The White Speaks

A woman I know submitted this to the blog:

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When I was young, my hair was brunette and very thin and flat. Was that way all the way until I was in my 40s. I tried perming it or braiding it, but it was always a disaster. Then, when the grey started to take over, my stylist suggested a blonde wash. I went blonde. And life changed.  

Let me tell you, there are privileges associated with being blonde. People smiled at me more, men especially, and talked to me more and I dated more and all kinds of effects happened. A colleague once talked about the “hot blonde” in the room, and I didn’t know that he meant me; I still thought of myself as brunette. So I didn’t notice the connection right away; at first I thought, maybe I’m finally becoming a more relaxed person! Or, maybe I finally know how to connect with people at parties! Maybe suddenly my intelligence is showing, because people are asking for my opinion more!

Nope. I now think it was the blonde. Because lately, I’ve let the hair go entirely natural, which is a predominantly silver color. And I’m back to being ignored by people at parties, especially men, and not being talked to, etc., not being asked for my opinion, being expected to serve others rather than being in charge. It’s like I’m increasingly invisible.

My point is this. Privilege due to physical characteristics is invisible to the person who has it. They just think life is like that. I have a big enough personality to overcome my new “disadvantage,” but to realize my life was actually easier when I was blonde is truly surreal. Human beings are strange. Unless we consciously fight this unconscious (for many) predisposition to favor some over others for reasons unrelated to what they actually have to offer, we will continue to do so, to the detriment of us all.

I believe we need to fight unfair privilege, first by naming it, then by talking about it (and possibly arguing about it), then by increasing awareness to everyone, then by holding people accountable for not doing it.

If we are white, we have been favored by others throughout our lives in ways we probably never even noticed. Others have been unfairly not favored, and we probably didn’t notice that either. How many moving violation traffic tickets have I received? Pulled over five times maybe, ticketed twice. How many did I deserve? Many, many more, I can tell you.

That’s all I have to say really. It makes me sad that white people are being so slow to realize this. We have a lot of understanding to do.

So I watched for the first time Spike Lee’s 1992 film, Malcolm X, starring Denzel Washington, this weekend, along with watching an accompanying documentary on the DVD set about the man himself.

If I had seen this film back in 1992, I certainly would have thought it was talking about the ancient past. That all that was behind us. That nothing like the things that happened to him were still happening.

As an ignorant, self-deluded, comfortable white person, I would have been so wrong.

Watching the film now makes it clear that little has changed. The basic issues still exist and keep that wall between our fellow citizens and true equality. I say “fellow citizens,” because that’s what I believe that black Americans are, even though one of Malcolm X’s points in his early days was that blacks were/are not Americans; they were/are the victims of America. It was a startling point to me, but a stance I can understand now.

I wish it weren’t so. I want everyone born in this land of ours to be Americans; to feel like and truly be 100% enfranchised citizens; to enjoy all the rights and privileges I enjoy; and to bless our collective nation with their talent, their intellect, and their promise. That day is still coming. This makes me both sad and determined. My wishes don’t make a difference, of course; only action will.

Much of what Malcolm X said then still resonates in today’s context. Two statements that struck me:

“To teach a man to hate himself is much more criminal than to teach him to hate someone else.”

“You [white people] stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. You pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. You won’t even admit the knife is there.”

I found the man to be stunning, a life cut short way too early. He was on a path of transition from his days as an acolyte in an organization that used him to widening his perspective on the possibilities of the black/white relationship. His adherence to Islam was a tribute to the religion, and we would have learned so much more from him about it. He might have been a voice to bring more pride and status to the black community, both within itself and outwardly in dealing with us. If he hadn’t been assassinated, he might have transformed the dialog that we are wrestling with now.

Having known so little about him before, I mourn his loss now.

The final cut of the movie had a scene during the time when he was growing in fame when a young white female college student runs up to him and says, “Mr. X, I've read some of your speeches and I honestly believe a lot of what you say has truth to it. I have a good heart. I'm a good person despite my whiteness. What can the good white people like myself, who are not prejudiced, or racist, what can we do to help the cause?” He stares at her and replies, “Nothing!”

