I think that’s part of what we’re seeing, this mix. White male power got to be ubiquitous for so long. It got to be the air we breathe. And now there’s suddenly some accountability. And I think white men, too, have always been angry and bitter by the failures that have been placed upon them. They aren’t as successful. They’re not as successful and powerful as they were told they should be and because we never talked about the system, they weren’t told why. And so they were told to blame us, blame women, blame people of color. And now, on top of that, they’re like, “I’m already miserable and you want to yell at me for grabbing someone’s ass at the workplace? Since when?” We’re seeing this anger and desperation because they aren’t conditioned to accept responsibility. They have refused to learn how they participated in systems of violence.
I can understand so much about whiteness, but I can’t understand what it would feel like to be 40 and realize that you’re part of an unfair system. You know what I mean?
The difference is that white men have been so coddled that they don’t know they can survive this knowledge. They can grow past it. We have. We are living examples of going past the knowledge that this system sucks. We still do what we can. We still care for our families. We still try to find happiness.
But there’s this idea that a white man shouldn’t have to, and they have no practice in it. And I’m sure that’s a huge existential crisis to realize you’ve striven your whole life for something you were never ever, ever gonna get.
What “procedural justice” leaves out of the conversation are questions of substantive justice. What is the actual impact of policing on those policed and what could we do differently? Over the last 40 years we have seen a massive expansion of the scope and intensity of policing. Every social problem in poor and non-white communities has been turned over to the police to manage. The schools don’t work; let’s create school policing. Mental health services are decimated; let’s send police. Overdoses are epidemic; let’s criminalize people who share drugs. Young people are caught in a cycle of violence and despair; let’s call them superpredators and put them in prison for life.
Police have also become more militarized. The Federal 1033 program, the Department of Justice’s “Cops Office,” and homeland security grants have channeled billions of dollars in military hardware into American police departments to advance their “war on crime” mentality. A whole generation of police officers have been given “warrior” training that teaches them to see every encounter with the public as potentially their last, leading to a hostile attitude towards those policed and the unnecessary killing of people falsely considered a threat, such as the 12-year-old Tamir Rice, killed for holding a toy gun in an Ohio park.
The alternative is not more money for police training programs, hardware or oversight. It is to dramatically shrink their function. We must demand that local politicians develop non-police solutions to the problems poor people face. We must invest in housing, employment and healthcare in ways that directly target the problems of public safety. Instead of criminalizing homelessness, we need publicly financed supportive housing; instead of gang units, we need community-based anti-violence programs, trauma services and jobs for young people; instead of school police we need more counselors, after-school programs, and restorative justice programs.
I now recognize some number of these exchanges for what they are: requests for reassurance, little tests I have to pass if I want to be perceived as anything other than a resentful adoptee, an ungrateful daughter, an angry person of color. My esteem for my white family, the strength of my connection to them, is what makes me feel safe, relatable, approachable to some. This, it turns out, is the price of admission, the prerequisite for whatever authority they are willing to grant me when it comes to talking about my own experience.
This pressure transracial adoptees might feel to be “good” can be directly linked to the belief that people of color should shrug off damaging, dehumanizing racism rather than call it out – that it’s our responsibility to not show anger, to reassure white people at any cost, to place their comfort over our own humanity.
Just once I want to speak to a room of white people who know they are there because they are the problem. Who know they are there to begin the work of seeing where they have been complicit and harmful so that they can start doing better. Because white supremacy is their construct, a construct they have benefited from, and deconstructing white supremacy is their duty.
Add to that the complexity of women of color’s own relationship to work. Historically, we have always worked and mothered. Many have even grown up seeing their mother and grandmother work more than one job. This is all we know. So the notion of having time to mother feels unfamiliar. There is still the social stigma of taking time off to mother—something black and brown women have never felt free to do. Ever since our bodies and our babies lost economic value, we have struggled to reassert our value as mothers and our importance in raising our own children. As I often say, black women in this country are viewed as perfectly acceptable and desirable for taking care of other’s people children but somehow stereotyped as not being able to take care of their own.
These numbers are high because survivors are systematically punished for taking action to protect themselves and their children while living in unstable and dangerous conditions. Survivors are criminalized for self-defense, failing to control abusers’ violence, migration, removing their children from situations of abuse, being coerced into criminalized activity and securing resources needed to live day to day while suffering economic abuse.
Often, when people talk about “racism” they are using the term to refer to a set of ideas or personal values. In their view, racism is a disease that afflicts some individuals and causes them to discriminate against others just because of the way they look. It is often complemented by the idea of color-blindness, exemplified by the common claim that “I don’t even see race” or “everyone is the same to me”. This perspective locates racism within individuals, our beliefs and opinions and what we “see”. It also suggests that even to acknowledge racial difference is a form of racism; this creates a conflict, since those harmed by racism require an acknowledgment of their racialized status in order to have a conversation about injustice. (For example, to talk about the contemporary legacy of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, or the internment of Japanese Americans, one needs to admit that we are in fact not all the same.)
For sociologists – as well as for many activists and others – it is more accurate to think of racism as a set of structures organizing the way society works. This view characterizes racism as something that lives not in individuals, but in systems – in the fabric of American society. Through this lens, what is in one’s “heart” does not matter. Rather, the question becomes how our society follows a pattern, churning out different outcomes for different people in ways linked to race. This happens with or without the consent, awareness or intentions of individuals.
Many people believe racism is like a skilled equestrian’s choosing, through decisions and commands, to go faster or slower, to jump a fence or avoid an obstacle, to follow a certain route or not. However, thinking structurally, we can understand that racism is more like a merry-go-round. You may be going up, down and around, and you might feel as if you’re riding a horse, but the machine is functioning with or without you.
In other words, the question of whether something is racist may be more complicated than it appears on the surface. We might consider events and policies racist not because an individual is hurling epithets or explicitly trying to harm black people but because they result in the systematic disenfranchisement of black people and harm to black children – regardless of intent – and because they are bound up in the perpetuation of historical policies rooted in more explicit racism. And this, in part, is why people fight so hard for their schools: because the fight is actually about a great deal more than just one building.
To Kill a Mockingbird was not only written in an immature voice, but poured out of a mind immaturely attuned to racialized people as human beings who continue to exist when white people aren’t thinking about them. The story’s cast of white characters – Scout’s family, her neighbours, even the malevolent Ewells – are actualized and living people, each with their own motivations and desires. They, and the social realities of the 1930s South, are the novel’s subject.
Tom Robinson, on the other hand, is a cipher. A formless void into which the white imagination can project itself. We know hardly anything of his family’s grief, or their rage at the unjust society into which they were violently displaced at birth. We read nothing of the nights his mother must have wrapped her hands around her empty womb and cried out to God to save her child. What we do know is his pitiful fate at the hands of a justice system engineered to destroy him.
Tom Robinson, and the black community in the fictional town of Maycomb, are the novel’s object.
That a 58-year-old book, written from a white woman’s perspective, should supersede award-winning stories from authors who live their racial realities once they put down the pen, is an absurd notion. As is the idea that promoting better books and better storytelling amounts to censorship.
don’t use history to justify your racism. For one, it’s historically inaccurate.
Read this 40 part series.