This weekend, J and I watched CNN coverage of the protests in Minneapolis, Atlanta, and elsewhere over the death of George Floyd. It was a mistake to watch: cable news is an addictive drug that does more to fuel rage than to illuminate or change minds. But we watched the same story we’ve seen play out before, with angry protestors facing off against officers in riot gear until someone blinked, blood was shed, and everybody lost.
After every senseless killing of unarmed black men, there is the same hand-wringing. White folks like me insist we aren’t racist while wondering how racism nevertheless endures. Can’t we all just get along, we ask, then we insist that some of our best friends are black. I always go out of my way to be nice to everyone, we insist, arguing that we don’t even see color.
But if white folks like me don’t see color, how can we see racism? “Not seeing color” is an excuse well-meaning but complacent white folks use to avoid the difficult and messy work of dismantling a system we didn’t design but that shields us in a protective cocoon. If I’m not racist, then racism is someone else’s problem, and I have no responsibility to fix it.
But racism is an ideology, not “just” an individual worldview, and ideologies are inherited. It isn’t your fault if you were born with a genetic predisposition toward addiction, heart disease, or cancer, but if you are aware of your congenital risk, you can make conscious choices to mitigate those circumstances. Just because you didn’t cause a problem doesn’t mean you have no responsibility for responding to it.
If you were born and raised in America, you inherited the problem of white supremacy. You didn’t cause or create it, but you were born into the consequences. Picture yourself being born atop someone else’s shitheap, and you’ve grown up your whole life breathing in that stench.
Proclaiming that this isn’t your shitheap–you didn’t build it, you don’t add to it, and you neither approve of or condone it–doesn’t make the pile and its smell disappear, and neither does trying to hide, cover, or distract from it. The only way to get rid of a massive, centuries-old pile of shit is to grab a shovel and start digging.
This is what anti-racists mean when they talk about doing the work. Yes, you can march; yes, you can wave a sign, post on social media, and vow to be a nicer, kinder, and more equitable person. But the shitpile of racism is higher and deeper than that. It’s a problem that’s bigger than a few shitty cops; it’s an entire social system that rests on the flawed, deeply rooted, and often unconscious assumption that there is something wrong, innately criminal, or just plain deficient about nonwhite folks.
American history rests on this premise. It’s how generations of slaveholders justified keeping humans as property, and it’s how generations of settlers justified taking land from Native people. It’s how countless capitalists up to and including the present day have justified policies such as redlining, segregation, and mass incarceration. The opportunity gap between white and black isn’t accidental; it’s intentionally designed.
The ideology of white supremacy explains why jogging while black is an executable offence and why a white dog-walker felt justified in calling the cops on a black birdwatcher who dared ask her to leash her dog. These individual actions are heinous, but they are not anomalous. People do shitty things to people of color not in isolation but within the context of a system that stands on a shitty foundation.
So what should we do? White people like me ask this question again and again after each upsetting incident, then we quickly return to our comfortable complacency, noseblind to the shitheap we’ve inherited.
White folks like me need to do the work of dismantling white supremacy, and that work varies from person to person: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Wherever you are, what row do you have to hoe? We each have implicit biases to understand, acknowledge, and uproot, and we each are stakeholders in social systems we can work to change from within.
If you are a teacher, how can you teach for justice? If you are a parent, how can you raise children who are more aware and self-aware? If you are a business owner, banker, or insurance adjuster, how can you do your job more justly and intentionally, with an eye toward greater equity, and how can you urge your colleagues and organizations to do the same?
The scenes from this past week prove that white folks like me are not doing enough: whatever our current comfort zone is, we each need to inch further outside of it. March if you can, but make that marching your first step, not your last. Individual action and collective change work together like two hands. Do your part, insist that your elected officials do theirs, and hold both yourself and your leaders accountable.
Since I am a reader, I start with books: if you’re white like me, educating yourself is essential. Some books I wish were required reading include Carol Anderson’s White Rage, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Crystal Fleming’s How to Be Less Stupid About Race, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, and Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race.
