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If It’s Not About You, It’s Not About You – But It’s Really Not About You (On White Fragility)

When I wrote The Intellectual Condescension of White Liberals in response to white liberal response to the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the post generated hundreds of comments (256), many of which took me to task for the title of the piece. It confused people. What did I mean? Did I really mean that?

Yes, I meant precisely that. I meant it as a challenge to white liberals who distance themselves from the harrowing reality of systemic racism and their place in those beneficial systems of oppression by intellectual opining.  Several white people pointedly wrote, “I don’t get it. You must mean conservatives. All of my friends are devastated by what happened in Ferguson.”

Well, okay, then I’m not talking about you and your friends then. Do we have to stop the conversation, or can white people learn that not everything applies to them personally?

Part of white privilege, if I may jump right into the point of this post, is that white people expect to be treated as unique individuals while people of color endure being treated as a collective, anonymous stereotype and threat.

What this means is that white people easily take offense at any generalizations about their race — however fair and accurate — and divert the conversation when they hear critiques that might erroneously include them in the broader analysis of white (in this case, liberal) failure. It’s a diversion we can no longer afford and should not oblige.

My good friend the Rev. Tom Schade says no white leaders have the authority to be angry at white folks who aren’t caught up on Racism 101.  I disagree.  Emotions do not require authority — and who would get to grant that authority, anyway? At any rate, white people tone-policing each other doesn’t seem like a particularly productive approach, although it certainly is a popular one among liberals, whose lexicon for such conversations is sophisticated and complex. So complex that when we descend into the spiral of bickering amongst ourselves about tone and emotional style, we may actually feel we’re accomplishing something.

(My own observations about tone policing, concern trolling and emotional control among Unitarian Universalists would require another separate post on WASP Emotional Culture, but I won’t write that here!)

There are some things that shouldn’t have to be carefully spelled out, and one of them is that white folks shouldn’t need attention paid to their wounded pride while black lives are being threatened and extinguished around them. White people — many of them self-identified as liberal and progressive or simpley “not-racist” — still too often hear the conversation about race in entirely personal terms, and we have to grow up and grow out of that.

On Black Twitter, I believe the hashtag would be #WhiteTears or #NotAllWhitePeople. White liberals need to keep up. Part of doing our work is to be grown-ups who do not protest at every generalization we read and hear about white people and to need hand-holding because conversations about white privilege and racism make us feel defensive or uncomfortable.

For white folks who still don’t have a basic working definition of White Privilege, it would be good to start here with Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 seminal essay explaining what it is.

Rev. Jake Morrill just published this article called “Racism 101 For White People.”  It repeats the salient points of McIntosh’s essay and also includes resources for anti-racism activism.

Unitarian Universalists are gathering in Portland, Oregon this week for our General Assembly.  Do we assume that this space is safe for African-Americans at this precise moment in America? I think a lot of UUs assume it is. I think we may be very wrong about that.

It is very hard to talk about this because white UUs pride ourselves on being welcoming, affirming of everyone’s inherent worth and dignity, color-blind, anti-racist and supportive of people of color. We pride ourselves on our willingness to listen and include all voices in our movement.

We have a lot of pride.

What we don’t have is a whole lot of humility. We don’t really do humility. We do not have a confession tradition in our liturgy. We do not have an assurance of pardon — too Calvinist.

Okay, so that is what it is. I admit that I am far more Calvinistic than the vast majority of UUs. But we can reject a guilt and sin-centric theology and still acknowledge that we have a lot of work to do on humility and non-defensiveness.

In “The Intellectual Condescension of White Liberals,” I wrote about the Unitarian Univeralist tendency to engage in “analysis paralysis” as a way of distancing from the harrowing emotional reality of what is happening in America and has been happening for over 200 years. That was about six months ago and of course we haven’t solved that problem yet.

We could start, though, with setting down our heavy burden of needing everything to be accurate about us personally when engaging in anti-racism work. Continue reading “If It’s Not About You, It’s Not About You – But It’s Really Not About You (On White Fragility)”

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Tips For Healthy And Fair Community Conversations

I recently attended a community conversation about policing and the African-American community. I offer these suggestions not so much in specific response to that event as a general reminder for anyone organizing, speaking on a panel or attending a similar event.

1. When speaking from the audience or from the dais, please do not stand and say, “I don’t need a mic!”

You need a microphone. There are people there with hearing problems and your assurance that you “have a loud voice” is not appropriate or accurate. Using a microphone is about inclusivity and even justice: everyone should get the mic, and everyone should be expected to use the mic. At the event I attended, I was dismayed to see an African-American woman speaking passionately about the death of her child and not get a microphone even when it was obvious that she would be speaking for more than a few seconds. Her testimony will be lost to posterity, even as other speakers’ voices will be heard on the recording of the event.

Everyone gets the mic. Everyone uses the mic.

2. Organizers, don’t obsess about your agenda for the evening.

It is  commendable to have an agenda and to honor it. However, if the community has an obvious need to ask more questions, process information or hear more testimonial, be flexible. Respect the community spirit. If necessary, ask the community if it wants to spend more time on one agenda item before moving on. It causes anxiety among those assembled to have a leader on the dais constantly interjecting how “we’re not on schedule” or “this is a big mess” when it is not a mess, and the community attending is appropriately and respectfully steering the conversation back to where they need it to be.

Religious leaders who respect the movement of the Holy Spirit but protect their agenda in a controlling way are respecting their ego more than the Holy Spirit. Be flexible in your leadership, and don’t insult the proceedings because they happen differently than you want or need them to.

Don’t be a control freak.

