Why The Eradication of Both White Privilege and Racism Have To Be a Part of the Progressive/Liberal Agenda, Part III, Finale

People get tired of racism. People get tired of talking about racism. People get tired of listening to other people talk about racism. It is not only people who are somewhat or largely racist who tire of these discourses. Many people get tired of this topic. I am strongly pushing the bounds of tolerance simply by composing a three part series on this blog about it. Even some of my most loyal fans will likely roll their eyes and shake their heads in disbelief and exasperation when they discover I have written yet another installment on the subject. That's just how averse we are in America to talking about racism.

I have learned that virtually everyone (who is not black or brown) or who is not very seriously engaged in and committed to some form of active anti-racist work, eventually gets tired of talking about racism and wants to move on to another topic of discussion. Racism is not a sustainable conversation with a very large cross section of American citizens. It is very much like we as a people are engaged in a type of stealth like behavior, when it comes to discussions around race. We are lying in wait for any random cataclysmic, newsworthy or even pop confection of a story to break so that we can exhale a huge sigh of relief and completely pounce on this new thing, full force, whatever it is, and give energy to it instead of to the ongoing and always relevant discussion of racism.

The problem of course, is that so many of these new things especially the big ones also have a very clear racialized or race related aspect, energy or undertone to them that is so powerful it often simply cannot be ignored---Hurricane Katrina, the signs present at early and ongoing Tea Party rallies, the rhetoric that emerged from early and ongoing Tea Party rallies, bitherism, the passage of California's proposition 8, the American recession, the passage of Arizona's SB 1070, the passage of Alabama's HB 56, the execution of Troy Davis, etc. America is anything but a post racial society yet so many of us so desperately want it to be. This desire is so deep and so insidious that it has become as ingrained in the American ethos as racism itself.

Its easy to understand why Americans are so eager to move past racism. It is a very ugly yet integral part of our past history and current reality. It is a national embarrassment. And most people don't enjoy being embarrassed. We tend to want to move past embarrassing episodes in our personal lives as quickly as humanly possible. The same is true for our national lives as well. And it is not just African Americans who have been subjected to the American brand of ethnic based bias, of course. This is a country of the occupied, the enslaved and of immigrants. Every single occupied indigenous nation, family with enslaved ancestors and every immigrant group who has found themselves within the borders of the sea to shining sea-ness known as America has experienced some form of horrifying legacy of ethnicity based bias within these borders. There are the Native people's whose land was initially appropriated, The Jews, The Irish, The Italians, The Germans, The Japanese, The Chinese, The Mexicans, The Nicaraguans, The Salvadoreans, etc. One could write a very good and very compelling history of America simply by writing it through the prism of our history of racism and the stain of ethnicity based bias.

Many people also have a very poor level of competency when it comes to discussions around racism. There are voluminous misconceptions. There is a lot of disinformation. People are uneducated or under educated about the subject. People have been told lies that they believe even if covertly so. Some people with media power deliberately repeat these lies. People get very defensive. Some people get crazy. People feel guilty. People feel shamed. Some people experience it as the ultimate "gotcha" conversation. Some are competitive enough to never want to engage in a discourse where they are on the wrong side of that gotcha. People feel buzz killed. I have compassion for all of that. I honestly do. And you know what? Get over it. Because the result of not getting over it, as whomever the genius was in early AIDS activism so solemnly bemoaned, silence = death. It really is as simple as that for me when it comes to my lack of tolerance for people's desire to avoid conversations about race.

There was a video that circulated around the internet a while ago. It was Morgan Freeman talking to Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes about race. Freeman's antidote on the topic was to simply cease and desist when it came to discussions about racism. Morgan Freeman is an imposing and convincing person. Many of my white facebook friends tagged me on their sharing of the video. They praised it endlessly. I was captivated by the video. The teacher of conscious living part of me who understands that one gives power to that which one speaks about, knew exactly what Morgan Freeman was talking about and was drawn in almost completely...but not quite. As more and more of my white friends engaged in deeper and deeper and more enthusiastic praise for Freeman's perspective, I began to notice that none of my black friends were responding to it similarly. And I have many black friends with very strong opinions. Many white Americans desperately want to move past Americas racist history. Black folks response to that is more often along the lines of, "uh, hold on Sally." Morgan Freeman, I believe, is in an interesting minority in his perspective as far as black Americans go. Lets explore deeper.

I went back and watched the Morgan Freeman 60 Minutes interview video again, and again, and again and a few things began to pop out at me. First, there is the undeniable fact that Morgan Freeman has far more class and other forms of privilege than the vast majority of other African Descended men and women in America do. This is important. Its difficult to imagine this having no bearing at all on his philosophy whatsoever. I believe it is largely his privilege speaking when he adopts his colorblind philosophy. Second, in the interview, in defense of his essentially colorblind philosophy, Freeman says to Mike Wallace, "I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man." Seems simple enough, right? For me however, there is one glaring problem with this approach. Here it is:

I very recently watched the video of this exchange again. In the meantime, since recording the original program with Wallace, Morgan Freeman has been featured on one of the installments of Professor Louis Henry "Skip" Gates Jr's PBS genealogy program African American Lives. On this program it is revealed that, like many blacks from the south with the same last name, Freeman's name was taken when his ancestor became free from slavery as a direct nod to that momentous event. Hence, Free Man. So every single time he is referred to as a black man and especially when he is addressed with the inclusion of his last name or whenever his last name appears in print, Freeman's connection to America's slavery/racist past is being conjured up...literally. And he wants to try to forget that? Move past that? Well, sorry, he can't no matter how hard he tries. It is literally a part of him.

The other big problem with Freeman's approach is that colorblindness usually equals some form of active denial or complicity when the issue is America's relationship to its own racial history and contemporary reality. There is no better place to observe this than in liberal progressive white America that often believes colorblindness is a very good thing. It isn't. I do believe in the spiritual understanding that we give power to what we speak about. I have discovered however, that there are clear limitations to the application of this. When it comes to social justice advancements in the recorded history of humankind, such advancements have never, ever been achieved through silence. They've never ever been achieved simply through osmosis. They have been achieved through acknowledgment and then the long, hard work that follows and always with the ongoing acknowledgement just a half step behind whatever the current hard work calls for. Morgan Freeman's solution may be an appropriate one at some point in America's future. It is not a solution for the current American ethos around the issues of race, white supremacy, white privilege and black oppression and genocide.

On-site links:
Why The Eradication of Both White Privilege and Racism Have To Be a Part of the Progressive/Liberal Agenda, Part I

Why The Eradication of Both White Privilege and Racism Have To Be a Part of the Progressive/Liberal Agenda, Part II, OCCUPIED Edition