger and hiding and shame.
Because not only are we hurting those around us—even those we call our friends!—we’re hurting ourselves. I’ll leave you with the work to investigate white life, but we are living in despair more than we want to acknowledge, with white males killing ourselves at record rates at the dead-ended-ness of white life.
So let’s talk. And it’s okay to react with anger and frustration and even denial, because—and here me out here—at least we’re reacting. Maybe that’s the way we edge ourselves into listening.
When I share these things, it’s not to make yet another list of things we should do in order to be better white people to your Black family members and friends. Most of us can’t even comprehend what it means to be white in the first place (which we are very, very white indeed). So I won’t waste your time on how to be “better.”
I’m just going to give you some things that will help you be a more genuine person to the Black people around you, to the Black people you love and to the Black people you call your friends.
It’s so wonderful that you want your friends to be comfortable and happy in your presence, so I’m going to build on that.
Stop Saying You’re One of the Good Guys
I can hear you now. Your Black friend says something about what a white person said or did that has enraged them, hurt them, disappointed them, shut them down, or erased them. Your first response is “But surely not all white people, Jason. Surely you know that I’m one of the good guys.”
Stop. Really stop.
Did you even take the first step here of listening to your friend. They were telling you something—you! It is an incredible gift when any friend trusts us enough to tell us something about them. They trust you to hear them, see them, feel them.
Do you know what they’re even asking for when they tell you this? This is not a rhetorical question. I’m genuinely asking you to think through what a connected person is doing when they share intimate information with you. What do they want?
Hint: it’s not what you want in accepting that information. I suspect the thing you’re waiting for is that the complaint will be over so you can correct your friend’s misapprehension of the details and the situation. “What you heard was…” and “I’m sure it didn’t really happen like that…” are common.
But even more common, especially when you start thinking you’re “woke,” is “But surely, Jason, you know I’m not like that—I’m one of the good guys!” Hashtag NotAllWhitePeople.
Maybe it is true. May it is indeed “not all white people.” But should you ever get a chance to overhear your friends talk about us, you’re gonna be quite surprised. Maybe unpleasantly. To your friends, it’s near-universal that indeed it’s hashtag AllWhitePeople.
Really. This isn’t some shameful thing I’m sharing, some sign that maybe I have the wrong kind of friends, and that your friends don’t say this about you.
They do.
You don’t know what it’s like to be Black 24×7.
You really don’t know.
You don’t even know what it’s like to be white 24×7, because it’s invisible to you. It is just normal. You get good customer service—so your friend Jason must be making it up that he was treated rudely. You get the car you want at the lowest rate possible—so your friend Janet must be imagining that she was treated with disrespect in the sales office. You live with people who are just like you and who accept your presence in your neighborhood—so the Smiths must be paranoid to think that it’s their neighbors calling the police on them all the time and staring at them when they walk down the streets of their own neighborhoods.
You really don’t know.
You can’t assume that because you have all good intentions and thoughts that your friends know this about you. You really don’t understand how the words in your head don’t come across more clearly than your actions do.
One thing that’s helpful for us white people to know is that we start at zero with our Black friends, and that at every step of the way we have to build trust. And when we break trust, we revert to zero—and the curve is much steeper the next time. After just a few betrayals, often only one, the curve is a line 90 degrees straight up.
You need to know this.
Not because your friends are snowflakes or fragile or unforgiving. But because your friends’ experiences are near-universal. And because your friends are genuine human beings with hopes and dreams and memories and experiences, just like you.
You hurt them and betray them when you don’t listen. After a while, they just stop. You’re put in a zone of relationship where you can hang around, but you’re no longer within.
Don’t be that friend.
It is okay to listen and accept this, and it is important to have this awareness as you push into friendships with your Black acquaintances.
Does this mean you should walk on eggshells around your Black friends?
I don’t know the answer. Maybe you should. Maybe you should try respect and confidence and listening and affirmation. Maybe you should hear out your friends always and not talk over them or fix them or correct them.
Maybe—now hear me out here!—you could just sit with them and grieve with them and, you know, be their friend.
It’s a thought.
Stop Saying You Don’t See Color
Oh my god, if there’s one thing I could do, right now, to stop white people from saying, it’s this:
“I don’t see color.”
What a chickenshit thing to say.
Maybe you’re one of the tiny, tiny few people who genuinely have physical issues so that you see no color—no reds and greens, no blues and oranges, absolutely nothing. Just black and white. Ahem.
For you, you can skip this section entirely.
But for the rest of us, we see color.
Let’s not be cute and say that what we mean is that we don’t see the color of people & that we treat them all the same.
Because give me five minutes with you and I’ll point out the ways in which you see color and use it to make decisions.
Trust me on this.
You see color. You really do see your friends’ appearance and size and shape and face and gait and hair style. With some effort, you see their age and other details of their personalities—happy, morose, cheerful, depressed, uplifting, life-sucking. You know their politics and their religious affiliations to some degree. You know their favorite foods and the stuff they avoid. You know their allergies and their desires, their loves and their lusts and even their hatreds, their strengths and weaknesses.
