So You’re A Woke White Person?
You say you’re good with equality among races. You stand proud with your friends, denouncing prejudicial treatment against people of color. I suspect, though, that it will be tough for some enlightened white people to shed deeply ingrained beliefs. You and your friends are taking some bold steps. The walk seems to back the talk, but deep down in your soul, old habits are difficult to break. Wearing a Protest t-shirt is nice, but it won’t change your nature.
Congratulations if you’ve taken a stand against racism, but understand this. You’ve still got much work to do. The excitement of revolution will fade. You will find yourself among family and friends who don’t share your enthusiasm for change. You might live in a place where racism is a way of life for friends, colleagues and other members of your tribe.
One day you may find yourself socializing with long-time friends. It could be in a coffee shop, a pub or a church. Someone drops the N-bomb or makes disparaging racist remarks. Will you speak up, or will you remain silent? Will you allow the moment to pass, with no enlightenment from yourself?
How do you exorcise your prejudicial demons? It requires looking inward, with a deep and penetrating microscope. Let’s break it down.
How Do We Learn Racial Prejudice?
Racial superiority is not an innate human characteristic. It‘s learned. We’re not born dividing the world by skin color. We learn from someone who learned from someone who learned from someone else. It can hide and take residence in the depths of your being. You can’t see it. It doesn’t announce it’s presence but rears it’s ugly head when you least expect it.
Environmental Learning
If you learned it from a parent, sibling or schoolmate, it’s environmental learning. You didn’t read it. You did not take an Introduction to Prejudice course, nor did you experience it. You absorbed it from your tribe and surroundings. Some children are indoctrinated with prejudicial beliefs from an early age. It’s drilled into them on a daily basis. This is difficult to overcome, and children have a built-in excuse for it. But as they grow into adulthood, they can no longer play the Kid card as a social pardon for prejudicial beliefs.
These learning flaws can be overcome. If they are perceptive, children maturing into adulthood can learn to see things through a different lens. They can raise their own personal bar and will themselves to jump higher than those around them.
Experiential Learning
You may learn prejudicial attitudes from your own experiences. You can create a racist based on negative experiences with other races. But here’s the trick. Your interpretation of each experience may be impacted by your environmental learning. Donald Trump famously stated, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”. In Trump’s hypothetical, his followers actually see him commit murder, but their environmental indoctrination leads them to interpret the experience and forgive their hero.
How Do We Unlearn Racial Prejudice?
Do Revisionist History
You now know that American history may not have unfolded as you learned in school, so it’s time to do some revision. Re-learn African American history, but be aware that all references are not created equal. You must choose your historical references carefully, casting a critical eye at all times. Use fact-based sources rather than opinion pieces or fictional stories. Whatever you do, stay clear of social media.
Get To Know People of Colour
I learned a mind-altering lesson as a 12-year old, from a wise uncle who taught me to never use the N-word again. Later, as I matured into adulthood, I created a new environment. My learning capacity was expanded to include a universe of new possibilities. I learned that the black people are nothing like the stereotypes I learned through my environment. Sadly, I discovered that their American experience was vastly different from my own.
- The last documented lynching of a black person occurred in 1981, in Mobile Alabama. The local Ku Klux Klan was in an uproar about the result of a local trial and sought Klan-style retribution. They randomly selected 19-year old black teenager Michael McDonald. Two Klan members beat him mercilessly and hung him from a tree. Let me repeat this again. The year was not 1931, but 1981.
- A guy I know was telling a black friend about his family history, that his lineage was traced back hundreds of years. The black friend replied that many black Americans are not big users of Family Tree software. Why not? Because many cannot trace their families before the 1800s. Before and during the Civil War many slaves were separated from their families by their white masters. Children lost parents and many wandered the South in a fruitless quest to re-connect.
Find The Better You
Dig deep and inside yourself and replace deep-seated prejudices with the better angels of your nature, as described by Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies…The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. “ — Abraham Lincoln (March 4, 1861/First Inaugural address)
Stay The Course
If you are publicly calling out racial prejudice, and do it in the face of naysayers, then you’ve come a long way toward transforming your inner self. This is key to positive change in a nation that is bitterly divided. Laws can be legislated and monuments removed, but people with prejudicial beliefs have deep-seated anger, and will not be forced to change. The sad reality is that many will never change, but those that do will do so because they find their better angels.