In the script, there is a scene that did not make the cut for the movie, in which later, another white college student asks him, “Mr. X. I have a good heart. I'm a good person despite my whiteness. What can the good white people like myself who are not prejudiced do to help the cause of the Negro?”

This time, in the script, he thinks about it and replies, “Let sincere white individuals find other white people who feel as they do and teach non-violence to those whites who think and act so racist.”

The student replies, “I will, Mr. X, I will.”

He says, “Let's all pray without ceasing. May Allah bless you.”

As a young child in the western suburbs of Chicago in the 1960s, I remember wondering why “colored” people weren’t choosing to live where we lived. If they only lived in my neighborhood, I thought, they could go to my school and they wouldn’t have to go on all those long bus rides I was hearing so much about as my parents watched the news over dinner. We had a nice school, they might have liked it. But my father would say, “People like to stick with their own.”

The riveting new documentary from Bob Herbert Against All Odds reveals the real reason I didn’t have black neighbors. Black people were prohibited by law from moving into my town, and if the law didn’t stop them, the practices of mortgage companies did. And if that didn’t stop them, rioting whites would just burn down their house.

From the excellent summary of the documentary on Moyers & Co., ‘Against All Odds’ Is Required Viewing for White Progressives: 

For example, beginning in the mid-1940s, thousands of whites in Chicago participated in a series of riots to keep single black families out of their neighborhoods. In 1951, when an army veteran attempted to move into a rented apartment with his family of four, they were stopped by a mob of 4,000 people that ransacked their belongings and then burned the entire building down. Similarly, in 1959, when a black family moved into their newly-purchased home, a mob of 5,000 people stoned the house, threw lit torches, and chanted “we want blood.”

I’m embarrassed for the city of my youth, but my dad was probably all for that. We were of German extraction on his side, and he would speak to me about “chauvinism” being good, meaning being proud of your own heritage and wanting to keep it “pure.” His parents had immigrated to the States from near Hamburg between wars. Grandpa had fought for the Kaiser. They brought along their feelings about the Fatherland with them.

Black people in my area had mostly come there as part of the Great Migration, when the Jim Crow environment in the South became so hopeless that millions packed up and left in pursuit of the American Dream. To the Northeast, to the West, and to my neck of the woods, Chicago, they came. But they did not get into my neighborhood. They were consigned to overcrowded housing in the deep city, uncared for and denied all the resources my grade school self had in abundance just a few miles away.

In the early 1970s, politics was heating up. Personally, I hated Nixon (didn’t trust his face) and loved McGovern. That’s the first election I can remember, the one of 1972. Nixon was up for his second term, and the Vietnam and Cambodia escalation was in full swing. My fifth grade project was to be McGovern in a political debate in class, which I won, hands down. Too bad McGovern didn’t. My dad thought I was misguided. “You’ll understand when you have property of your own.”

That’s what it was about to him. Property. Keeping property and upward mobility in the hands of white people and out of the hands of everyone else.

We were upwardly mobile indeed. My dad lived the American Dream—the one reserved for white people. He himself was a laborer, but his father and mother had put enough aside over their years of being immigrants to be able to buy my mom and dad their first house (in a town to the west of the city that was safely free of black people). They then also bought them a second, bigger house in the same town when I was about one, and Dad continued to rent out the first one.

Meanwhile, black people were being denied jobs everywhere but in the public sector or as the servant class. Their schools were substandard, and their housing could barely be called that. Home ownership, even when they could afford it, was kept out of reach. I remember the grownups talking about the Cabrini–Green housing projects. It was hailed as progress, but was really just a warehouse for people no one wanted in the ’burbs.

On our side of the line, all us kids had medical care (dental, optometry especially) from Dad’s union, and those of us who went to college did so with our fancy SLMA loans, called Sallie Mae as just another way to show our affection for this cheap money. My siblings became lawyers, nurses, etc., and I went to the college of my choice where I got a top-notch business education for the whopping price of $5,000 per year.  

Black people? Not so much. Some in their community did very well despite the barriers, got their children through college, started businesses, began to gain economic footholds. But jobs continued to be denied them along with loans. That material wealth would be denied to anyone outright never occurred to me. My dad’s narrative of people being “lazy” or “uneducated” explained the disparity to me.

