What White Folks Don’t Know
White people go through life with the benefit of the assumption of equality.
White folks can walk through life backwards and blindfolded in the belief that they have the right to succeed, despite shortcomings and deficiencies that would virtually destroy the hopes and aspirations of any person of color.
Black people go through life having to ‘prove’ their equality in virtually every instance of encounters with and within white society and culture.
How does one go about proving that he/she has the right to exist and live as a human being?
When a white person sees another white person, the reflexive assumption is that the other person is a social, political, moral, and ethical equal until he/she proves or manifests otherwise.
When a white person sees a black person the very opposite is the case and the unconscious ‘What are you doing here?’ or the ‘You don’t belong here.’ reflex syndrome kicks in.
That’s when the micro aggressions occur and the defensive survival tactics and techniques are reflexively summoned in response.
Here’s a mild example:
Going to college to earn a degree and a place on the ladder of achievement and success is vastly different from going to college to learn how to fight for your life and the right to earn a living.
How far ahead am I supposed to get when I must constantly prove that I have an equal right to use the toilet or the lunch room, or get a raise, or compete for advancement, etc?
How much intellectual, psychological, and emotional energy do you think that might take on a minute to minute basis?
Most white folks wouldn’t know where to begin if they had to establish and prove their worthiness as human beings, moment to moment to moment…
For the vast majority of white people, the white supremacy and white privilege that are baked into the fabric of America’s social, political, and economic and systems, eliminates the requirement to know what black people must learn in order to simply subsist and survive.
07/06/2020 @ 9:38 am
Most White people don’t understand the difference in daily experiences at all. I know when I was in college I didn’t. I saw a lot of self-segregation among Black students and utterly didn’t get it. What I didn’t understand about that kind of self-segregation is that it has two functions in opposite directions and I only saw one. I saw the obvious one about pride and the ability to immerse oneself in one’s culture. What I missed was that self-segregation also took ethnicity off the table, that even though Blackness was accentuated the lack of anyone else meant that people could interact with each other without their race fundamentally affecting their interactions and also without anyone who didn’t understand their experience. Representing is tiring, particularly when it has to be defensive in nature. I’m perfectly happy representing as a Jew most of the time because my Judaism is rarely viewed with hostility. Or fear. Or contempt. Or even too many stereotypes. There have been times when representing as a Jew has been defensive but that isn’t the norm in the US. It is absolutely the norm for you.
One author who taught me that was Nathan McCall. I read Manchild in the Promised Land and though I learned things from it I couldn’t relate to Claude Brown. This may have been generational. McCall is very close to me in age and showed me what a parallel existence looked like and it was way, way more different than I expected. I also realized that when I was growing up in upstate NY – in Rockland County, close to the City, not like upstate where I am now – a lot of the Black kids I saw in school, who there were almost universally poorer than the White kids, were living experiences like McCall had.
I knew they faced things that weren’t obvious. My mother showed me one of them. The local newspaper published photos of the local graduating high school seniors. One day most of them were published. The next day more were published that were “missed” the first day. All Black faces. This was late 1960’s.
07/06/2020 @ 11:50 am
@Koshersalaami;
“I knew they faced things that weren’t obvious….One day most of them were published. The next day more were published that were “missed” the first day. All Black faces.”
There’s absolutely no way in hell that this wasn’t ‘obvious’ to the black residents of the community, especially and particularly the black kids who were graduating.
That was no accident, oversight, or mistake made by the newspaper. It was a blatant act of overt racism, full of racist messages to all recipients of that edition…white and black….
07/06/2020 @ 8:25 pm
Of course it was racism. Of course it was obvious to the Black community. I have no idea how conscious Whites in the area were of it. I didn’t read the newspaper at that age. My mother showed it to me.
07/06/2020 @ 10:27 pm
@Koshersalaami;
“I knew they faced things that weren’t obvious. My mother showed me one of them.”
“Of course it was obvious to the Black community.”
On the surface, when juxtaposed,
these statements appear to be self- contradictory…
Things that aren’t ‘obvious’ to white folks hit black consciousness as though they were the brightest of lights on Times Square in Manhattan.
White people are oblivious and indifferent to what black people see and experience on a regular basis in broad daylight and in plain sight.
07/06/2020 @ 10:50 am
I think this is likely to be true for many but it certainly isn’t how I think: “When a white person sees another white person, the reflexive assumption is that the other person is a social, political, moral, and ethical equal until he/she proves or manifests otherwise.”
07/06/2020 @ 11:27 am
@AWS; Reflex doesn’t require conscious thought process.
It is behavior absent thought.