I’m saying it’s obvious that you see your friends, and that of the few you call your close friends, you have an infinite number of ways to distinguish one from the other. (You don’t really confuse your close friends, do you?)
You see your friends, and you see their color as well.
What you probably mean is something that sounds wonderful: color is used in our Western culture to signify meaning and worth of the individual and the group, and color is used to segment those groups into the favored and the disfavored. And you don’t want to do this because hey, it’s wrong to do that!
I get that desire. Believe me. (Remember I’m speaking from experience here.)
But as a white person, you get to do this categorization-by-color automatically & usually without your direct consent—and you go along with it because it’s agreeable to your values.
Your inherent values of whiteness.
Maybe you’re one of the “woke” people who’s starting to see that this is a flummery and a prepostery. Color in the physical world doesn’t have a damned thing to do with the value of a human. Segmenting people into favored and disfavored groups based upon color is wrong, you say, and so—you do something really, really dumb: you say you just don’t see color.
Dude.
It’s admirable that you want a color-blind society. Really. Wouldn’t it be great if we judged someone by the content of their character and not the color of their skin?
Yes. It would. Indeed, it would.
The problem is that right now, we don’t, and that our refusal to see that world right now is incredibly harmful to the people who are affected by color-aware society of the empowered and the disempowered.
I want a color-free world as much as anyone does, maybe, but what I mean is perhaps different from what you mean.
What I mean is a world where genotype is acknowledged and celebrated and seen, but in much the same way as hair color or size or food allergies is seen—as something about the person that distinguishes them as an individual, with absolutely no meaning to them as a member of a group that is presumed to have shared inherent values, good or bad.
What most white people mean is a world where we can stop talking about color because it’s uncomfortable to admit that our white race is favored and blessed and cosseted and petted, and our neighbors and friends who are not white are also not given the exact same treatment and opportunities.
It’s not that we don’t see color. We just don’t want to see the world that we white people created and maintain and evangelize for: the world of white people as the top people. We don’t want to see how we fit into this world neatly, as if we’re created for it and it’s created for us, and we don’t want to see how much of a disjoint there is between our own acceptance and the experiences of our Black friends.
I have to be blunt here: our Black friends see color, all the time, because they know that color matters all them time. They have the continuous personal experience that it does.
All. The. Time.
In the past month four of my friends have said roughly the same thing, in a quiet moment when we were just sitting around, not really talking, but just, you know, talking.
“It sucks to be Black in America.”
I’ll leave it as an exercise to reader to figure out my response. Don’t make me a hero in it.
But four different occasions. Four different moments of the intimacy between friends. Four different friends. Four different points in our relationships, and they shared the same thing.
I don’t have to see what they see. I can choose to ignore color. I can choose to ignore my friends’ shared experiences. I can choose to ignore my friends.
That’s what being white means. That’s what “not seeing color means.”
But that means we don’t see and don’t know and don’t understand our Black friends.
Don’t be that kind of white friend.
You don’t see color?
Good. Ask the good Lord to make you Black for a week because to you “color doesn’t matter.”
Let me know what happens.
Don’t Say Talking About Racism Causes Racism
Talking about cancer doesn’t cause cancer.
Talking about hatred doesn’t cause hatred.
Talking about something doesn’t cause that something.
It is okay to talk about racism as if it is a real thing. Sure, we can use the argument that racism is a social construct, and doesn’t exist in the real world as a measurable value. You can’t weigh racism or find its atomic number or test its physical properties in a test tube.
I understand the desire to dismiss the value of racism because we think it’s ugly and wrong.
But it is a social construct with incredible force and meaning. Racism redirects Uber drivers. Racism changes discussions. Racism affects where we live, even the choices we’re offered on where to live. Racism affects our health and our wealth, our education and careers. It directs some of us as trusted candidates for office, and blocks some of us as untrustworthy and ineligible to even accept positions in office (Birtherism about Barack Obama was peak whiteness, and an enormous number of white people today still believe the lies.)
You want another example of fiat meaning? Money. There is no real meaning to Element 79. It’s a metal with certain properties that distinguish it from Element 78 and Element 80, among others. There are about 412 million pounds of it available in the world—which sounds quite common to me. It has certain properties that attract it to the human eye—it’s shiny, malleable, ductile—but so are other metals and substances in varying degrees.
But gold has driven empires to rise and collapse. Gold has been one of the largest forces in history to effect events, as well as affect them once they happen. The Western Hemisphere is colonized because of gold.
What gives gold its value? Nothing at all.
Except that people think it has value.
That’s it.
It has value because people think it has value.
Whether that sounds crazy or not—it is the way the world works right now. A hypothetical construct in the world of the human mind only. (Gold doesn’t have value in the physical world. It is just gold.)