After all, I figured, the United States is a capitalistic system, of which we were all very proud given that communism had failed and the Berlin Wall was about to fall. For capitalism to work, there must be constant growth. Cutting a huge part of the population off at the knees, denying their ability to grow and be upwardly mobile, would be a drag on the market, wouldn’t it? I took macroeconomics in college. I knew how this must work. So no bank or city worth its salt would artificially keep part of its citizenry down. That’s not capitalism. That’s un-American.

Knowing what I know now about Reagan, his ludicrous “trickle down” theory, and the appalling statements by his advisor Lee Atwater about how to signal racist dog-whistles to white supremacists (“lower taxes!”), I am ashamed I voted for the former movie star. But I did, because he looked good on TV and I believed in capitalism as the best, fairest way to provide opportunity for all.

How did my life go? My situation set me up to stay employed, raise kids, own my own home, start a business, succeed. Sure it was hard work, but it was unencumbered by barriers to entry or egregious laws and practices. All those black people who should have been my neighbors and friends? Never saw them. Lived as though they didn’t exist. The separation remains even in the town I live today, where whites are on one side of a line down the middle, everyone else on the other.  

In Dad’s papers when he died, I found a lovely tract from 1952 called, “Facts the Historians Left Out,” emblazoned with the Confederate flag on the cover. (Did you know that most slaves were “childlike, good-natured, well-behaved”? And they had “food and clothing in plenty”?) There were also letters from a friend of Dad’s in which the two were obviously discussing their hopes to be part of a white supremacist revolution—one letter had the postscript, “Don’t struggle—segregate!”

When Dad died, his estate left me enough to give a boost to my retirement. Dad was a laborer, a union man, and a supervisor, but he never was an office professional in any respect. Even with that, he was able to gain enough wealth that he could give his children a leg up in life by paying for college and then leaving them enough to augment their own retirements. How did he do that? Through real estate. How did he access that? He was white.

That’s it. He was white. He had no other outstanding attributes (although he was a faithful husband and a good provider all our lives). He was a regular guy, with muddy work boots and concrete-dusty hair. Yet the American Dream for him was easily within reach because he could sign those contracts and buy those houses.

To so many others, it was held out of reach. Don’t tell me that if people of color had only worked hard enough back then, they could have achieved the American Dream, too. They could (and did) work themselves to death. But without access to owning real estate, via improving neighborhoods and housing loans at low interest, no population can acquire the wealth they need to be upwardly mobile. They are behind in economic growth because we made sure they would be.

Narcissism. It’s all over. It’s pervading public discourse on every level. It’s tempting to write it off as “the other guy.” But I’m here to tell you that, if you’re white, narcissism may very well be the explanation for why we do what we do in regards to people of color.

Psychology Today has a seminal article on narcissism that shines a light on just what it’s all about.

How Does a Narcissist Think?

The article lists nine traits that narcissists exhibit, which I will break down below.

It’s fascinating stuff, if it weren’t so disturbing. As individuals, we may or not exhibit these traits. But if you think of all white people collectively and imagine us all as one giant organism, the organism that is “white people” very definitely over the centuries right up until today strongly embodies all these traits. It’s a sobering thought. Let’s take them one by one.

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance, e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.

I mean, how can we doubt this? White people as a group claim superiority all the time, by assigning ourselves status as the default group, by insisting on being the dominant culture, by making all history lessons, movies, TV show, about us, by ensuring that we fill CEO offices and political parties, by districting our neighborhoods and imposing segregation economically and socially when we can’t do it legally, without earning it at all. As a group, if white people were one person, that person would be seen as doing #1 all the time.

The article says:

The most interesting thing to me about this trait is the part about being recognized as superior without the achievement to back it up. This kind of thinking can be harmful to others when the narcissist says, “Look at me, I am better than you! I am bigger, and more powerful, and I may use it against you.”

Is not white people doing this prevalent in the news every day?

