I want to thank black people for making me feel so uncomfortable.
I’ve spent the last couple of years sitting in seminars, churches, and classrooms listening to Black people tell their stories. At times it’s been uncomfortable, shocking, and painful. If what I was learning made me angry, I wasn’t going to be comforted here. This wasn’t about ME. The community let me know I was a guest and not always a welcome guest. It was not their job to explain their history, their pain, their oppression. I learned to be silent, often wrestling with the weight of the question, “what is my part in this struggle”?
Let me be perfectly clear, I mean crystal clear, I am not speaking for Black people. And I’m probably failing as a white messenger of the Black message. But I’m going to keep trying.
I recently attended a presentation about defunding the police and systemic racism. They compared two side-by-side Chicago communities. One an economically depressed, predominately Black neighborhood with a high crime rate and a disproportionately high number of police, who many in the community viewed as the enemy and the oppressors. They had few schools, no community centers, few health care clinics, or job opportunities. The other, a very diverse community with a thriving economy, 2 community centers with pools and ice-skating rinks, 2 hospital systems, great schools and police force that engaged with the community. They pointed out that added police in the predominately Black community didn’t make them safer. It was the opportunities in the diverse neighborhood that made a community thrive.
When I mentioned the presentation to a white friend she responded that “giving” the people things would not solve the problem. Her take on the problem was the rise in single parent families. It’s not the first time I’d heard these statements. It was the first time I knew better. I must admit I was “speechless”.
Let’s start with the statement, “we shouldn’t just give Black communities opportunities.”
It’s not about “giving” Black people anything. It is about our country’s centuries of White rule and it’s history of controlling and handicapping the Black communities to assure that they never accumulate wealth and power over their own future.
Who knew that slavery didn’t end with the 13th Amendment? Not me. After slavery was abolished the south still needed a labor force to work their plantations and rebuild their cities. Southern states enacted Black Codes which restricted black people from owning property, conducting business, buying and leasing land, and moving freely through public spaces. They then passed the Vagrancy Act of 1866. It forced into employment, for a term of up to three months, any person who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. The combination of the Black Codes and the Vagrancy Act made it impossible for “freed” Black men to find employment and then made being unemployed a crime. Black men by the thousands were arrested and put on chain gangs to work. As white people, we celebrate the freeing of the slaves, but in their reality, they went from being property with monetary value to the owner, to being prisoners, work horses, their bodies literally had no monetary value. Some men were actually worked to death, just to be replaced by another “free” Black man.
Who knew that in the few instances where recently freed Black people were able to build a thriving community and accumulate wealth, their communities were burned to the ground and their leaders beaten or even lynched? Not me. How did I not know about the Tulsa massacre and Black Wall Street? Why didn’t I know about the Wilmington North Carolina massacre in 1898? I’ve visited Wilmington before but had no idea that in the late 1800’s the city was a thriving Black community. Black people owned businesses and held public office. Until the white community felt threatened and overthrew the county government, ran the Black mayor out of town, burned down the black businesses, including the black run newspaper, and brutally murdered up to 300 Black men.
The Black community isn’t asking for a handout. They are demanding white people acknowledge a white culture that systemically rigs the system to assure that they are rarely able to accumulate wealth, power and control over their future.
Economic oppression didn’t end with the Civil Rights Act, it just became more insidious. Take redlining, the dictionary defines redlining as “a discriminatory practice by which banks, insurance companies, etc., refuse or limit loans, mortgages, insurance, etc., within specific geographic areas, especially inner-city neighborhoods.” Banks literally drew red lines around neighborhoods in which they refused to invest. A 2019 study done by the Urban Institute, shows that there is still a 30-percentage-point gap between black and white homeownership.
Now let me address the statement that the predominance of single mothers is the root of the socio-economic disparity. According to a 2016 article in AFRO, 33.3% of all black children are being raised by a single mother, while 6.5% of all white children can say the same. Again, we, as white people, must acknowledge the fact that a white system that abolished slavery but then has continued to disadvantage and enslave Black men in the prison complex helped create this disparity.
How did I not know that Nixon was terrified that the anti-war and Black Power movement would affect his chances for reelection? His administration decided on a strategy to criminalize their very existence. According to John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s aide on domestic affairs, “we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” This was just another version of the massacres in the late 1800’s early 1900’s.
The tendency to criminalize behavior that falls more harshly on black communities is not solely a GOP sin. Vice President Biden was one of the leading authors of The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. It authorized more than $1 billion for drug enforcement, education and treatment programs. One of its most consequential provisions was the “100-1” rule, so named because it required a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for trafficking in 500 grams of powder cocaine or five grams of crack. Yes, I had to google this, 500 grams of powdered cocaine is equal to half a kilo, while 5 grams of crack cocaine would fill a thimble. Snorting cocaine was a white persons privilege while the affordability of smoking crack cocaine was concentrated in the Black community. Dealing in powder cocaine carried the same mandatory minimum sentence as the personal use of crack cocaine.
President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement act of 1994, which included mandatory sentencing and the “3 strikes” provision. The 3 strikes provision required a life sentence for anyone found guilty 3 times of a violent crime, to which drug crimes were included. Recently President Clinton has admitted this was a grave mistake, that disproportionately affected the black community. He also acknowledged that the prisons system grew so large due to mandatory sentencing that there was no possibility of funding rehabilitation or job training programs. The system had become completely punitive.
Let me be honest, I’m a white girl who grew up in the lily-white suburbs. I can’t even brag that I have a Black friend. How did I become that girl preaching about racism and white privilege? I have no idea but I promise the Black community I will keep on learning, teaching, and preaching.
So, I want to thank black people for making me feel so uncomfortable.
The next stage of the white gaslighting is happening right now. Politicians and white nationalist are trying to take over our public education system and are attempting to criminalize the teaching of our country’s truth. Here are a list of some of groups and seminars that have helped me navigate this journey:
Chicago ROAR, Chicago Regional Organizing for Antiracism: http://crossroadsantiracism.org/chicago-regional-organizing-for-antiracism
Institute for Nonviolence Chicago: https://www.nonviolencechicago.org/
Peace Circle Training and Restorative Justice, Community Justice for Youth Institute: https://www.pbmr.org/circle-training
