Our Blinkered View of Race
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June 6, 2020This is going to be the hardest blog post that I will have written. There will be no jokes or cheeky comments or clever turns of phrase. This post may lose me some friends and some readers. So be it. I am a white man writing today on matters of race. I will not presume in any way, shape, or form, to speak for black Americans, even those I know well. I simply cannot know, and will never know, what it is they experience. I will let their voices speak for themselves and I hope we all listen. In what follows I will be writing about race as a white American speaking from my experience and nobody else’s.
Also, I was inspired to write what follows after reading the excellent article in the Catholic Herald by my friend, and editor, Christopher Altieri. His passion for this issue comes through in his essay which you can access here. Please read it.
Yes, America, we do have a race problem. And it isn’t going away anytime soon. Most white Americans tend to think that racism has largely been eradicated from our society since the old Jim Crow laws are gone and many of the outward manifestations of racism, such as enforced segregation, are happily no more. Furthermore, it seems on the surface at least that very few white Americans harbor the kind of explicit and conscious racist views that were once so common. But the progress that has been made in eliminating some of the worst aspects of our nation’s sad legacy of racial injustice has also served to put blinkers on white America’s vision of the state of racial relations in this country. And here I am not alluding to our blinkered perspective on the many ways racial injustice still exists in cultural and systemic ways. I am referring to the many ways we first ignore, and then dismiss as trivial, the racist views of our friends, loved ones, and neighbors. Precisely because we harbor the illusion that racism is no longer a problem, we compartmentalize racist statements when we encounter them as one-off and anomalous aberrations and view them as too few in number to cause us to question the grand paradigm that racism is dead.
Let me give you an example. The other day I was having a conversation with a dear friend of mine - - a man I love and admire because of his deep generosity and his capacity for true, reciprocal friendship - - when we started to discuss the issue of the current riots caused by the murder of George Floyd. I was stunned when my friend, who knows I have a niece married to a young black man and that I have four mixed race grand nephews and nieces, blurted out the “N” word and cursed the rioters with that racial slur. He went on to say a few other disparaging remarks that had deeply racist connotations. I stood there in stunned silence, internalizing my rage, as I wondered if this was a bridge-burning moment between friends. I quickly weighed everything in the balance and made the prudential decision to say nothing. I politely changed the topic and the matter ended there. But I am still deeply troubled in my soul as to whether or not I was right to remain silent.
You can say that this one little anecdote means nothing in the big picture and that I cannot reach broad sweeping judgments based on a one case induction. But here is my point: I don’t think it is a one case induction. Every white person reading this has probably been at social events where the “N” word is used. And even though we disapprove of such words, most of us do what I did. We say nothing and change the topic. We do not want to lose friendships that we value and we do not want to burn social bridges over something so … so…. dare I say it? … so “trivial.”
But it is not trivial. We need to remove our blinkers. And the current racial unrest is removing them for us, with extreme prejudice. The Black Lives Matter movement is telling us, among other things, that we can no longer politely change the topic. We can no longer just turn the page and go to a happier part of the narrative. That smirking cop with his hand in his pocket as he callously disregarded George Floyd’s plea for breath and life, is, perhaps, the Rosa Parks moment of our generation. I say that cautiously, both out of respect for Rosa Parks and because things have not yet played out over time, but it is striking to me that “this time” things seem different. They seem different in the sense that I don’t think we can ever have those blinkers on again. Because it is those blinkers that have allowed the racists in our midst to feel legitimated, to feel immune, and, God forbid, to interpret our silence as approval.
I know there are those who will point out that the Black Lives Matter movement was founded on social theories that may seem “hateful” to many. That it advocates quite often for violence and many of its members openly repudiate the non-violence of MLK as no longer feasible. But here is where I might lose friends and readers: I don’t care. As a Catholic Worker I, of course, condemn violence and embrace the path of nonviolence. So, I am not saying that I don’t care about those aspects of any movement that advocates for social change through violence. What I am saying is that the central point it is making is true in a deeply unsettling way. And as its ranks swell it is that central truth that will rise to the surface and not the cracker-barrel sophistry of a Saul Alinsky. The American Revolution most likely began as a minority movement of well-off, white men who were just tired of British taxation. And they advocated for armed insurrection. I think they were wrong to do so, but the movement evolved into more than that and the resulting nation that was its fruit should not be reduced to the motives of a few men who, over beers in a pub, grew pissed at pecuniary oppression.
Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin would not have approved of the current riots. But neither would they have tried to blunt the tragic fact of racism in this country by blurting out phrases like “All Lives Matter.” Of course they do. But the motive behind such counter phrases seems sketchy to me. Another blinker. Another way of changing the topic and turning that page.
Black Lives Matter. Full stop. And now, in my own conscience, I have to figure out what to say to my friend.
