5 Things That Prove All White People Are Racists
Walk up to any white person and merely start a critical discussion on pervasive racism in America and take note of the instant tension, denial and desperate plea to simply move on. Whether you reluctantly accept and acknowledge it or not though, your racism is and dare I say it “white privilege” has always been on display in one way or another even lacking your best intention.
While you wouldn’t be caught dead in a white hood, burning crosses on lawns, throwing Molotov cocktails into political activist’s windows in the night, or waving confederate flags around, the label of a racist nevertheless appears on your forehead unable to be washed away like your racism fatigue following a few weeks of marching, protesting, and claiming yourself “#woke.”
So without further ado, here are just 5 things most commonly appearing on your collective foreheads.
1.) Like the sign in the above photo you take pride in uttering the four offensive words that grate on the nerves of every black person around you “I don’t see color,” which is usually followed up with some inane statement like, “I don’t care if people are white, black, purple, blue, or green and we all bleed red!” Side note: If you’re inadvertently seeing purple or green people or blue people outside of the performers in The Blue Man Group, either take a break from the mushrooms or call your nearest optometrist on the double.
Critical problem: Discounting a person’s race is a callus discounting of their daily life’s experience being within the color of their skin. When your BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) friend shares with you a racist encounter they’ve just endured and you downplay or defend the other person, the proof is in the pudding.
2.) “I can’t possibly have white privilege. My family grew up poor, and I got beat up for being the only white kid in the neighborhood or version B, “All of my friends were black. I had a black roommate in college for a semester. I dated someone who was black once,” or God forbid, ”I slept with someone who was black.”
Problem: White privilege is a gift bestowed upon you the moment you poke your screaming pink little head outside your mother’s womb. You don’t have to work to earn it or have a certain measure of monetary wealth to reap the benefits of it. It is absolute freedom for life in return for doing absolutely nothing. The more important question is since you’ve had so much exposure to black people or other people of color when you look around your social circle, how many black faces do you see? You might still have your token friend Jamal you try to be homies with but let’s face it, the moment you could get as far away from black people as you could, you did. Jamal is nothing more than a way to assure yourself that you indeed can’t possibly be racist.
3.) My dad taught me to say, “Yes sir or Yes ma’am if I were ever pulled over for a traffic stop. That black guy on the news deserved to be shot up by the police because (by some stereotypical measure), those words are not a part of the African-American vernacular and he wasn’t doing what the officer COMMANDED him to do. The contentious officer was clearly in fear for his life when the guy reached in his back pocket!” (to you know, get his wallet out to present his ID as he’d been commanded to do.
Problem #1: You have more of an issue blaming victims of police brutality and murder at the hands of the police than you do the mass shooters killing a generation of children or forsaking others with severe PTSD. I don’t ever remember having to cower under a desk because a classmate was enacting a video game fantasy with an AR-15 or having my learning interrupted by constant Code Red, Active Shooter and Campus Lockdown Drills as a first grader. After all, these mass shooters are just troubled kids with histories of mental health problems. “Don’t seize my gun because guns don’t kill people, bad people kill people. Haven’t you repeatedly heard of black-on-black crime?” My take on the subject…If you need an AR-15 to defend your family in your home or go hunting, your time would be better spent at the gun range practicing to shoot with a gun you can handle.
Problem #2: You speak of the Constitution as if it were the bible but somehow you missed the amendments providing BIPOC communities full citizenship including all of the rights and privileges it guarantees like due process of law for example.
4.) “Black people could do better for themselves if they got a job and tried. No one helped me. I had to pull myself up by my bootstraps and make it on my own. Instead, they have things like affirmative action which is just reverse racism because it’s letting black kids into college because they’re not smart enough to qualify on their own.Then they take out a bunch of student loans they can’t pay for, are too lazy to get a job and expect the government to take care of them.”
Fact: The current wealth gap is considerably in part due to the result of discriminatory mortgage lending practices of banks favoring white soldiers returning from WWII who couldn’t afford to purchase homes. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) along with the VA and GI Bill allowed white families to acquire the single most generational wealth-building tool possible, a home.
Not merely were black people including black WWII veterans excluded by law from purchasing homes, but white business owners also fled to these suburban areas a practice known as “white flight.”
White flight caused the industrial revolution and urban renewal, processes of gentrification that remain today. Distressed communities including their homes and businesses were and are continually destroyed and disinvested in to make way for large-scale developments often with the promise of reinvesting tax credits to build and revitalize low-income, primarily black and brown affordable housing communities.
The housing crisis of the early 2000s exponentially and disproportionately affected black and brown communities who lost their homes en masse due to predatory lending practices and foreclosures.
Affordable housing communities utilized by essential workers including firefighters, teachers, and other municipal employees are discovering it harder and harder to, “pull themselves up by their nonexistent bootstraps.” Real-estate developers, municipalities, and other stakeholders make excuses for why empty land cannot be developed into affordable housing units, but the truth is that practices of redlining communities nevertheless exist due to the racism within white neighborhoods retaining their NIMBY attitudes (Not In My Backyard).
And lastly, #5, the one that puts my granny panties in a wad the most, white people, particularly white men who enjoy the highest level of privilege in the land, claiming to know what the black community needs to lift themselves to equal standing, and how they have the best ideas to change all of the discriminatory practices of the past, present, and future (aka disregarding and denying the practices of THEIR creation).
Having never tread an overdue step in a black person, particularly a black woman’s shoes, they attempt to justify and ignore the past, discount the issues of the present, and somehow believe they have all the answers to change over 400 years of history, a history whitewashed by the slave owners who created the American Dream possible for anyone, well except BIPOC communities, certain religious affiliations and immigrants for which the American Dream is more like the American Nightmare.
These white men erroneously believe their loathsome privilege gives them the entitlement of identifying a comprehensive solution to create racial equality and freedom, yet their non-sensical declaration leaves out the step where they look in the mirror, acknowledge their intimate relationship with racism, responsibility, and biases, and learn what it means to, “Shut up and listen up.” Black voices have not been silenced. Rampant racism merely allows them to be persistently ignored because, “I couldn’t be racist, right?”
These five overwhelming proofs of your pervasive racism are equal to the same proofs you allegedly hold self-evident, that all are created equal. Absolutely, we’ve admittedly had one black President now since George Washington merely assumed political office in 1789. We presently incredibly have the most qualified woman in America serving as the first African and Asian American Vice President, and yes, we know about Oprah, Beyoncé, and Jay Z striking it rich but Pollyanna, you unknowingly have a long way to progress before your racism fatigue is overcome by true accountability and readiness to do the work.