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by Lena Potts
I get nervous around White Americans. I didn’t always. Growing up, I had the immense privilege of largely ignoring race, despite being Black. Even now, I enjoy the privileges of rarely having to fear for my safety or that I’m being unfairly treated, like so many of my peers.
But since the election, I’ve noticed that I have a hard time trusting that White Americans are my allies, in, well, most things. An older White man holds the door open for me- I feel confusingly uneasy about it. I visit my friend in Santa Cruz, and the entire coffee shop is White, and a man says he “just wants to grab my hair”- I’m stressed. Two weeks ago I went to a country bar in San Francisco, looked around, and almost had a panic attack.
Race-based stress and fear is everywhere, often noted in the reverse direction of my own. As police violence toward Black people grows in publicity, so do race-laden claims of fear. The victim, before they were shot, posed a threat, or somehow seemed dangerous in that moment (we won’t even spend time here dwelling on how a 12 year old at a playground seems like a threat to anyone who doesn’t want to kill Black folks).
However, when we zero in on police shootings, we lose sight of the fact that they are not the problem. They are a tragic, disgusting symptom.
According to exit polls, 62% of White men and 52% of White women voted for Donald Trump. Overall, 57% of White Americans who voted voted for him.
If I’m in a room with 10 random White voters, five of them thought to themselves, at best, “hey, I know he said he grabs women by the pussy, I know he said Mexican immigrants were rapists, and I know he repeatedly refuses to denounce the White supremacists who vocally support him, but he’s a good businessman [deeply questionable], and I like that he’s straightforward [about his bigotry], so he should be the President”. At worst, they agreed with his bigotry.
That’s a terrifying lineup from my position as a woman and a person of color. Half the people in that room are either explicitly anti-me and my basic existence, or, best case scenario, voted for someone to lead the entire country who is vocally against my rights, dignity, and humanity. Why? For a god damn tax break, or because he’s entertaining.
While injustice and inequality have always existed, the basic fact of his success allowed a coming out of the closet for his worst supporters- many far more competently vicious than he is. Because he won, they all won, we had Charlottesville. Mosques are being burned down, and Muslim women are being openly attacked. They are in the open now, protected by their own numbers, and by the fact that one of the most powerful people in the world will stand by them, represent their interests, and, even in the face of utter horror, avoid denouncing them.
All White Americans, obviously, are not this. But half of White Americans knowingly let this happen.
How could I not be nervous?
To be clear, this is not racism. Racism is the nativist and prejudiced motivations for repealing DACA under the guise of safety, when the program requires a clean criminal record. Racism is the perception that Black Americans are a constant danger, when in reality the vast majority of White Americans that are killed are killed by other White Americans (84.2%). Or that Black Americans do a lot of drugs, when Black and White Americans use drugs at the same rate. Institutional racism is the fact that despite those numbers, Black Americans are imprisoned at roughly 6 times the rate of Whites for drugs. Racism is that someone told me they were “afraid of the turban guys”, but radical Islamic terrorists (who one would unfortunately assume she meant by “turban guys”) pose dramatically less of a threat to humanity than lawnmowers. Data like this would make you think the President would spend more time protecting us from rogue yard equipment than banning people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. But we’re not dealing in facts. The perceptions and subsequent treatment of, on both an individual and systemic level, people of color, that are clearly based in prejudice rather than the facts, is racism.
The fear of that empowered, systemic injustice, which has nearly always beaten, slaughtered, and imprisoned people who look like you, is completely justified. As is fear of the individual agents within it, as over half of them make active and open decisions to uphold that system of oppression. I am not disproportionately and unjustly profiling you. I am interpreting the social and political decisions of a majority of a group of people who by and large have more political and social agency than myself. That’s not racism, that’s reading the facts.
Recently publicized dashcam footage shows a Georgia police officer assuring a White woman during a traffic stop that she would not be harmed, because they “only kill Black people”. He said that, out loud, in an attempt to calm her. Not as a gross joke amongst the guys, not as a satirical critique, not while quietly intimidating a Black person- secret or closed. Open, purposefully, meaningfully.
Sure, we can say that is one man’s feeling. But when that feeling is reflected in the killings of hundreds of Black people by police, who are not often prosecuted, by a judicial system that favors the systems of authority already in place, within an even larger criminal justice system that imprisons Black people (particularly men) at a wildly disproportionate rate, it is not one man’s feeling. Wee should continue to deeply scrutinize police, not because they are bad, but because they are representatives of systems of power, like our leadership.
We also need to think bigger. “We only kill Black people” becomes a generalized sentiment that trickles down, in a quieter, but just as insidious form, throughout our society. It allows people to believe that they can march through towns wearing KKK garb. That they can burn down mosques and assault helpless people, or that schools can enforce dress codes that don’t allow Black students to wear their hair the way it grows from their heads, or that we can continue to take and take and take from Native people without question or recompense. It allows roughly half of America, and 57% of White America, to vote for Donald Trump.
To White people who consider themselves allies of POC and other marginalized groups: this is a time where your allyship requires more. As the hatred (that has always been there) is emboldened and grows louder, so must your support.
Because I’m not blaming you at all, half of White people who didn’t do this. But I am asking you to imagine being me, in that room of 10 White Americans in 2017. In fact, please imagine being someone a hell of a lot more marginalized than me, understanding that half of the people you’re looking at knowingly did this. If you were standing in that room, I’d hope you’d want to reach out and truly, truly help that person. Most places are that depressing, scary room right now. Show up, reach out to folks, and find out how you can be actively, not passively supportive. Because we are so, so, confused, angry, saddened, emboldened, and afraid.
