I recently watched “Amend: The Fight for America,” a Netflix documentary that I highly recommend, and once again came to the conclusion that America has a race problem. Captain Obvious would say America has always had a race problem, though we’ve never really talked about it because we have consciously refused to accurately define the problem itself.
The race problem in America is white people, and the state of race relations in this country has always been a function of white people. People of color (POC) have suffered the consequences of America’s race relations, despite playing no part in their creation, and are now left without the ability to solve it.
Let’s review some history on this issue.
Africans did not kidnap Europeans and bring them to the “New World,” nor strip them of their identity, separate them from their children and subject them – and their descendants – to 250 years of heredity chattel slavery and 100 years of apartheid, Jim Crow and 50 years of trench warfare around the issue of their civil rights.
The Indigenous People of what we now call America didn’t subject the Europeans they crossed paths with to a 300-year genocidal assault that reduced their population to almost zero and eradicated any evidence of their culture. There is no white victim equivalent to the Trail of Tears or the massacre at Wounded Knee.
Asians didn’t bring Europeans to America, press them into labor gangs to build the intercontinental railroad, and when the job was done, pass the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) to prohibit all Chinese immigration. For good measure, we can also mention that Japanese citizens didn’t intern white Americans during WWII.
Last but not least, Hispanics didn’t force white people into underpaid migrant farm work jobs or to work in unsafe meat and poultry processing plants at the height of a pandemic so they could have food – without labor or risk. Their ancestors, also, never declared war on the United States.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Everything that I outlined and more is what white people in America have consciously chosen to do to POC. In today’s climate, we describe this history as structural or systemic racism, as if racism, like some mythic demon Grendel, is a monster with an independent existence that terrorizes the land. The truth is quite different; racism is no malevolent evil force that haunts the land, but rather white people’s normative rationalization they use to relate to, and act toward, POC. This is not an accident.
One of the limitations of the temporal nature of human life is that we never live long enough to truly have a historical context. Because of our first encounter with a given reality, we often falsely assume that reality never existed before the moment we experience it. Because of that, we’ll easily misunderstand the nature of the moment, and our strategy for dealing with it will become misaligned or simply incorrect. However, we have been here before as a nation; if we understand that we are the manifestation and current expression of our ancestors, then we can draw on their experience and wisdom to inform our thinking at any given moment.
Here is what one of the most literate, insightful and articulate of the ancestors, James Baldwin, had to say about the underlying cause of systemic or structural racism.
“I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long […] They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.”
Anyone could spend the next 20-30 years of their life arriving at this conclusion. Or, if you believe Baldwin is right – and my 72 years says he is – you can let his experience and judgement inform how you decide to treat this moment.
When I say how you treat this moment, I’m not talking about some grand political strategy that leads to liberation, and I’m also not talking about your personal experience with individual white people. Baldwin is talking about how you, and by extension all of us, should understand our relationship with white America.
We expend untold amounts of energy, at the expense of our emotional and mental health, unsuccessfully trying to get white people in America to recognize our humanity. Baldwin also speaks to that when he says, “Well then, for the sake of one’s sanity, one simply ceases trying to make them hear. If they think things are more than people – and they do – well, let them think so. Let them be destroyed by their things.”
Because we don’t learn from our history, our experience in America is like Groundhog Day. Today’s emerging Black generation would be wise to understand that as they take the baton of leadership, they’re also starting the race with a 400-year relay – and they’re not running the anchor leg. Learn the lessons, and when your time comes, pass the baton off in better condition than it was given to you.