2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

White people are all about ourselves. Seriously. We couldn’t even let Black Lives Matter have any part of the limelight without interjecting All Lives Matter. We shed so many white tears when our preoccupation with ourselves is pointed out that it’s become a new euphemism. We whites, as the article says [with some paraphrasing], always “have to be on top, and win in all aspects. [We] value [people of color] in regards to how [they] can help [us] achieve this perfection, but if [they] rise above [us], watch out! [They] can’t outshine [us] or [we] will take [them] down notch by notch.”

Who hasn’t seen this in the news, in the media, so many times? We can shoot somebody to death, and rather than accept our part in the system that makes that happen, we spend our time bad-mouthing the victim to make it seem that being upset over the death is misplaced. “Oh, well, he had a criminal record.” We care more about our feelings than the rightful grief of parents, spouses, children.

3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

Look at our neighborhoods. It’s right there on the map. In my town, a phenomenal place that people spend thousands of dollars to come on vacation, there is practically a line down the middle separating the white half from where everyone else is. Up here we have wide lawns and no crime. Down there, they have population density and over-patrolling. We may not know why we’re doing it this way or how it happened, but it’s clear if you look for it. We are impelled to associate with our “own,” those we perceive as having the same status as we have.

Check out your own neighborhood. How many people of color are there?

4. Requires excessive admiration.

This one drives me up the wall. We want so much admiration, we’re willing to coopt the cultures of others for a laugh or as a fashion statement. Native American headdresses as Halloween costumes, Black music purloined by white performers for profit, yoga classes purely to look hot without any of the spiritual underpinning the practice is based on. We don’t want anyone to be better at anything than we are, to the point that we will water it down, whitewash it, and then arbitrarily declare that we’re the ones really doing it right. Like we’ve “saved” it somehow from the “heathens.”

The narcissism article says, “Everyone I have worked with in a clinical setting, who has either been raised by a narcissistic parent, or has been in a love relationship with a narcissist, says they are EXHAUSTED! Why? It's because the narcissist has an empty emotional vessel that needs to be refueled constantly with admiration and praise.”

This reflects what I often read from racial justice activists of color: the constant need to educate and reassure whites is exhausting. They say it all the time. We are exhausting to them because not only can we not admit our own faults, but we expect them to explain things to us over and over again as though we’re not even hearing them and then make us feel good about ourselves afterward.

More from the article: “If you are in a relationship with someone like this, you are constantly filling up their narcissistic supply needs. It not only gets old, but it is tiring. And…your needs don’t get met. The relationship is not reciprocal. Give and take? Uh…no.”

Yep, that’s us.  

5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.

When I call the police, I expect them to take my issue seriously and to immediately respond. All my life, that’s how I’ve been treated by police. I would be shocked—shocked!—if one day a police officer ever dismissed me or, worse, actually touched me or restrained me for any reason. I cannot imagine being manhandled by law enforcement. I am certain to my bones that they are 100% on my side, and will protect my life and property to the extent their training and the law allows. I feel the same way about teachers, doctors, bankers—they’re all there to serve me and I expect to be treated accordingly. You should hear me on the phone with my wireless provider.

This is not, obviously, how it is for everyone. I, of course, never noticed this until it became so painfully obvious in the news. Do I feel entitled to this treatment? You bet I do. I may want it for everyone else as well, but if you told me that I’d have to give up some of what I’m getting—for example, if the police told me they couldn’t respond to my call because they were helping someone on the other side of town—I wonder how long it would take before my sense of entitlement would make me crack? How spoiled am I? Am I willing to share?

6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

This is another one that it’s constructive to imagine collectively. You and I as individual people may not consciously exploit others (although, please see my prior post for another argument), but white people as a group throughout history have been nothing but exploitative. Crusades, colonization, slave trade, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, robber barons, banana republics, the Cold War, the Iraq War, climate change, etc. etc. etc. We are the single group that has done the most to ruin the communities of others, destroy the environment, deplete resources, steal the others’ labor—there’s just no comparison to our thoughtless, selfish attitude toward the world around us.

From the article: “Once again, to the narcissist, the other person does not matter. It is only about what the person can do to help the narcissist in whatever endeavor they are pursuing. The narcissist thinks nothing of taking advantage of others to meet their own goals. It is a given. And this is a warning to you.”

White people as a collective body don’t think other people matter. Is that who we really want to be?