If you’re white like me, these books will challenge you; they aren’t comfortable reading, and that discomfort is the first step toward change. Cleaning up a shitheap is difficult, messy, and unpleasant work, but ignoring that shitheap is even worse.
Jun 16, 2020 at 9:10 am
yes we know, you read and talk and don’t do anything, your views are cryingly untainted by any real dealing in the subject area
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Jun 16, 2020 at 9:12 am
Indeed, as a reader and instructor I am not doing enough. So please teach me: what more are you doing that you would advise for me?
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Jun 18, 2020 at 8:12 am
i have always been interested in history and it gives a perspective on these matters
i can’t convey it to you because you have to do it and actually its similar to the problem of trying to explain that translations are simply an opinion of the original work, you need to do some translation to understand that
there is a dimensionality to great writing and its language that you just cannot pull apart
your ‘fake” humility could do some work btw
i’ve read some african writers and what i found interesting is you can understand them, they think the same way as me, literary thinking is above race and communality
alternatively, you of course can get caught up in the inanity of the hoi polloi, their rabidness, stupidity and grasping
the beauty of the “literary mode” is to take you across time, place and geography to where the thinking has salience and has somewhat sorted out the confusion
when i look at art or read, i also research the author or artist, that naturally gives a bit of historical perspective that can actually get quite weird at times with some surprising highly condensed connectivity
the point i make about “real dealing” is that until you interact with something on a street level so to speak, you really won’t progress in understanding, otherwise teaching and reading would be adequate
i have had some contact with american students of english literature and i would have to say i have never come across such a bunch of politicised, opinionated stupids totally closed to anything that has not been shoved down their throats
the problem is the lack of “doing” they don’t write, they just read in a restricted way, and actually zen is like that to
well, the deeper problem is the complete lack of talent, even you must have noticed that
don’t let me interrupt your dream of middle class life, injured animals and toxic zen and i am sure you won’t
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Jun 18, 2020 at 8:29 am
I’m confused by your reply. You said I need to do more, and I asked you to tell me what more I should do, and your response focuses on what you have studied, read, and observed. All that is fine and good, but What. Do. You. Want. Me. To. Do?
I am asking you to teach me, and you reply by saying you can’t. That’s a nice sidestep but doesn’t help anyone.
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Jun 19, 2020 at 8:56 am
surely your reading age is up to coping with what i wrote ? a phd fgs ?
basically the contemporary world is just a rabble of noise, if you want the
“clarity of deeper understanding” you need to look across various eons to writers of substance and not be fooled by your co-existantists, who while not always malign have twisted brains
i think that’s one of the interesting things about zen and what makes it so toxic, is the very restricted range of intellectual material, however it does introduce one, or at least mediation does to the contemplative mode, but one has to move on and out of the carefully crafted nonsense so embedded in it
you are asking me, yet your blogs of your solitary experience like your walks are where its at, that experience and the re-working they do and the writing thereof which is further processing, you are already there, the world hardly rates it, but its the deepest “spiritual experience”
this is the trouble with zen, its a fake “peer group” your peers are more in the artistic area and really if you are interested in for want of a better phrase “the overall meaning of life” you have to create a conversation with people like emily dickinson, sa’di (a medieval isalmic/sufi mystic), jenny joseph the poet . . .
