For White People Who Want the Racist Nightmare to End, We Must Reclaim Our Lives from Anti-Black Racism
We who are the descendants of indentured European servants and of European working class immigrants who fought back against bosses and their police to form unions and fight for better pay, better working conditions, the weekend, benefits, that few my age and younger have,
We who are the descendants of peoples who became white as a ruling class strategy to divest us of our shared humanity and solidarity with all working and oppressed people, and gave us entitlements, rights, the social and cultural wages of whiteness, as W.E.B DuBois wrote, that ultimately kept many of us economically down, politically weak, and spiritually impoverished,
We who are the descendants of people who became white through our collective consumption of hundreds of years of toxic anti-Black racist culture from the minstrel show to COPS that reinforces anti-Black laws, policies, and de facto rules that allow every form of brutality and insult to be unleashed against those who became Black in the process of extracting the wealth and power that built the United States,
We who are raised to be white in a white supremacist capitalist society must remember that white privilege was both a granting of access to resources and rights, while also a strategy to warp our worldview in anti-Black racism, so that our anger and resentment about working everyday to make someone else rich, is directed not at the bosses and the ruling elite, but other working people who are Black and of color. A strategy of maintaining structural inequality by granting non-ruling class white people the opportunity to regaining a sense of our own power through our socially encouraged, protected and often rewarded, ability to desecrate the dignity, humanity and life of Black people.
We who are raised white must realize that this society that devours the lives of Black people, everyday, is also a society that systematically raises us to be either butchers of Black life or the defenders and supporters of those doing the butchering. We are raised in a culture where white parents brought their “becoming” white children to watch the lynching and participate in the private rioting of socially acceptable white violence against Black bodies. We who are raised to be white, are raised in a death culture to be soldiers inflicting daily dehumanization against Black people in a capitalist society that profits from the slow and sometimes quick taking of Black life that maintains the monstrocity of the status quo.
While the most devastating and brutal consequences of anti-Black racism take place against Black communities, anti-Black racism is also core to what it means to be white in this society — to be emotionally and spiritually malnourished, fed hate, fear, envy, and resentment that deliberately replaced the sustenance of solidarity, of love, friendship, community and mutually affirming authentic human interactions across what became the color lines of a white supremacist society.
Every murder of a Black person by the police, every justification of how scary and threatening that person was to armed, trained, law enforcement, every media account that assumes innocence on the part of the police and guilt on the part of the murdered, every justification for endless anti-Black racist war, is also a continuation of the campaign to turn descendants of European servants, descendants of insurgent European immigrants, into patriotic white people who fight for the agenda of the rulers and denounce all who strike out for a world that affirms the inherent worth and dignity of all people, that embraces our shared humanity, that centers economic, racial, disability, gender, environmental justice for all.
Anti-Black racism is war against Black communities and it is a cancerous, solidarity poisoning, justice denying, process of straightjacketing the hearts, souls, and liberatory imaginations of those of us who have been raised white, so that we will be butchers, soldiers, and “good white people” who call for calm over ending violence, when it’s Black lives taken.
Anti-Black racism is a structural nightmare that white people must wake up from. We must wake up and fight back against it. The fight for white people against anti-Black racism is one of solidarity with Black communities and Black people in our lives and in our hearts, but it is also a fight to break free from the death culture suffocating and malnourishing us and everyone raised white, who we love.
When indentured Europeans joined with enslaved Africans to overthrow the tyranny of the slave master, the goal was to all get free. When the descendants of indentured servants, of working class exploited immigrants, descendants of those who became white, join with the Black-led multiracial Black Lives Matter movement, today, we must remember that in our confrontation with anti-Black racism, in our efforts to dismantle white supremacy, in our work for racial justice, we are also working to all get free and reclaim our shared humanity and the power of our solidarity, to build a world where liberation rather then supremacy guides all of our lives.
Free Downloadable Resources on Taking Next Steps:
Towards the “Other America”: Anti-Racist Resources for White People Taking Action for Black Lives Matter by Chris Crass
Practice Showing Up: A Practice Guide for White People Working for Racial Justice by Jardana Peacock
Two Ways to Support the Movement for Black Lives Now:
