Over the past couple of weeks, for obvious reasons, I’ve been giving
greater than usual thought to what “white privilege” means. I have been seeking
out and reading every account I can find of what it means to African Americans,
because I realized that it was impossible to think about what I viewed as white
privilege, no matter how liberal and non-racist I have tried to be in my life,
without first fully understanding what it meant to the people directly affected
by it. I could enumerate everything I figured was different in my life than in
the lives of people of color, but if the other piece of the puzzle wasn’t
there, I couldn’t possibly comprehend the multiple subtleties of racial and
ethnic discrimination.
This wasn’t unknown territory to me by far. As a journalist, as a
liberal, as an expatriate and as someone intellectually curious about the world
around me, these were questions that I had been studying and seeking to
identify with for decades. But with the horror of the circumstances that are
currently sparking worldwide protests and with all of the horrors that have
preceded it, it has become crystal clear to me that, no matter how great my
empathy with the victims of racism and of daily discrimination might be, it is
not something I have ever had to live in the flesh and it is unlikely that it
ever will be.
I told myself that, in order to champion the cause of those being
discriminated against, I needed to delve much deeper than ever before into the
real meaning of Black Lives Matter. I had to ask myself how, in this day and
age, half a century after the civil rights era, such a phrase could even be a
modern-day slogan. It was only plausible in the context of renewed racism, a
rebirth of attempts to invoke white supremacy, an era of not merely tone-deaf
leadership, but, indeed, of complicit and authoritarian leadership.
What I discovered in this search was that it wasn’t enough to declare
myself a liberal who had spent a lifetime striving to “do the right thing”, to
shrug off early-learned attitudes by affirming and reaffirming my dismissal of
them. It was necessary to look back at my background and the society I came
from to better understand why we whites can never seem to “own” the problems
faced by black people and why so many white people don’t even try.
I was brought up in a homogenous society in west central Ohio. I lived
in a small town where just about everybody was “people like us”. Despite the
fact that a lot of us were second, third or fourth-generation Americans from
German and Scots-Irish families, we seldom if ever thought about this and tended
more to identify, especially at Thanksgiving time, with the English pilgrims
who had come to the so-called New World in search of liberty from tyranny and
freedom of faith. We were oblivious to the fact that many of the New England
Yankees who claimed their roots went back to the Mayflower Compact probably
wouldn’t have crossed the street to spit in our hair if had been on fire. We
were also oblivious to the fact that, thanks to slavery, many if not most
African Americans’ roots in America ran much deeper than our own. All the more
so because they had soaked American soil with their blood for generations.
No, to our mind, we were the
bulwark of American society. We were what people were talking about when they
referred to “Americans”. Our town was not “predominately” white. It was uninterruptedly white. Blind white, you might say. And back
then, in the nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, local law enforcement
was paid to make sure it stayed that way. In the fifties and in the decades
before, there was a discreet sub-chapter of the Ku Klux Klan to which some of
the most prominent of male citizens belonged. But nobody talked about it. It
was a kind of secret lodge, if one that made its presence felt in the town’s
administration and churches. Indeed, I would only learn about it as an adult, in
interviewing local historians, one in particular, who had done the pertinent
research and could still name names.
That homogenous town was our world. It was what we thought of as
America. We only saw people of other races when we strayed beyond the city
limits and on those rare occasions, we looked on them almost as being
“foreigners”, or at least not quite “people like us”. This wasn’t racism
proper, but rather, blind prejudice ingrained from birth.
We only saw African Americans—whom the more polite and proper of us
referred to as Negros or colored people—when we went shopping or on some other
outing with our parents a few times a year to the neighboring industrial city
of Lima. We were almost tacitly cautioned —a pinch on the arm, a warning thump on
the back of the head—not to stare at them, and to avoid contact or conversation
unless they were working in the stores and shops we frequented. But that was,
in fact, rare. They tended to be industrial and maintenance workers, police or
firemen, short order cooks, dishwashers and delivery personnel, not the kind of
people local white businessmen hired to deal directly with the public. And we
needn’t have worried since, back then, they avoided contact with us as well.
They, unlike us, knew precisely the world they were living in.
The homogenous community in west central Ohio was, in a manner of
speaking, the milk we were nursed with. I wasn’t from a racist immediate
family. If my maternal grandfather, a first-generation American of German
descent, was indeed openly racist, my mother was not. I mean, not any more so
than any other small-town, middle-class, white woman of those times. She taught
us that all people were the same in the eyes of God and that we should never
discriminate against people of other races. We shouldn’t, however, date or
marry a black person. Not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with it. But the society of our
time, we were told, was not ready for it and as a result, we and our children
were bound to live a life of suffering and social ostracism if we formed a
mixed-race couple.