7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

If you answered, “Who cares?” to the question at the end of the last point, you are emblematic of this one.

White people as a group just plain don’t care. We shrug off the fates of others like, “Well, that’s just the way life is.” I’ve heard highly privileged, wealthy white people say, when confronted with how unfair our system is, “Life is unfair. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Too bad for them, am I right? They should have been born somewhere else with a different color skin or more affluent parents. It’s not our fault they weren’t. We shouldn’t have to do anything about it. It doesn’t affect us, so why should we care? If they only did this or that, they could get the same things we have. We did everything ourselves, so they should have to, too.

Problem is, that of course is all wrong. White people stole the opportunities from other people systematically for generations, and now we blame them for not achieving the American dream. We stole, and we don’t care. We want what we have, and we don’t want to share.

As a collective, we simply cannot feel the pain of other people—people we’ve enslaved, exploited, raped, murdered. It’s a psychosis on our part, really. The inability to put ourselves in the other’s shoes is a flaw that runs deep.

There is a scene in the mini-series Roots (both versions) where a young white plantation daughter and a slave black girl are playmates. The white girl teaches the black girl to read and claims her as a best friend. But later, when the black girl is caught doing something the white girl’s father doesn’t like, the white girl turns on her. “How could you do this to me?” the white girl cries. The father sells the black girl to someone else, who promptly rapes her. But the white girl made it all about her.

The narcissism article says,

The lack of empathy is really the cornerstone trait of narcissism. … The false acting of loving is possible but the narcissist cannot sustain it. Have you seen the person who seems to be empathetic and kind but as soon as things don’t go their way, they turn on you? Or the friend who cannot tune into your feelings but rather turns the conversation to themselves? … The most difficult thing about having a narcissistic [in your life] is realizing their inability to love. It is simply a crushing moment when this awareness hits.

Multiply that crushing moment by every person of color victimized by the white narcissistic system, and you might begin to glean how horrific our effect on humanity has been.

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

This relates to #4 above. Because we whites, as a group, require excessive admiration, we are envious of anyone who does anything better than we do. So instead of honoring and caring for the football players who give us so much great sport, for example, we’re okay with them getting continual concussions and brain damage just for our entertainment. Instead of admiring and praising musicians who empower their listeners and make us see things in a new light, we slut-shame them or call them thugs. Instead of admiring a First Lady who is fit and healthy, we sneer because she showed her arms; instead of respecting arguably the smartest President we’ve ever had, we call him a monkey and obstruct everything he tried to do to better the lives of average Americans because it wasn’t all about us.

Check out this from the narcissism article:

Because the narcissist has to see themselves as larger than life, they assume others will be jealous of them. But, what we see more, is their own envy of others who may outshine them in any way. How do they deal with their envy of others? They make concerted efforts to take others down in constant criticism, critical judgment, name-calling, gossiping, while at the same time pumping themselves up.

Sound familiar?

9. Shows arrogance, haughty behaviors, or attitudes.

The article says,

While it looks like narcissists’ have a high opinion of themselves, they really are self-loathing and have a need to take others down to feel better.

This is telling to me. We whites must know on some level how odious we’ve behaved throughout history. We must know that others have every right to despise and hate us. We must feel, somewhere deep down, that “murder will out,” as they say, and our sins will not be forever hidden. So do we do the hard work of admitting it and making a change? Nope. We assume instead the arrogant stance of claiming it as our divine right, our manifest destiny, our superiority. It’s a massive cover-up for self-hatred.

The thing is, I don’t hate myself personally. But being part of this collective narcissism I do hate. I want out.

The narcissism article closes with this, which I think by now you can read without my commentary as though it applies to white people as a group.

It is important to understand that narcissism is a spectrum disorder ranging from a few traits to the full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. Everybody can display some of these behaviors at certain times of distress in their lives. It is when these character traits are consistent over time and are impairing relationships and hurting others that they become dangerous. When winning at all cost and needing to be better than others is at the central theme of one’s character, danger is in the air.

Danger is in the air. White people, to others, our narcissism is endangering their very lives. It’s not right; it’s a sickness. I tell you, the more I learn about this, the more I want to rip the band-aid off and expose the filth for what it is.

