I'm a white guy.
I'm in my sixties, so you can say I'm an old white guy. I don't mind.
Upper middle class, too.
So why did I join the NAACP? White people.
Whenever I hear a white person raging on (and I don't mean everyone's crazy uncle at Thanksgiving) about "minority entitlements" or "reverse racism" or "why aren't there support groups for white people?" I hear a whiner complaining that they think they might have gotten a taste of what their own team has been dishing out for a few hundred years.
Want to convince me you're really being unfairly treated? Let's go for a walk, my white whiner, and you can show me the parts of your town where you are not allowed to buy a house. NOT the parts where you can't afford it, NOT where you don't like the neighborhood, but where you are NOT ALLOWED to buy no matter how much money you have, because the banks won't talk to you and the real estate agents won't even tell you what's for sale in there, and don't bother saying that that's illegal, because we all know it but nobody will talk to you anyway. They will, of course, gladly show you a place where "you'd be more comfortable." Within living memory this was rampant, and it still happens today.
While we're out let's go get something to eat, and you can show me the restaurants where you are NOT ALLOWED to eat or even buy food from the back door because you are white -- not that you can't afford the prices, not that you don't like the food or are uncomfortable in that neighborhood, but show me the signs out front that say NO WHITES and show me the scars where the police dragged you off the chair and out into the street and beat your white ass to a pulp when you went in anyway. Within living memory this was rampant, and it happened even outside the South.
While we're at it, point to the trees where white folks get hung, and tied up with barbed wire and flayed and castrated and set on fire so the "reverse racists" can have their pictures taken with the body to use as postcards, and you can point to the spots where you always step off the sidewalk and cast your eyes down when a non-white walks by. In living memory this sort of thing was rampant, and I believe that the family of James Byrd would disagree if you claimed that this sort of thing is all in the past and better forgotten.
Now I don't feel the least bit guilty about being white, so don't bother filling the comments with that "white guilt" nonsense. I just realize that I have benefited greatly from a system that gives lip service to being fair but historically little else. Why is it always such a battle to get people treated decently? For a so-called Christian nation, we seem to do a piss-poor job of loving our neighbors as ourselves. We white folks have a lot of shit to own up to, live down, and even try to make up for, and you better man up, boys, or you just make it clear that you are still part of the problem not the solution. Don't give me that crap that YOU weren't born yet and YOU didn't do that stuff, because as far as I can tell, if you're whining about "reverse racism" then you play for that team whether you think you do or not.
So yes, I'm all worked up, but what's all that got to do with joining the NAACP?
Well, I've tried fighting racism on my own, sometimes in private, sometimes in public, and I've found that getting it right can be a lot harder than it looks. I don't always have the time it takes, or the money it takes, or the experience to avoid missteps, and shamefully sometimes even the will is hard to gather. But the folks at the NAACP make the time, and gather the money, and they have the experience and the will, boy do they have the will, to carry on the struggle to make the system better for us all.
Even us old white guys.