Can America Heal From the Paralysis of Our Racial Divisions? Let's Discuss!
Back in March, I posted a video in which I discussed our national obligations related to making things better for people of color. Just the other day someone commented on the video and suggested that I post the script from the video as a shareable piece of writing.
So, here we are, and here is the full script written by Pete Musto & Ben Ben Austin-Docampo, and me.
Race in America: The Work We Must Do
Another February came and went. And I can't help but find myself thinking about the meaning of Black History Month. You may think it strange that a guy who looks like the bastard lovechild of Yukon Cornelius and a gender-neutral potato-head doll would preoccupy himself with the celebration of African American heritage. In a way, though, it is the responsibility of everyone, especially white people, to not only appreciate the minority experience in this country but also do our level best to understand the role we play in it. Because no matter how uncomfortable it might make us think to about, so many of the problems in American society really do boil down to the issue of race and racial inequality.
Now that does not mean race is the only issue we face. And no, not every single white person in this country lives a better life than every single black person. But the truth is that black and brown people across this country do have a shared experience: they are statistically and disproportionately disadvantaged by the systems of power designed to benefit white people. This is a very complex reality to face down because it brings so many difficult emotions out of people. As Americans, we like to think of ourselves as fundamentally good, and we go to great effort to ensure that our nation is portrayed in a noble light. But true nobleness doesn't mean blindly trusting our own instinct to assume we are always (or always have been) in the right. It means being willing & even eager to ask yourself what can I do better?
You might also find yourself asking, "where do we start?" Sadly, there will likely always be racist people. There's no accounting for taste or stupidity in this world. But just because the road to true equality may be a long and arduous one doesn't mean we should be afraid to walk the path. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." So, we start with an honest conversation about our past and how that shapes the present. We remake the systems and policies in place that exacerbate the issue. We name the steps we can take in every aspect of our society, and act upon them in the service of justice and equality.
Point 1: Modern & Historical Parallels
Americans have a funny relationship with the past. We love to extol the virtue of some of our darkest hours by promising to never forget 9/11 or always remember the Alamo, never mind the fact most people have no idea that many of the Texans who fought there did so because the Mexican government had deemed their ownership of slaves illegal. This kind of aggressively willful ignorance seems baked into our cultural DNA. We want the attack on Pearl Harbor to live on forever as a day of infamy. But when it comes to those less-than-proud chapters of our history, too downright shameful for a glossy Hollywood re-creation, our memory starts to get fuzzy.
Bring up topics like affirmative action or reparations and faster than you can say "collective amnesia," arguments for why "the past is the past" and "we need to move forward" start rolling on in. After all, we had a black president, and even let a black lady take the number 2 spot. Racism solved, right? While anecdotal, I just did a video on Reparations and instead of the normal hundred or two hundred thousand or even half a million views that my normal videos get… it is sitting there with fewer than 30,000. That tells me that people are uncomfortable with facing the dirtiness of our history.
It makes sense why this line of thinking is so appealing. The first slaves arrived in North America over four hundred years ago. How can anyone today be expected to feel responsible for something their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents did? But, while we may be absolved of any residual guilt from America's original sin, anyone with a brain and a pulse knows we are still dealing with the historical fallout, which clings to us at a cellular level. In order to extirpate this cancer eating at the heart of all of us, we must first admit that there's a problem.
Yes, slavery came to an end in 1865. But if you think racial inequality in this country ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, I've got a totally legit multi-level marketing business that's shaped like a sweet-looking pyramid (that's NOT AT ALL A SCAM) that I think you might be interested in. Never forget that following the 1877 Supreme Court ruling in support of segregation, Jim Crow laws throughout the U.S. made state-sanctioned oppression of black people the order of the day for almost 90 years. This system of disenfranchisement and violent abuse was cruel, as in the case of a North Carolina law preventing white and black students from sharing textbooks. And absurd, in the case of an Oklahoma ban on interracial boating.
The reason you still hear so much about the Jim Crow era isn't just because of some self-loathing millennial woke-mob on Twitter whining about how much America sucks. I'm sure any person of color over the age of 75 in this country will gladly tell you how it felt to not have the right to vote. You hear about it because it shaped the course of their lives.
And not just their lives! This is America, baby. Go big or go home. In other words, ban Chinese immigration until 1943, have the police look the other way while a bunch of sailors lead a full-on assault on Latino communities during Los Angeles' infamous Zoot Suit Riots, and don't forget to completely decimate the Native population and betray nearly every treaty we made with them.