there’s more answers in landscapes than people, and i think you can include artistic works and quality writing in that
since you have quite a bit right, what you probably have to do is lift your reading level and its so helpful to read the lives
for example sylvia plath, a deeply mystical poet (lorelei is one of the all time great poems) got literally killed by spreading her wings way too wide with children and a deeply unsatisfactory husband and then you can go across to pieter bruegel the elder’s famous painting of icarus, its never ending
i think the “text only” approach of some academic circles is very misguided and has its origins in a misinterpretation of jacques derrida
the really sad thing about sylvia plath is she was an outstanding prose writer, she could have made a good living at it it and if vogue had publlshed her short story “mary ventura and the ninth kingdom” that would be the break she needed, but of course they didn’t
i don’t want to be too negative on zen, it does have some strengths, it teaches social skills and machiavellian politics quite well, but its origins are not what you would expect, not some hermit in remote mountains like bodhidharma (actually quite close to a wealthy sponsor) but rather greek philosophy from the greco-bactrian kingdoms on tang dynasty borders
the conventional buddha statue with pleated robes is stylistically greek
you may not think i am answering your queries, but i am
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Jun 22, 2020 at 3:24 pm
It seems you object to my reading list. But here’s the thing: I have read Dickinson and Plath, and neither one turned me into a poet or a mystic. And my reading Dickinson and Plath did nothing to dismantle racist policies, which is what I’m talking about in this post.
Emerson said books are for the scholar’s idle time. So when you aren’t reading mystical poetry, what are you DOING to fight racism?
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Jun 22, 2020 at 8:05 pm
battles should offer a personal return
“what are you DOING to fight racism”
in my dealing with people i am not racist, that’s all that’s required
preaching is the panacea of hypocrites
there’s something about teaching that cripples the intellect
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Jun 22, 2020 at 11:12 am
I must say I struggle with the advice to “Do the work.” In addition to voting responsibly, donating to anti-racist groups like the SPLC, reading Ta-Nehisi Coates and Reni Eddo-Lodge (and others), and participating in cultural competency training every year at work, I do genuinely try to reflect on my own positions and acknowledge my own personal racism when I see it. As you asked your commenter above, what else am I supposed to do? I feel like I’m doing my best, but I also feel like I’m being told it isn’t enough. Perhaps it’s just a matter of continually pressing my limits and comfort zone and not becoming complacent — maybe that’s “Doing the work.”
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Jun 22, 2020 at 4:30 pm
I think the question “what does it mean to do the work” is an excellent question to sit with. (Since you’ve practiced Zen, you know what I mean by that.)
I think this question is *supposed to be* hard. That’s what makes it “work.” And I think it’s an *ongoing* work. I don’t think you ever arrive to a place where you can say “ah, yes, I’ve Done the Work, so let’s check that off the list.” To me, “Do the work” actually means “Keep doing the work.”
In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King said the real enemy to progress isn’t the rabid racist who wears a white hood…it’s the moderate white person who “means well” but is complacent. I think part of “doing the work” is sitting with that observation and continually asking myself, “Am I allowing myself to become too comfortable and too complacent?” (And yes, I’m including myself in that question.)
The other thought I’d add is an observation from Ibram X. Kendi. In both Stamped From the Beginning and How to Be an Anti-Racist, he argues that racist POLICIES are the problem. So yes, it’s great for white people with good intentions to examine and “work on” their own biases…but even if all white people starting “being nice” to all people of color, racist policies still cause damage. It’s the *policies* white folks need to dismantle, not just individual behavior.
(This reminds me of the pro-LGBTQ ruling in the US Supreme Court this week. Yes, it’s necessary to change straight and cisgender folks’ minds so they don’t act in homophobic ways…but individual straight and cisgender people can be “nice” to LGBTQ folks, and that won’t prevent those folks from losing their jobs if that’s what homophobic policies allow. So changing the policies is necessary.)
So whatever any of us can do to change policies is part of “the work.” It starts, I think, with education: you can’t organize for change if you’re *unaware* of how the system is stacked against people of color. Once you’re aware of the problem, it’s up to you as an individual to decide what specific “piece of the problem” you want to focus on.
So yes, voting is necessary, and giving to organizations if you’re able, and doing whatever lobbying, letter-writing, protesting, or other activism feels appropriate. Again, each person has to figure out what their “work” looks like. If you sit with the question, I think the answer will appear…but it’s necessary to keep sitting with the question, and keep returning to the work.
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Jun 23, 2020 at 10:29 am
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you’re right that it is a continual process (and probably a lifelong one). Perhaps I limit myself when I think of all I have DONE, rather than thinking about what I still have to do every day — fighting that complacency that King warned about.
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