Quarantine Diary #67 5/27/2020 White People

When I’m not here at my desk, I’m outside in the dirt. I have spent much of the past week in my backyard doing cute projects, clearing weeds, planting seeds, moving plants. I even moved a tree! (Granted, it was a small tree.)

In about an hour I will be out there again until all my little vegetable and basil plants are planted. It’s supposed to rain this afternoon.

So that’s part of my quarantine, I’m dickering around in my own yard. Suits my introverted mood.

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The most ironic tweet of this morning is from Randy Rainbow. If you don’t know who Randy Rainbow is go to YouTube right now and look him up. We’ll see you back here in a half hour.

His tweet?

“Taking a break from white people today.”

He’s white and so are most of us but we get this.

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America’s racism is visually boiling over.

Yesterday we saw the appalling privileged white woman in Central Park threatening a Black man by calling 911 to report he was trying to harm her. All he wanted was for her to leash her dog in an area where one is supposed to leash their dog.

In Minneapolis a white cop killed an African American man by kneeling on his neck while the man gasped that he could not breathe. Three other cops stood around watching. Jesus Christ.

Here we still are in our unending national conversation about racism.

I have two things to add.

1. How did our nation get so mired in the sin of racism AFTER we fought and won the Civil War to end it?

Soon I’m going to walk us through the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and how Lincoln’s Vice President gutted the victory of the Civil War to perpetuate the racism of slavery. Which is why we are still here. (I do this not because you need me to teach you, but because after I write something, I generally know it.)

If you want to consider this question today, I highly recommend this podcast: http://inthepastlane.com/episode-187/

2. My other question regards our personal stories. What happened in our old white lives to make us better than we were destined to be?

Not every one of you who read me are old and white, but many are (I don’t poll but that’s my take on who reads this website).

We remember the racism in which we grew up. I remember the ugly words that relatives used to signify African American people. I remember adults around me saying the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s was stupid, law-breaking (the irony!), and fomented by “outsiders. I remember people “explaining” to me that Martin Luther King was a Communist agent.

When it wasn’t direct and ugly, it was patronizing and divisive. I remember my dad saying he had served with Black men and with Jews in WWII. He admired those fellow soldiers, but his admiration taught me that the situation and my dad’s “open mindedness” were remarkable. Not the skewed way the world worked where the race of men he liked and admired was the thing worth mentioning.

There are so many ways in which we absorbed the ethos of our growing up time and place. We saw and experienced and sometimes participated in direct racism against others. We heard and experienced and often participated in patronizing belittling.

Yet somehow we eventually learned enough to listen. To shut up. To vote for people who talk thoughtfully about racism. To read books and essays by POC. To think carefully about what almost any American experience might feel like when one is inside brown skin.

We’ve read and listened to and watched programing about the ways we have institutionalized racism in our country. If a group of people is going to talk about ANYTHING and all the talkers are white, we have learned to be skeptical and critical.

So the question is this. How did we get here? We know we are not where we need to be, but we aren’t where we were.

What was the key that unlocked us towards a more open, respectful, and listening future? What happened to and around us that allowed us to try to be allies of POC when so many other white people stopped paying attention or stopped caring or became dangerously racist?

When and what happened that helped us become who we are now?

I am not talking about patting ourselves on the back.

I am asking how do we get ourselves and others past and around the institutional racism that is everywhere?

Thanks to a FB post from KM, this is an incredibly good resource going forward:

https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234

Whether you comment here or not, what were moments in your life where you began to see and then turn away from American racism?