You could throw in examples of codified anti-Irish, Jewish or Italian policies, too.
But in a way, that's getting away from the point. Uncle Sam's muddy bootheel has always come down hardest on the people who look the least like him. That's why to this day, evidence of rampant discrimination against people of color can be found in nearly every aspect of American life. Take for example a 2019 LA Times report that found the LAPD was almost five times more likely to stop black drivers, and three times as likely to stop Latinos, as they were to stop whites. That's despite the fact that a greater percentage of whites were found with drugs, weapons or other contraband.
No one is saying policing is easy. But that doesn't explain this kind of documented bias. Banking isn't easy either, I suppose, because according to 2014 Federal Reserve data, loan applications from black-owned businesses were twice as likely to be rejected as those from white-owned firms. Or how about school administration? It can't have been easy for New Jersey's South Orange-Maplewood school district to admit last year it had been using standardized test scores as justification for continuing the legacy of educational segregation. And think of the poor Virginia law clerks stuck with the task of clearing out the over 100 racist laws still found on the books in 2019, including one stating whites and blacks can't live in the same neighborhood. These were laws in black-and-white – on the books – in 2019.
So no, to the people who live with this kind of injustice every day, racial inequality is not some abstract concept cooked up by pipe-smoking academics looking to justify their tenure. Anyone who wants proof of the fact that there are two Americas needn't look any further than what has taken place over the course of the last nine months. On one hand, Black Lives Matter demonstrations against extrajudicial killings of African Americans by police were met with overwhelming force. On the other, a violent MAGA mob was allowed to swarm the U.S. Capitol building with no resistance – They treated the United States Capitol like it was a Walmart on Black Friday with truck nuts and camo tank tops on sale.
The truly infuriating thing about trying to have these kinds of conversations, though, is the constant attempts to undermine them by people arguing for an alternate reality. Trump's 1776 Commission report, released on Dr. King's birthday, literally uses the 'well, all the other kids were doing it' line of thinking by trying to justify slavery as not being a "uniquely American evil." He also banned (at all government agencies) any anti-discrimination training that discussed concepts like white privilege.
Point 2: Legislation/Policy
Unfortunately, the issue of race in America is so immense that many of my fellow whites are too intimidated to even think about it analytically. They're paralyzed with ego-driven connections between guilt and responsibility. And the problems related to racial inequality are so complex, it can feel like we're playing a game of whack-a-mole as one success only leads to many more challenges.
But it is our duty to one another to never give up the fight, and always stay vigilant against racist behavior, thinking, and policy. Because there's no denying that this is more pervasive than just a few guys with the same stupid haircut as Richard Spencer running around cosplaying as some kind of Tiki Torch militia filled to the brim with white-polo'd weaklings.
Now, as a potential stunt double for Jim Gaffigan, I understand that I am lightyears away from being an expert on what is best for black people or any person of color, for that matter. But I also know that one of the best things white people can do is stay informed and supportive of policy that will bring about real change.
This includes education reform, as a 2018 report from nonprofit EdBuild showed that schools in predominantly white districts in 21 states got $23 billion more in funding than schools in predominantly nonwhite districts. It also includes electoral reform. The ACLU has found that across the country, things like voter purges, lower numbers of polling sites in counties with larger minority populations, and bans on felons voting mean that one in thirteen Black Americans are unable to participate in our democracy. It means promoting diversity initiatives as well as local and national legislation aimed at fighting discrimination in areas like housing and medicine. And it means limiting the budgets of police departments. Cops don't need to be strutting around like they're on a hair-triggered tactical team deployed in an urban assault… Or marauding through neighborhoods in tanks. We need to retrain them. We need our police to be peaceful advocates of the communities they actually live in, and redirect the money saved by not buying that tactical gear and those tanks towards mental health programs and other social services.
Perhaps the biggest and boldest single legislative initiative the US can embark on to create greater equity among races, though, would be to end the policies which lead to mass incarceration. Once it became taboo to openly discriminate against people based on race, new ways of continuing discriminatory behavior were invented. This is directly tied to our criminal justice system, which disproportionately incarcerates men of color over any other segment of the population. But the really insidious part of this is that those who the criminal justice system labels "felons" are systematically divorced from all of the rights that were denied African Americans in the Jim Crow era - - voting, employment, housing, education, food stamps and other public benefits and exclusion from jury service. This is why Michelle Alexander named her seminal book on this topic The New Jim Crow. Ending this practice means ending a generational cycle that keeps people of color sidelined in the most vital aspects of society and perpetuates a caste system that keeps some folks at the bottom with almost no possibility of escape.