I start with myself, admitting my own blindness and ignorance to how I’ve contributed to and benefited from this mass disparity of justice. Then I look for ways to mop clean up, if possible.

We need to go to the doctor and get whatever treatment is needed to turn this around. First step is admitting it, though. Narcissism has no treatment. The most you can expect is for the narcissist to begin to feel the inklings of accountability for the hurt they’ve caused.

Okay, most white people don’t literally own slaves—like when a person is paid nothing and compelled by force to do whatever some “owner” tells them. Most of us whites recoil in horror at that prospect. It’s obvious, it’s blatant, and no, we don’t want to be party to that. We would never want to be that kind of slave owner.

But if you define slavery as when a person is forced to work themselves to death for a heartless master and isn’t ever paid enough to have a decent life, that we’re doing in abundance. We whites turn a blind eye to it and embrace its effects enthusiastically. We are slave owners by proxy.

Admit it. Do you have a cell phone? Do you ever eat fast food? Shopped at Walmart lately?

The supply chain for so much of the commerce we gleefully participate in by its definition requires a huge labor base that must be paid next to nothing for costs to stay low. Really, next to nothing. Hardly even sustenance level, in whatever country is allowing it. If a person wears themselves out doing that work, well, heck, there will always be another brown or yellow person to come along and take their place. Just not a white person.

No, we white people are wheeling our carts around wide aisles of consumer goods or pulling into the drive-thru or texting away on our latest model, willfully ignorant or unconscious of the fact that the very things that we’re holding in our hands would have been inaccessible economically if we had to pay their true cost. The true human cost.

The immediate masters in this scenario are corporations—dehumanized entities that have no other purpose except to make money. They enslave their workers far away from the eyes of us, the consumer, the slave owner by proxy. The slavery takes the form of hiring people for brutal physical or mind-numbing jobs with no health insurance (even though the job itself destroys a person’s health) or vacation pay or other benefits (because they just manage to not have it be full-time in order to avoid that overhead cost).

We whites are okay with this. We are in fact complicit in it. We have said resoundingly that we want corporations to be answerable first to their stockholders, rather than also to their communities or to their employees. We think this makes economic sense. We go, “Yeah, sure, companies need to make money. That’s what growth is all about.” We eat our strawberries in the smug assurance that they are organic or local, but with no consideration—nary a thought—about what the labor standards might have been.

How many times have you heard as the justification for allowing immigration that “no American [read: white American] would take that job”? From left-leaning liberals no less! “The immigrants contribute to our economy by doing the work no citizen wants to do, which helps keep food prices down.”

Do we understand that we are eating our $5 pints of strawberries on the backs of this kind of enslavement? And if we paid the real cost, meaning the laborers received 40 hours a week of pay at a living wage that allowed them to own their own home and send their kids to college, with health insurance included and proper benefits, who knows how much those strawberries would cost? And if we’re not paying that price, we’re stealing the very lives of those laborers?

I’m going to quote twenty-third U.S. President Benjamin Harrison here, who in 1891 basically already said what I’m saying:

I cannot always sympathize with that demand which we hear so frequently for cheap things. Things may be too cheap. They are too cheap when the man or woman who produces them upon the farm or the man or woman who produces them in the factory does not get out of them living wages with a margin for old age and for a dowry for the incidents that are to follow. I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth or shapes it into a garment will starve in the process. (Speech in Rutland, Vermont, 28 August 1891, as reported in The New York Times, 29 August 1891, p. 5.)

Preach, President H.

Here’s an idea. I’d like to see labor standards become as important to us whites as whether the thing is gluten-free. How about a certification that declares that every hand that touched this product—be it food, clothing, household goods, cars, electronics—was paid a living wage at a full-time job with the same benefits we ourselves have? I’d like to see a label right on the product that tells us that the corporation who is marketing it is intentionally lowering profit margins to ensure it is compensating its employees to this standard, and that the stockholders themselves support this.

The United States is a rich country. We have the money. We’ve chosen to set up the system such that the money gets concentrated in the hands of a few; we can just as easily choose to set it up such that those who create the wealth with their very hands and lives get a share of the wealth that not only sustains them but allows them to flourish.

