Blacks Don’t Need White People To Solve Racism
Marcus Garvey taught that “a race without authority and power is a race without respect.” However, due to the degrading experience of chattel slavery, Blacks have developed a crippling desire to prove their respectability to whites, hoping that once convinced, whites will have a moral epiphany that leads to the dismantling of white supremacy. This obsession with white acceptance prevents the race as a whole from doing what is necessary to completely free themselves from oppression. To this point, Dr. Amos Wilson said the white man’s “so called power is based on the nature of the relationship he has with the black man.”
“We empower him,” he said. “He cannot be what he is unless we are what we are. To a good extent the European is our creation. They cannot have what they have unless we are what we are. We can better appeal to our own sense of selves… through transforming ourselves, they will be transformed automatically.”
There Were Second Thoughts After the First Attempt at Dismantling White Supremacy
Even if whites decide to implement equitable policies, they can just as easily make them go away. During Reconstruction, for a brief period following the the Civil War, the U.S government passed several laws aimed at protecting the enfranchisement of the formerly enslaved Blacks. African-Americans were legally granted freedom from servitude, full citizen status, the right to vote, and many Blacks were voted into political office. Nonetheless, the political revolution of Reconstruction spawned increasingly violent actions from the racist element withing the U.S. Eventually, public support for the policies faded in the North, as voters decided the Civil War was over and slavery was dead, leading to the complete reversal of legal protection under the law for Blacks in America.
Whites Have Built Insurmountable Defense Mechanisms to Avoid Dealing With Racism
Many whites have developed a plethora of excuses to avoid an honest discussion on white supremacy. Colorblindness, reverse racism, classism, Black laziness, are some of the excuses used to continually deny the reality of global racial oppression against Blacks and to avoid having to do something about it. In fact, in an article written by Emma Gray and Jessica Samakow, two editors for The Huffington Post, the authors write, “people who are discriminated against don’t get to just wake up and decide race doesn’t matter, that it doesn’t exist.” The fact that whites are aware that they have the option of “not seeing race” further proves that they do see color, and that they do benefit from the color of their skin.
Whites Benefit Tremendously From White Supremacy
Historically, white supremacy has afforded whites all sorts of privileges and advantages. When addressing white America, Gray and Samakow declare the following:
“Think about how often that applies. If you’re pulled over by a cop, your innocence is assumed. If you’re looking to move, your neighbors will believe you’re a good person without any proof. If you’re shopping in a store, you won’t be followed by an employee. You don’t get to choose whether you benefit from white privilege or not — it’s the structures in place that automatically grants it to you. Denying that only makes you complicit in continuing that cycle.”
In a highly competitive world, it’s hard for any human being to give up that which provides them advantages. Is it realistic to expect Whites to give up the very advantage that ensures their success over other groups? Marcus Garvey once said potentially “every white man is a Klansman, as far as the Negro in competition with whites socially, economically and politically is concerned, and there is no use lying.”
Blacks Have Waited Long Enough
After nearly 40o years of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and 100 years of Jim Crow, and 50 years since the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., Blacks are still suffering from systematic racism, inequality, and state sanctioned violence. If whites haven’t yet dismantled the oppressive system that continues to persecute Blacks, it’s insane to expect they will be doing it anytime soon.
Speeches of Equality and Anti-racism are Rarely Followed by Real Change
Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public places and discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin, 50 years later, structural racism still remains.
“There has been a dramatic change in attitudes and in principles,” says Michael Wenger, a senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the nation’s leading think tank on African-American socioeconomics. “Change has been much less dramatic in actual behavior.”
The racial wealth gap kept widening well after the civil rights era, nearly tripling between 1984 and 2009, according to a Brandeis University study.
Whites Will Never Be Able To Relate To The Black Experience
The struggle most white people have with understanding racism may also result from the fact they will never be able to experience or comprehend what it’s like to live in a Black body. While expounding upon this notion, Lorraine Devon Wilke, a writer for The Huffington Post, wrote the following: “They can want to. They can try. They can watch it, read about it; talk about it, blog about it. They can weep over its injustices, march in solidarity with its victims, use the right phrases and hashtags, even show homage for its music and culture. But just as non-parents can never fully understand the experience of actually being parents (forget the “my brother has kids” thing… it ain’t the same), so, too, can whites never fully grasp the day-to-day, can’t-turn-it-off, always-there experience of being [Black] in America.”
Most White People Don’t Understand The Meaning of Racism
Most people, especially whites, do not have a true understanding of racism. They are able to detect overt racism, but often confuse it with prejudice. Yet the more covert characteristic of structural racism is completely invisible to many white people. In Powernomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America, Dr. Claud Anderson writes, “Racism is wealth- and power-based competitive relationship between Blacks and non-Blacks. The sole purpose of racism is to support and ensure that the White majority and its ethnic subgroups continue to dominate and use Blacks as a means to produce wealth and power…True racism exists only when one group holds a disproportionate share of wealth and power over another group then uses those resources to marginalize, exploit, exclude and subordinate the weaker group. If a problem is not understood, it’s unlikely that it will be solved and may not even be acknowledged.”