And remember, this isn't about you, necessarily. If you're white and your life is hard, no one is trying to tell you to get over it. Just know that the odds of the cops hassling you are lower, and banks less likely to look at you sideways, and the state is less likely to take your kids away. And by God, that has got to change.
Point 3: Advancing POC Leadership
Now, you've heard this before: representation matters. Part of making change is making space for people who have been historically excluded from wielding power. But shocker: it turns out people of color are their own best advocates. In order to legislate equity agendas we need to identify, support and vote more people of color into office. Likewise, businesses, schools and colleges should promote diversity in all areas. If people aren't present, it's hard for their needs to met (or even heard, for that matter)! Â So that's one thing. The other is listening to leaders of color when they speak. White people can take this as an opportunity to, you know, shut-the-fuck-up for a minute, and trust that sometimes the best thing you can do is listen to someone else about things you've not experienced and don't fully understand.
In that regard, some thought leaders you'd do well to learn from include activists like Bree Newsome — who's great on Twitter — Patrisse Cullors, Aleecia Garza, and Opal Tometti and Stacey Abrams, writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxanne Gay, Ibram X. Kendi, Clint Smith, Bakari Sellers. And that's just for starters. And you know, there's nothing wrong with reading the classics like "Letter From Birmingham Jail", by Martin Luther King, Jr. or The Autobiography of Malcolm X or the essays of James Baldwin. I'll put the links to these resources and others in the description below so you can go back on your own. Take this as a challenge to introduce some new thinkers to your thought-ecosystem. We can all do with a bit of new knowledge.
Point 4/Conclusion: Cultural shift
So, in large part, we know what must be done. Still, nothing will ever change if we don't deal with the defensiveness some folks have when it comes to discussing race once and for all. Racism is the biggest cultural disaster Americans live with. We have yet to reckon with it in a frank and open manner from the government on down. And flat out, it hasn't happened. We haven't reckoned with it… which has led to our inability to get out of our own way for progress' sake. Last summer the nation erupted after the video of George Floyd being murdered by Minnesota police officers went viral. And rightly so. Sadly, the video only confirmed what we have always known, even if we aren't always able to talk about it. In what was an already historically difficult year for Americans and the world, the death of George Floyd was simply the latest bellwether moment to remind us exactly where we are on the issue of race in America. And so, people protested en masse across the country and indeed the world because of what they saw. And rightly so. The protests were criticized, minimized and frankly, misunderstood by many. And, as they always do because they must, the protests eventually subsided. There was a time in June of last year when it felt like the protests might finally force us to finally have that oh so important and elusive national conversation. The one where we really look ourselves and do the work to get past this point in our racialized society. But we didn't. We are still searching for this forum.
In order to get there, we need to confront this difficult history head-on and be in lockstep with one another about the truth of our racist society if we're going to win an equitable future. As James Baldwin said much more eloquently than anything I've ever managed to fumble my way through, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
There's no way to erase the past. Which is why we as individuals must act. None of us can afford to be on the sidelines in this fight, we must all make efforts in our lives to be anti-racists.
Recently, President Biden has made many references to "the soul of America" in context to winning it back, getting us on the path of righteousness we deserve. At the same time, writer Ibram X. Kendi contends in an article in The Atlantic that honestly, America has two souls. This is evident, he writes, by what we saw come out of the last four years and what we have always seen when it comes down to race. Witnessing something like the murder of George Floyd, the beating of Rodney King, the reversal of the Dred Scott verdict...there has always been a portion of society willing to sell out the other in order to uphold its own supremacy. But it doesn't have to be that way. Until we're willing to have that difficult conversation - - together - - to listen to each other - - together - - to make mistakes and give room for that to happen - we won't get anywhere. We must let the historically disenfranchised lead us while those of us who have held power sit back and quiet our voices so others may be heard and heeded. Until that happens, we will remain a nation with two souls, one fighting for dominance over the other. Whether we can overcome this, make two souls into one, remains to be seen. I think it's possible, but it begins with the conversation.