All it would mean is that white people would maybe be able to buy fewer things. We would pay the real costs finally. The market would correct for it, and entrepreneurs would still figure out how to be successful. Success, in fact, might have an entirely different meaning.  

Is all the garbage we can buy now worth the life and limb of our fellow humans? Isn’t it time to stop being slave owners by proxy?

For further reading: The Divine Right of Capital by Marjorie Kelly

This short piece from Afropunk.com is getting some play where I lurk.

I started saying 'yes' when white people ask if my posts about social justice mean I hate them 

The author just tells it like it is. This part is resonating with me:

I don’t care about parsing out which white people my answer applies to anymore. That is their job. It's up to them to figure out why Black rage at white abuses implicates them, and then to rectify it. … The only way Black hatred would not be justified would be if we were to fix five centuries of brutality and terror, and we have a long, long way to go to do that.

He gives us a time frame. Five hundred years. I’ve got five hundred years of privilege behind this little life I’m leading now.

Who gave this to me? Not anyone who cares about me individually. It was white people in positions of power throughout history who bought my cooperation with this warped system by promising me an easier life. Which I’ve received. Without ever once deserving it. Dammit!

So fellow white people, what will we do about it?

One thing we can do is to open our eyes. Open our eyes to how we are seen by those we have oppressed. Maybe I personally didn’t oppress anyone (or maybe I have?). Maybe I haven’t been abusive or violent to anyone. But they don’t know that. When they see me, they see us all.

Do we get that every time a black person is kind to us, or polite, or respectful, we don’t deserve it?

Do we get that every time a black person defers to us or lets our white nonsense stand without correcting it, we should be embarrassed by the social construct that makes them feel they have to?

Do we get that every time a black person lets us speak first, that’s our cue to shut up?

Are we starting to understand this to our bones?

We owe them. We—white people as a whole—owe the rest of the world our lives and our fortunes. We didn’t get them on our own merit or by our own efforts. We got it through violence, oppression, bigotry, and immorality. None of it is ours. We need to step back. I’m not kidding.

That election in November hit me over the head. It was bad enough that white men voted the way they did; to know that white women also voted against their own gender interests and instead supported the racist candidate was a sharp stick in the eye. Racism “trumped” feminism.

The majority of white people—my people—people like me—voted to keep other races down compared to us irrespective of what it would mean to the country or the world as a whole. This is a fact.

Statistically, therefore, it’s a rational response for black people—in fact, all people of color—to be suspicious of the whole lot of us whites. I suppose they always have been, because when were racists a minority among whites?

I’m embarrassed that this was news to me. I’m appalled it took that election for me to have my eyes opened to my own tribe and its evil streak. I’m ashamed of my complicity in this situation, how much I’ve profited from it, how much I’ve enjoyed at the expense of others. It makes me angry to feel this way. So here I am, calling it out, howling at the moon perhaps, but howling nonetheless.

White people suck. We have a history of sucking, we have a present-day reality of sucking, and there’s every sign that we’re headed into a promising future of sucking. I’d hate us, too.

What’s the answer? Dismantle the suck, white people. Seek out and support things that benefit people who are not white. Consciously act, vote, buy, read, watch, in ways that are not so selfish. Share, dammit.

It will be awkward—I know it is for me. We will get it wrong, they will shake their heads at our feeble efforts, it will all seem like a waste of time—until that one moment that I hope is not five hundred years in the future when critical mass is reached and the majority of white people are no longer assholes. When a majority of whites see themselves as just one hue of the human race, with the same value as any other.

Then it will be like the lights going up after a ridiculous movie that never made any sense and you have no idea why you sat all the way through it. And we’ll point at it together and say, “Wow, what a waste of time that was.”

I am not actually Gandalf. Not Gandalf the Grey, although the hairs on my head might say otherwise. Not Gandalf the White, even. What I am, though, is indeed White.

And I have many things I want to say to my fellow “The Whites.” We have a lot to acknowledge about ourselves, a lot to make up for. Not our personal fault, but our collective responsibility. I’ll be talking on this tumblr about what I’m seeing and reading and extrapolating about just what it is that is coming to the surface about the unfairness that is rampant in our world, and postulate what we Whites should possibly do about it.