Daunte Wright is dead because of the color of his skin, and all the associations that his skin brings in our society.
Outrage and disgust and fear are the only appropriate emotional reactions to a society predicated on White supremacist domination and violence, a society in which Daunte Wright can be murdered by a purportedly highly trained police officer, with over a quarter century of experience in law enforcement, who is unable to distinguish a taser from a firearm, and unable to refrain from killing a young man in cold blood.
Michael Harriot, writing for The Root, offers the evidence to consider in the ‘debate’ (it’s a debate, you see, in some quarters) whether America is in fact racist, to its core:
Explain why white people use illegal drugs, possess illegal narcotics and sell illegal substances at higher rates than Black people but Black people are six-and-a-half times more likely to be arrested and convicted for drugs. The Stanford Open Policing Project—the largest police stop project that ever existed—found that Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be stopped and 4 times more likely to be searched than white drivers even though white drivers were more likely to have contraband...
… Black people are not three times as poor or less educated. In fact, a Black child born to wealthy Black parents is just as likely to end up poor or in jail as a poor white child born to wealthy parents. A home in a Black neighborhood is worth $48,000 less than the exact same home in a white neighborhood, even if the crime rate and neighborhood amenities are exactly the same. A white high school dropout is more likely to find a job as a Black college student. Of all the manufactured hypotheses that attempt to explain these racial disparities, none of them even comes close to the simplest explanation.
It’s racism.
Perhaps racism is the reason that these valiant scholarly attempts at whitesplaining away America’s racial toxicity exist in the first place…
Harriot raises another point that seems to make many who consider themselves well-informed members of the political left very uncomfortable— it’s not just conservatives fascists who are racist in a racist society:
Maybe white people genuinely cannot fathom that white supremacy is responsible for these racial incongruities because, by proxy, it would also mean that they benefit from these inequities.
Maybe that’s why most white people “are satisfied with the way Blacks are treated in society.” Perhaps that’s why two out of every three white people believe Black people have “as good a chance as whites to get any kind of job for which they are qualified.” The majority of white people do not believe Black people face discrimination in voting, medical treatment or when applying for a loan or mortgage, even though numerous studies have documented these systemic issues.
The percentages tell us that the number of people who believe racist fictions about the lives of Black people in the US must include a stunningly high number of self-described progressives.
That’s because in a structurally racist society, racist views permeate the entire cultural landscape, and so those who hold them can maintain the illusion that they are not benefitting from and contributing to the racist framework:
White Progressives Have a Lot of Work to Do, and I’m Not Here to Help
Chris Stewart
Liberal White people who subscribe to all the right periodicals, vote for the wokest sounding political candidates, and give money to causes that surely prove their stellar virtues also suffer from colossal blind spots that hide their contributions to the perpetuation of racial inequity…
I lost faith in White “progressives” so long ago that I scantly remember having it. Every now and then I go back and read the emails I received as an school board member just to remind myself how truly awful fauxgressives can be. As the target of their social violence on many occasions, as an audience to their massive eruptions of privilege, and as a witness to their duplicitous hypocrisy during a decade of negotiating with them, I’m tapped out. I’m not alone. Many people of color are tapped out. Disgusted. Tired.
There are too many people here who don’t want to think the problem involves them.
Too many who don’t want to undertake uncomfortable self-reflection, or face difficult choices.
Too many who want to believe the problem is limited to ‘the real racists’, and ‘real racists’ are easy to spot, and ‘real racists’ are thankfully few in number, and of course are not among their friends, family, neighbors (and for goodness sake not to be found among political comrades).
June 25, 2020
Our research, personal stories, and the experiences of many others don’t offer much cause for optimism. Why? When people of color give voice to the discrimination they experience, they are often silenced by their white colleagues, many of whom purport to be liberal progressives. And although there is a perception that academia is a safe haven for these kinds of honest conversations, it is often the opposite. Until this changes in education and beyond, it’s our view that we will be unable to reach racial equity in white institutional spaces…
Angie studies liberal ideology and how it contributes to organizational silences on racism. She argues that external racial ideologies of “color-blindness” interact with internal organizational cultures to produce something called racism-evasive responses. Racism-evasive rhetoric denies naming and addressing the significance and realities of racism. Examples include: emotional responses, such as crying, to deflect from hard conversations; using African Americans as color capital; the performance of sending white children to racially diverse schools as a way to deflect from problematic or racist behavior; and claiming special insights due to traveling the world or having intermarried. In Angie’s experience, all of these racism-evasive tactics have surfaced in everything from departmental discussions about racism to cynicism and incredulity about her research on the experiences of faculty of color.
When discussions of systemic and institutional racism do happen, white people often want to run the conversation. In her forthcoming book, Angie names this phenomenon “liberal white supremacy” – the tendency of white people to constantly place themselves in the superior moral position. This takes many forms. Some want to compete for the title of most “woke” progressive. Some show up to insert themselves in conversations about racial and economic inequality only when it becomes popular or high-profile to do so.
In line with Angie’s research, Tsedale has experienced how white colleagues use racism-evasive tactics to avoid engaging issues that push Black voices from the margins to the center.