In all fairness, however, we were also warned to avoid marrying a
Catholic for the same reason. We were Protestants. What would our children be
if we insisted on marrying a Catholic? At the time, that didn’t seem to make
sense to me. Today I probably would have said, “White, privileged and free to
choose.” But back then I was just confused. Later, however, I understood that
this was a societal problem as well. My mother’s own upbringing had been in a
German Lutheran community where the split went back to the very birth of
Protestantism and it was “bad enough” that she had converted to Methodism when
she married my father, let alone “getting involved” with a Catholic.
As I’ve thought over and over as an adult about discrimination, I’ve
sometimes ventured that perhaps the only inkling, the only fleeting image we
small-town white people might have had of the million-times-worse ostracism
black and brown people feel in a white majority society is if we can think back
to what the rivalry between Catholics and Protestants felt like when we were
kids. And for the majority of children of later generations than mine, this was
no longer even an issue. The protest era of the sixties and the ecumenical push
by Pope Paul VI and other religious leaders had happened by then, so just about
everybody but black and brown people had gotten “socially well.” And for a
time, the success of the civil rights era made it look as if they might be on
their way to full freedom and democracy as well.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that minorities are far better off than
before the civil rights era and the equality laws that it engendered, it is
clear that not all is well. On the contrary, there is a far too strong
retrograde tide toward returning to “how things used to be”. And it is based on
fears about the impending loss of white privilege. The demographics no longer
favor white dominance. Relatively soon, the majority will be people of color,
and the fear of white supremacists is that, if democracy survives, their
misdeeds of the past, their discriminatory behavior, their “equal but separate”
apartheid mentality is going to come barreling back to haunt them. And so the
worst and most radical of these terrified white privilege advocates have thrown
their full and blind support behind a would-be autocrat who is doing his
damnedest to undermine democracy and make America white again.
If white liberals realize that something has to be done fast to defend
and revive our fading US democracy, then they (we) also need to see that this
battle for survival is inextricably linked to the need to extirpate the continuing
curse of racial and ethnic discrimination. And the only way we can do that, as
white people, is to start seeing the world through a different lens than the
one that our own upbringing and white culture has provided us with. We need to
be listening to minority community leaders, front-line minority activists,
black and brown writers and journalists, minority film directors, the most venerated
of still surviving civil rights leaders, and so on, without interrupting to
say, “Yes but, what about...?” It is our time to listen and learn, because
there is more at stake than minority rights. The entire American system is at
risk, and if white supremacists win the race war, it will be game over for
American democracy.
This is why George Floyd matters. Over the last two weeks, I have
repeatedly heard especially whites, but some African Americans as well, try to
minimize the importance of Floyd, the black man who was literally lynched on a
city street in broad daylight by four police officers. The narrative of these
people is that we should be careful not to turn George Floyd into a “hero”.
They try to argue that Floyd was being arrested for a felony—passing a counterfeit
twenty-dollar bill, which we have no reliable evidence to prove that he even
knew was counterfeit—that he may not have been a model citizen, or, as the
president tweeted, he was “not a nice person.” But within the scheme of the rule
of law, and human and civil rights, none of that matters.
There is nothing to prove or disprove that George Floyd was “a hero”.
But he most certainly was a martyr for the cause of human and civil rights. He
didn’t choose to be. I am almost certain,
in fact, that, given a choice, Floyd would have elected to be alive rather than
a martyr. But whether he or anyone else would have wished for a different outcome,
Floyd has become the straw that broke the camel’s back. Floyd was the torch
that lit the fuse to the powder keg. And if one nefarious political movement in
the US has, for the last three and half years, been coaxing rampant racism out
from under the rocks where it has been hiding since the sixties, the current demonstrations
taking place in all fifty states promise to spark the political movement that
will seek to drive racist demons back into the dark where they came from.
George Floyd is a symbol. He is emblematic of millions of African
Americans who continue, on a daily basis, to be discriminated against and
brutalized by bad cops and other bad actors. His death has been rendered emblematic
of the deaths of people of color not only in the relatively distant past, but
also in recent years and up to the present day. He is the iconic symbol of others
like Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, Freddie Gray, Manuel Loggins Jr., Ronald
Madison, Kendra James, Sean Bell, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, and so many
more African Americans who have been abused and summarily executed as a result
of police brutality, and whose killers, in most cases, have gone free. George Floyd’s
horrific and abundantly documented execution has become the place where not
only minorities, but also democrats of all races have drawn a line in the sand
and said enough is enough. This ends now!
To say that we whites—those who discriminate, those who don’t but do
nothing to stop it, those who consider ourselves non-racists but who aren’t
willing to be activists, those who keep trying to see the plight of people of
color through our own skewed white vision without even attempting to walk
around in another’s skin—are “part of the problem” is to miss the point
entirely. We are not “part of the problem”, we are the problem. And as such must re-educate ourselves to become
the beating heart of the solution.