Yet this metal is still seen as the symbol and meaning of wealth. It represents money, itself an artificial construct.
Try living in the world by saying “I don’t see money.”
You will starve.
Maybe in the world of Star Trek we can stop talking about money just as we can stop talking about racism.
But talking about racism now is simply talking about the world that we live in. The reality is that there is racism in our world. Talking about it doesn’t create it. Talking about it reveals it, shows us how much it drives our choices—and gives us the opportunity to affect the way it effects our principles and actions.
Racism exists. Talking about it acknowledges that, and gives us the space to be honest on what it means.
Don’t Say If We Just Do Something Else, Racism Fixes Itself
Sorry I sound elliptical here, but there are several things here that I want to mention, and I don’t want to limit its scope in the headline.
What I’m talking about are all the solutions we have to racism that don’t actually mean that racism will be attacked head on and extirpated.
What I’m talking about are the solutions we want to try that appeal to our sense of good and right and true & that also don’t require us to do any heavy lifting in and by ourselves.
What I’m talking about are solutions that come from our religious views or our economic theories or our political slants.
I understand.
Behind these cheap and easy and unworkable solutions is the desire to keep ourselves comfortable just as we are.
If everyone would just believe Jesus and follow his words, we’d have no racism.
If everyone would just stop believing in the sky god and see each other as equals, we’d have no racism.
If everyone would just share in all the effects of the economy where the state controls the means of production and the workers make as much money as the bosses, we’d have no racism.
If everyone would just have the opportunity to be entrepreneurs and build their own wealth, we’d have no racism.
If everyone would just follow the president—or oppose the president—we’d have no racism.
I understand these views. Really. I believed them for a while, and kinda still do. It is a gentle hope, and incredibly tempting.
If I just lightly follow a set of principles that fit my religious/economic/political viewpoint, then the intractable problem of racism will somehow disappear, with little or no real effort on my part.
I’m a Christian believer, for example. One of the most identifiable conditions of Protestant/Evangelical American Christianity is the belief that racism goes away if people become Christians.
Uh…. I have some incredibly bad news from history and experience. Reader, it does not.
The Western Hemisphere was founded to get the gold (see earlier point), and along with that comes the colonization and evangelism of the Christian faith, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. (There are other sects, such as the Orthodox in Alaska/British Columbia, but not as much of a force as Western European Christianity.)
America was largely founded by Protestants of the most evangelical kind.
America is perhaps one of the most overtly Christian nations in the world.
America has had moments of great Christian revival throughout the centuries. (First, Second, Third, and Fourth Awakenings, anyone?)
Almost all of America’s leadership has been Protestant males. (Kennedy was Roman Catholic.)
Christianity is embedded in American culture and power to a degree unlike almost anywhere else.
Has racism disappeared in America? Has it even lessened in its grip on American culture and power?
Reader: It has not.
Racism infected America with chattel slavery and bondage. Racism infected Christianity and Christian theology and Christian praxis and even Christian organizations. (Churches split in the American Civil War over the issue of slavery, y’all. We couldn’t even agree on that being universally sinful and degrading of the Imago Dei in the lives of our Black brothers and sisters. Christian owned other Christians.)
Racism affects how Christians choose their leaders and how Christians choose their theological centers of meaning. Racism even affects the theological points developed by leaders affirmed for their theological values.
Saying that if people follow Jesus they won’t be racist is perhaps a wonderful thought, but history and current experience contradict this in nearly every single experience of the Christian faith and praxis.
Socialism and capitalism both work heartily with racism. Socialist countries in Europe with the highest functioning economies and social equality still have issues with race, especially with Black people living within their socialist paradises.
I’m assuming I don’t have to explain how capitalism gladly and gleefully works with racism.
Economic theories don’t touch racism, and becoming more socialist or capitalist won’t change American racism, and won’t affect white supremacy and whiteness.
Maybe there is a way to incorporate antiracism into these things so that they can become tools of antiracism, but they in themselves do not display any real power to extirpate racism.
I believe that we use these as excuses to avoid the work that we need to do to fight racism and destroy it, because in order to truly change this world, we will have to make enormous, strenuous efforts that will cost us time, money, respect and comfort.
Want to split a church? Bring up the racism of the past and present. (Ask any white pastor if they will bring someone Black to lead them in antiracist work. Get back to me when that event actually happens.)
Want to split a movement? Ask the leaders to address Black voices and Black concerns, and incorporate them into their campaigns and party as equals with equally valid and challenging viewpoints.
Racism is going to exist no matter how Christian we become, or how fully our economic theories are enacted.
I’ll add more to this essay as I come across more ideas.
This is enough for now.
But let me remind you, my dearly beloved white people, that I’m just as white as you are, just as prone to error and failure and passion and justification as you, just as blind as you, just as weak and fragile and resentful.
What I share is to help us, together, to act better. Maybe we’ll never be better. But for now, we can work to do better.