What a crazy kaleidoscope time to be alive and American!
It’s hard to catch your breath, so breathtaking are the sights and sounds of an America that (hopefully) has finally had enough. We seem to be on the cusp of one of those lasting leaps in consciousness that alters history. (And as has been said before, so must it be said again: There’s gonna be a lot of hangovers!)
I feel like I am running lately — running to protests here and there, running home to watch other protests over here and way over there! I seem to have a sound track in my head to the phantasmagoria of outrage and protest. Listening to some ancient rock song on the car radio, “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear…” and I’m like “No! Now it is clear!”
Video after video of black residents schooling all those white boys and girls who’d come to “burn some shit down” and I heard the Clash’s “Want a riot, a white riot, want a riot of me own.” (The Clash at least understood that the British riots of the 80s against police brutality were not their riot!) The calls, screams and demands for an end to the policing that ends in so many state-sanctioned murders. And I heard a refrain from the rapper Common, “‘Justice for all’ just ain’t specific enough.”
And I thought, yeah, that’s it, that’s where we are: Justice for all just ain’t specific enough anymore! And now it is all about the specifics. A broad consensus is forming among we Caucasiatics — the move from “I’m not
a racist” to “I am an anti-racist” is the conscious-raising victory of the moment. The slogan “White silence = violence” will be our siren’s call from now on.
Some have already begun to quibble with the demands of protesters. Defund the police? Abolish the police? All Cops Are Bad? But I’m thinking, No! Not yet. Now is the time for protesting and if the protestors’ demands seem utopian or like something we can’t build an electoral majority behind, then fine. Let it be that. We are learning a lot from it.
If this is an evolutionary leap in consciousness — akin in consequence to that first tremulous fish crawling out of the primordial soup — then let it be a while, let’s watch and see what it becomes. What WE become.
The poet Rilke once wrote, “Where I am folded, there I am a lie.” Now is the time for we white folk to do that unfolding. And it will be painful, bending back these old creases, the new blood flow will be like the stinging pins and needles we get in our legs, only this pain will be in our souls, and there is little reward beyond merely unfolding, except we will be finally upright.
Can we take it? Can we protest now, but then look inward and consciousness raise, without giving in to that siren call: Not me You! In the “whiteness gene” in every white person, there is a selector switch for “make a posse.” As soon as white folks get riled up, we want to make a posse. White supremacists make homicidal posses, as happened in Georgia with Ahmaud Arbery. But good white liberals react to the same DNA switch. We just make posses against each other. No sooner are we converted than we go looking for heretics to burn.
Dr. David Camp, a black educator, in “The White Ally Toolkit,” points out that for this reason, many white allies are “doing it wrong.”
His warning is: Don’t ostracize, vilify, shame or condescend. That can be hard for us because our energy for change can fill us with a desire for action. Yet if all the action that desire amounts to is another white posse, then perhaps we need to check that reaction as well.
We must not be angrier than black folks are, nor feel that we are as affected as they are. The unfolding process for white folks will be a long one. We have to put “White Silence = Violence” first, but a true reflection on whiteness, and the deep, buried echoes of white supremacy in us and our society, will take some steady, longer-term, reflection too.
As a teacher I offer one example that will bedevil our conversations about racial justice, and require the patience and humility of a saint, not the conviction of an inquisitor.
You can always tell when Martin Luther King Day has arrived because of all the extra copies around of his “I have a dream” speech. The difficult conversation in this new awareness will be to understand that focusing specifically on that one speech, for example, is how America has “whitewashed” Dr. King’s legacy. Why? Because it teaches students to genuflect before a great man encased in marble, but not to emulate the great agitator he was in life.
And an anti-racism curriculum now means the lesson is not merely to revere that dream, but to teach why Dr. King, on the day he died, was more unpopular than Donald Trump has ever been.
But you can’t do that in a day, or even a month. Or by shouting. My fellow Caucasiatics, can we, as part of our anti-racist activism, now take on the burden of educating ourselves and our fellow Caucasians — not to spurn each other, but to finally lift the burden of white-unfolding off of African Americans, and take charge of it ourselves?
It will be painful, but if we white folks are serious, we will grin and bear it.
Joe Gannon, author and teacher, lives in Easthampton, he can be reached at opinion@gazette.net