I am a racist.
Okay, let’s back up.
Roseanne Barr tweeted this afternoon, “ I’m not a racist, I never was & I never will be.”
I replied, “No racist ever thinks they’re racist.”
Or as @ErynnBrook tweeted last week,
My own reply wasn’t to Roseanne so much as to people who would open her tweet and see the replies. I continued: “That’s why all of us need to listen when others, particularly minority voices, tell us our words have hurt them. More self-reflection and more polite listening would help society far more than yet more defensive shouting. All of us make mistakes we don’t realize we’re making, and all of us can afford to be more gracious when called out on them. Especially on racial issues.”
My tweets were two of the first replies to Roseanne, so they were seen a few thousand times before getting buried in the thread. A couple of Roseanne’s defenders tried to trap me, asking, “Are you a racist?” Because obviously I’ll deny it, and then they can use my words against me, right?
Wrong. Here’s my reply:
“Quite possibly! I’m no different than anyone else — we all have lots of subconscious assumptions absorbed from the dominant culture and ingrained in our worldviews that we never realized were there. I try to do better every day.”
I’ll say it again: Maybe I am a racist. In fact, I probably am, at least a little bit. And you probably are too, if you’re white like me. We live in a social system historically designed to help us at the expense of minorities. We also commit “microaggressions” without realizing what we’re doing, because many of the minority individuals we meet might be justifiably afraid of the consequences of calling us out (or just tired of dealing with it all the time), and so we never learn. If we don’t admit our racism to ourselves, we’ll never be able to right our wrongs and do better.
Now don’t get me wrong, none of this is to say that you or I or most other white folks are full of hatred. I think society made a big mistake by equating racism with hate. Fighting hate is good, but there’s much more to fighting racism than that. Racism can be unintentional and ingrained, rather than overt or conscious. Impact is even more important than intent — anything that reinforces the white privilege afforded by systemic racism, or anything that has a disproportionately harmful impact on minorities, is racist, even if those impacts weren’t intentional.
We have to seek out and erase these impacts, including in our own individual behaviors, every bit as much as we need to target racist intentions. If instead we grow defensive and close our ears when someone points out our impacts, angrily replying “No I’m not a racist!”, then maybe we aren’t being hateful, but we are being racist.
You’ll almost never hear a KKK member say, “I’m racist!” They come up with all sorts of excuses why their white supremacy isn’t racist, which only allows them to ignore that racism and let it persist. I don’t want to be like them. I want to seek growth, change, and humility. I want to listen. I want that for all of us.
So unlike David Duke, Roseanne Barr, and Donald Trump, who have all stuck their heads in the sand, I’ll say it again:
I am a racist. I don’t know how, but I know it’s true, and I am eager to change, little by little every day, with God’s help and with your help.
Also posted on Medium.