Reflections on Fighting a Losing Battle

"There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honorable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors that I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they're less successful in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled."
-Arundhati Roy

Recently, in the state of Michigan, something called the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was passed. The MCRI, as it was known, basically made the consideration of race or gender illegal for any state insititution. This was aimed at ending Affirmative Action. When I say Affirmative Action, I mean the Affirmative Action for minorities and women, not the Affirmative Action that has been around for hundreds of years for whites, which, luckily, is still going strong. During the build up to the fight over the MCRI a friend told me that the MCRI would surely pass, because, as he said, "no one has ever won an election asking white people to vote against white privilege." Well, history has proven him right, but the question that I kept coming back to over the last year and a half is, "would white people ever give up white privilege?" Or, perhaps a better question, "why would white people give up white privilege?"

Recently a series of events really made this question hit home for me...

1) Michael Richards's racist diatribe hit YouTube. And, the word "Nigger" was used on MTV's The Real World. I was reminded of my question.

2) Then, the other day I read a comment on a blog I sometimes read BlackAtMichigan that said, "racism will always exist. It's like breathing." I was again reminded of my question.

3) That same day, the day that I read the comment, a co-worker was assaulted my a car full of students. They tried to hit her with their car as she crossed the street; they then rolled down the window and yelled, "get out of our neighborhood nigger." A white co-worker who I was discussing the hate crime with was flabbergasted, absolutely shocked. She couldn't believe that such things still happened. Again, my year-and-a-half old question still burned away at me.

It saddens me that my co-worker, an incredibly kind woman was the victim of this ugly hate crime. It also saddens me that my white co-worker was shocked by this. I wish I could say that because racism is so rare that it's shocking when it happens. Maybe this has a small part to do with her surprise, but it has more to do with the fact that racism is invisible to white people, as is the privileges that come from being white. A great resource about white privilege is Peggy McInstosh's Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.

So, the question is still there, "why would white people give up white privilege?" The truth is we won't, not in large numbers anyway. Like Douglass said, "power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will." People of color have been demanding power for generations and a few white allies have been helping. This is important for whites. It's not something to bemoan, it's something to acknowledge and accept. Acknowledging the struggle and the challenge is liberating. Most liberal whites talk about how much progress we have made, and we have made some significant gains, but they act like they're Hegelian Dr. Pangloss wannabes. "If we just wait, racism will be gone. You have to understand these things take time. Just be patient. We're doing better." Nothing new here right? Dr. King addressed this same attitude in his Letter from Birmingham City Jail. Time is not on our side, it's not neutral. Things AREN'T getting better all the time (fuck the Beatles, they're tools of the counter-revolution). These whites sound like George W. Bush talking about the future of Iraq, just gotta have faith and things will turn out fine. Acknowledging the challenge is like waking up from a delusion that had us trapped. It's not something to be afraid of or mourn, it's something to welcome, cause now the real work can begin.

For us whites, that real work is to acknowledge our privilege and our racism. It's not nice, and it's not pretty, but we have to do it. We have to come to terms with it. Many whites reject the label of racist, but we have got to acknowledge it, we must reclaim the label "racist." Racist has become such a taboo that people do cartwheels trying to avoid it. We must stop, growing up racist and privileged is not the fault of white people, however, failing to accept and name it is. As Tim Wise wrote in the text, White Like Me, "the perverse thing about growing up amidst racism is that no matter your own views, no matter your own commitment to resisting it, you inhale it anyway; you ingest it, inhale it just as surely as you inhale any other environmental pollutant. Having done so, you are then always at risk of coughing it back up, of vomiting it back into the world whence it came." We have to say it and we have to own it.

Being racist doesn't mean you're an awful person, plenty of racist people are decent, but that doesn't make them any less racist. For too long we have assumed that racists are all members of the klan. Today, calling someone a racist implies the klan. Racists don't need to burn crosses. They don't need even need to say nigger or kike or spick. Sometimes they do (Michael Richards, Davis from the Real World), but they don't have to. We need to reclaim "racist" from the klan. If you're reading this, get up and look in the mirror and say, "you're a racist." Go on and do it. I know what you're thinking, "I'm not a racist." Ok. Maybe you're not burning crosses or going to lynchings. Maybe you stand up against ugly jokes when you hear them. Maybe you really are a race conscious person of color or a strong and devoted white ally. The truth is so many of us our poisoned by racism that no matter our passionate insistance that race shouldn't determine your future, we live in America. So get up and walk to that mirror and do it anyway. We have to say it, we have to own it, that is our real work.

Repeating that fighting racism starts by acknowledging it in our lives may not give much reason to fight racism. Perhaps we should also acknowledge the damage that racism causes. The first victim of racism is not the target of that racism, it's the racist themselves. Racism causes white people to have deep psychological damage. It reshapes our view and understanding of reality, and divides us from 2/3 of the planet. It keeps us from having real relationships with so many people. It damages us; it poisons us. It makes us blame the innocent and embrace our delusions of un-reality. We have to fight it, and by fighting it we must begin by admitting it exists. Then, we must work to construct another world, that world may only be as big as our backyard, but it's our backyard and we have to take responsibility for it, it's all we can do and it's what we must do. That's our real work. It ain't easy, but it's oh so necessary.