I've had the pleasure of having long conversations about racial issues with a white woman who is of a growing population of white women who only date black men. Because of this I felt like her opinion would be intriguing since its very easy to assume all whites are racist to some degree and are just hiding it. And I think one of the things that came out of our conversations is something I thought before; that there are degrees of racial bias and racial prejudice. And while she doesn't share the same biases as other whites because no race is a monolith, she does understand their perspective and fears. But she's honest in a way I find very refreshing and she's constantly looking for solutions that she personally can do. So I have to start off by simply giving her credit.
And to a large extent she does "get it" but at the same times there are things she simply doesn't get and you have to explain it to her and she doesn't understand why more black people don't explain it because she really does take it in and learn from it. She doesn't pretend like she knows everything. She sees the limitations of her knowledge and doesn't want to be ignorant, so she appreciates the correction. This is a stark contrast to people we're often used to dealing with because racist whites tend to think we're the ones who are ignorant and if they do talk to us about race its for the purpose of trying to educate us and bring us to their side. They don't even see how arrogant this is and have no sense of their own privilege in how spoiled they are that they feel like they can talk to anyone like that but we're supposed to be respectful to them or else they get upset and throw a tantrum.
Like I said... its very refreshing to have a positive conversation with a white person that is actually constructive where they're trying to see your point of view rather than pushing theirs. She has a group of friends like her. All their children are mixed. And they're able to have conversations as a group that probably no one else is able to have. But at the same time, it's like... "please school the others of your people who are not like you because they're way more likely to hear it from you than from us." But because she's white she still reacts to messages in social media directed at white people when most people writing those messages aren't speaking to every single white person on the planet but rather those who are part of the problem and continue the system of white supremacy. She's also well aware she's privileged and has watched a lot of the Jane Elliott content.
But one of the most interesting things she said was that whites are afraid that if black people get too much power we will turn the tables and basically enslave them. I laughed, but my laugh had a lot to do with the title of a book I've been working on. It's called "How I Enslaved White People". But no, its not about enslaving whites lol. I wanted the title to be provocative. It is sort of a future alternate timeline in which black people work together guided by an anonymous financial guru and basically take control over the economy in a way that the current tables are turned; that is to say, blacks have all the power and whites are broke and therefore have to work for blacks. The book isn't written as a fantasy but rather meant to highlight the problems of our economic condition in relation to how we empower ourselves and control our own destiny. It's not at all about mistreating anyone.
I told her about my book and we had a conversation about power. She expressed the fear of other whites that things have to be fixed in a way that doesn't take power from whites because whites will see that and react out of fear. My point was that power has to be first taken (away from the racists) so that it can be fairly redistributed the same way that money is in the hands of a top tiny fraction and needs to be redistributed.
You can call it socialism or communism if you want but you'd be wrong. Wealth is constantly being redistributed from low and middle class to the rich by virtue of the system being influenced by the rich so they get subsidies and don't have to pay their fair share of taxes. Even if all you did was force them to make up for this (which has happened over decades) in future taxation on future income (so not coming to take what you already amassed even though that wouldn't be wrong either) it would still have the benefit of helping to make life easier for people and freeing up their own (low) incomes so that they can save and invest and find some kind of financial security.
We need Economic Justice like Dr. King started to fight for before he got assassinated. But maybe Hemphill is right and that assassination never happened because racists don't do anything to black people and we just made it all up and Dr. Martin Luther King is actually chillin in Jamaica with Tupac, working on his next album, "California Dreamin".
So anyway, I ask her how we should try to work around this white fear (as an argument to show why I don't give a damn about who's afraid and how its not our job to manage their fear). Since we were going in circles I took my TV remotes to symbolize what she was saying. I gave her 4 remotes and I had one. She was saying we should trade what they don't have for something that we do have. So I showed her what happens when I traded my 1 remote for 1 of her remotes. Now, she still had 4 and I still had one. So obviously, our situations hadn't changed in the slightest.
Unfortunately, there were 5 remotes because that meant at the end, no matter what happened there could not be an equal division. The minute I stated my intention to take all her remotes to redistribute them she pulled them all back to try and keep me from reaching all of them. This was a good analog of white supremacy seeking to maintain itself through oppression.
So here's what I did. Once she lowered her guard I started taking the remotes one by one; not all at once. She wasn't instinctively triggered the same way and before she could really do anything, I had them all. Then I gave her back 2 remotes and I set the 3rd one aside so that neither of us had it.
Whites, even the ones that claim they don't have it, are most likely subconsciously afraid of what they will LOSE if black people gain "too much" power in America. This subconscious seed becomes a tree which then produces more seeds. We cannot stop them from fearing us because they imagine that we want revenge in the sense of doing to them what they did to us. They don't understand, as a group, that after going through slavery it isn't a fate we would wish on our worst enemy. Black people only see immorality in that history and it has granted us at the very least... a sense of morality that rejects the inhumanity that we experienced. While they treated us like animals and saying we were savages and 3/5 human... for us... THEY were the ones acting that way. So no... we're not interested in doing that in return because it's not who we are or who we ever want to be. We're not corrupted by the power we don't have. We see something better.
Equal rights and Justice.
|
|
