white people are missing the point
"It only matters when I get it," is the current mantra of white folks.
If I have to read or hear about another study, anecdote, or historical reference that white people pull up as an example of how America has failed, I am going to scream. It is an inability to check their privilege, once again. To lack the integrity to examine their place within a society that has failed humanity so greatly. Yes, this is — and has always been — the America you say isn't working anymore, working as intended.
Try some humility on for size
Back in 2020, I was working in high tech, at a company trying to be innovative in a space that had been a legacy shop for over 20 years. It was fine, but imagine the upper management persona who runs a place like that, White, Male, 'Highly Credentialed', Ego-driven, it was an obnoxious place to work at as a woman of color.
When George Floyd was murdered, we coincidentally had a company all-hands meeting a short time later, and the executive leadership at the time took it as an opportunity to center themselves in the conversation by saying that they had no idea things like this happened in this country. I was dumbfounded, to say the least — angry and disappointed, as were many of my colleagues, rightfully so. Something shifted in that workplace after that. Many of us shut down, stuck to our work, and didn't really participate in the company's cultural goings-on, which it tried to foster in an environment where we were trying to navigate how to keep a workforce present during a pandemic and other cultural shit falling apart around us. I digress. The point is the tone-deafness and complete inability to reflect on a situation that was very much the America we live in, instead using the opportunity to sit on a pedestal and shed a few crocodile tears while, in the same breath, saying that we have to keep operating BAU.
Recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates was sitting on a panel and, during the discussion after answering a question about "What is it that folks can do in these situations," commented that he was, rightfully so, surprised by how cowardly the populace is, speaking directly to, but indirectly calling out white folks and white supremacy. "Folks don't have integrity, and it shows." They still support the same institutions that fail us every day, complicit in the system they say "isn't theirs to fix" and yet they benefit so greatly from. What the actual hell are these folks asking? To be absolved of the sins of their community, and yet say they feel so helpless and hopeless. Victimhood.
GIVE ME A BREAK.
He is right. White people have a huge problem with self-reflection, but more so, they have an inability to listen to those around them, instead opting to sandwich the landscape with what they know -or don't know- and calling it a day by soft-balling a question of "What can we do, can you show us?" and then continually failing to act.
Back at my workplace, during the peak of our silent outrage in that space, the People Team! posed a question to folks: what literature could we —asking the most vocal folks who just so happened to be Black and brown— suggest to learn more about the cultural divide in this nation? Many of us gave suggestions, but for white folks who haven't done step zero they can't read a Coates or Kendi, bell hooks, or even something as wonderfully written and simple to understand as The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee -great read if you have the chance to pick it up- and simply 'Get it'. We were asking folks to read Huey Newton's 'Revolutionary Suicide' before they had had a chance to examine the 'ABCs of Racism' and 'Why Did PawPaw Hang Black People from Trees?' I am not saying any of this to be disrespectful to the plight of the most oppressed people on the planet, or as a slight to the authors above, but merely to illustrate that you can't get to step 2, 5, or 10 until you've done the work at step 1.
Black people, brown people, indigenous people, we tell each other stories, we talk about our pain, our plights, our joy and sadness of the past, we sing and dance our vision of the future - and some other folks, white folks, tell tales. Tall tales, delusions, they lie without shame, slap labels and credentials on themselves in an attempt to whitewash and bypass trauma so they don't have to self-reflect.
The point white people are missing is THEMSELVES. No self-reflection, no shame, no ability to call out the oppression because they don't see it as oppression, they see it as a problem that others are complaining about. So they again center themselves in it —folks who haven't even begun to wrap their heads around their complicity in all this— never begin to examine the insidiousness of what their ancestors have done, when they say things like, "Well, we didn't do this." You did, you do every day. You're not individually responsible for how we got here, but your inability to take action—to look at yourself, your neighbors—and then do nothing makes you the problem.
Y'all have lost the plot. If you ever had it to begin with, you failed the assignment, and you bombed the group project.