Since the time of
honest racial segregation in America—when whites wrote down race-based rules of
exclusion—we have been formulating modes of dishonest segregation: denials of
equality and inclusion in areas such as housing, criminal
justice, employment, interpersonal relationships, and private organizations.
Once institutionalized,
this dishonest segregation becomes subconscious for us whites: we do not create
race-based rules, we just live by the status quo. We are not racist, after all,
we just call
balls and strikes. We're objective when
pressing charges, citing criminal statistics, administering standardized tests,
drawing
political districts, or selecting the best
candidate.
Many whites were born
into this dishonest America: told that ours is a diverse country, only to be
raised in all-white
neighborhoods and sent to local property
tax-supported, largely white schools, with few
opportunities placed in our laps to have black friends.
By the time Rodney King
made the news, we had to learn of the goings on of our own country from strangers on
the screen—we had no loved ones who experienced institutionally tolerated
racial prejudice or violence. We knew no faces on which to see pain. We had no
connections.
Twenty years later, and
what has changed? Inequality remains. Informal segregation remains. This is
still a dishonest America. Whites only know more because there are more
cameras, not because of an increase in interracial neighborhoods, places of
worship, or other voluntary activities or organizations.
This reality does not
create people without tolerance, it creates people without empathy. It is
difficult, and perhaps unnatural, to feel empathy for a group excluded from
your childhood, education, community, and workplace—especially when you are
simultaneously told they are not actually being excluded.
Our crisis today is not
that us whites are any more racist than anyone else, it is that we do not
engage in empathy. We see a country that functions reasonably well for us and
fail to ask how well it works for others. Whites need to view #BlackLivesMatter
not as implying other lives do not matter, but as a plea for empathy, a plea to
help create a country that works just as well for others as it does for us.
Our crisis tomorrow is
that any unrest—any threat to change the status quo, any risk of this country
continuing to work as well for us as it did in our childhood—will push white
people to increasingly blame others. In accepting the Republican nomination for
president in 1968, Richard Nixon stated, “When a nation that has been known for a century for
equality of opportunity is torn by unprecedented racial violence … then it's
time for new leadership for the United States of America.” Nixon could not have
possibly been talking to black America, fresh off the heels of a century of
Jim Crow and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was talking to
white people—the same people presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald
Trump excites by the promise of making America great again.
As we did in 1968, we
risk looking to a presidential candidate who promises to restore order and,
implicitly, ensure that America continues to work well for us whites.
We do not need to make
America great again for us white people. We do not need to tell ourselves that
police officers are increasingly targets
of violence. We do not need more excuses to dig
our heels into the status quo. We need to begin a social evolution in which our
influence is real: we must listen to how America works for all minorities—Black,
Latino, Muslim, LGBTQIA, Disabled, women, etc. Real understanding will foster
empathy between communities, allowing for the creation and promotion of more
inclusive spaces, institutions, and policies. Through listening to the voices,
pain, and strife of our fellow Americas with whom we may not live, work, or
pray, we can begin to create the nation we were raised to believe we already
had.
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