3.  Be mindful of when the conversation is personal and when it is political.

When the community asks about systemic change or institutional accountability, leaders should not respond in a personal way about their feelings until after they have fully answered the questions at hand.

Everyone involved in any issue that brings a community together has strong feelings, or they wouldn’t have made the time to be there. Good leaders answer questions to the best of their ability and do not divert the conversation into sympathy-garnering revelations of their or their employees’ feelings. When leaders of a community are asked to address the community, they come in a role of power and authority.  When leaders get defensive about questions regarding accountable professional practices and specific plans for institutional improvement, they often move into personal feeling territory. This isn’t productive.

Leaders, don’t take it personally. Process your feelings of hurt and anger and fear somewhere else. Talk about how hard the job is in an appropriate and supportive place, not during the community gathering.

4. Leaders should never use “we” and “you” language.

At the meeting I attended, one police leader said, at one point, “Don’t judge us by our uniform and we won’t judge you by the color of your skin.”  This remark is an example of divisive rhetoric, revealing that the person who said it is thinking in literally black and white terms. I hope that was just the case in a stressful moment. There were many white people in the community who care about accountability in policing. There were many men in uniform who are men of color. Leaders must always remain aware of the complex nature of the communities they serve.

Leaders must remember that, in the ultimate sense, we are all “we.” 

5. Please do not stand and take the mic and start your sharing by saying, “Everyone knows who I am.”

Always introduce yourself. Not everyone knows who you are. Communities are always changing and evolving. We want to know who you are. We want to get in touch with you later in order to network. Tell us your name and the organization you represent. Spell your name if that can help someone like me connect with you. You never know who is in attendance.

 Never assume that anyone knows or remembers who you are. Leaders and participants should always be asked to identify themselves for the record and for networking purposes. 

The practice of community is incredibly challenging and demanding. It can be scary, and especially for leaders. Blessings and gratitude to all those who do the work of creating community. Blessed be those who stand on the dais taking the heat, and blessed be those who show up to support or hold them accountable.  If God wants anything of us, it is to come together and care about one another. Good community practice gets easier the more we do it, and makes us better at being human.

What tips do you have? Please leave a comment.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Intellectual Condescension of White Liberals

The denial is staggering. My colleagues are weighing in, one by one and then in a rush, commenting on Facebook and e-mails and in messages about their conversations with white parishioners who don’t get it, who are sunk up to their knees like quicksand in white privilege and denial and a worldview that wants to assume that this doesn’t just happen and he must have done something and you don’t know everything and did you read the report? and did you read it as thoroughly as I did, because if you did you wouldn’t be so upset, you wouldn’t be sick and snarling and enraged and disgusted with humanity right now, you’d be the nice, comforting minister I expect you to be.

Forgive me, or don’t. I am indeed sick and disgusted and although a beautiful colleague of mine wrote this afternoon about the need to take hands and sing, I cannot sing and I am keeping my hands to myself because I want to punch something. But my feelings and my comfort and my inability to sing are not what matter. What matters to me tonight is a man named Eric Garner who sold loose cigarettes on the street and as the cops confronted and harassed him this summer, yelled at them to leave him alone. Yelled at them to leave him alone because he wasn’t doing anything. I can’t quote Mr. Garner exactly, but as I remember that he said something about how you all (meaning the police) were looking to make trouble with him, looking to arrest another black man. He was irritated and agitated and then they surrounded him like sharks in the water, methodically and murderously taking him down.

I can’t breathe, he said.

I can’t breathe.

And they held him down and one officer strangled him from behind and they held onto him until he was dead. Someone called it a lynching and I can’t see the difference myself.

He became a martyr in that moment, if you hadn’t considered that possibility. Eric Garner was a prophet who spoke truth to power and that power pulled him down to the sidewalk and killed him right then and there.

And they got away with it.

Brainy white analytical types want this to work somehow in their minds, as they have no life experience by which to process this cognitive dissonance as reality.  There must be a reason for this. I can practically hear the gears whirring as I watch them try to make sense of what does not make sense for white people, even though one particularly lurid and egregious case after another of police brutality against black men has been paraded out in front of us for months.  We are Romans sitting in the arena watching gladiators kill slaves (I know that’s not historically accurate – it’s a metaphor) and questioning the dead as they’re dragged away.  Now, what strategic move did you not make that would have allowed you to avoid that fatal blow? There must have been something. Think. 

The fatal blow is systemic racism and the compliance and complicity of white America. You think I have any answers? I don’t. I only pray that liberal white Americans can examine their own intellectualized response at this moment and challenge each other to see how harmful it is — how distancing, disrespectful and unfeeling it is.

No one who hasn’t lived it has a sturdy soapbox to stand on from which to pontificate and opine. We only have the perspective of our own context and location, which for most of us is well removed from Ferguson, Missouri. It is not a time for analysis. It is a time for empathic imagining, for humility and sorrow.

Where in America would a white 12-year old boy walking around on a cold afternoon in an unpopulated area and idly waving a toy gun be shot by a police officer literally two seconds after that cop got out of his squad car? Two seconds on the clock. Imagine that happening in your neighborhood.

When it came out in the news today that the officer who killed Tamir Rice had been poorly evaluated by a previous supervisor for his “dismal performance with a handgun,” white Americans said, “Ohhhh.” A dead black child wasn’t enough proof for some of them, you see. They had to have the Officer Timothy Loehmann’s gross ineptitude confirmed by a white authority figure.

White men wave real guns around crowded areas in America and are taken into custody alive.  Tamir Rice, carrying a toy gun in an open carry state, wasn’t white. His parents are apparently not law abiding citizens, so one Ohio resident suggested to me yesterday (and this is a quote) that it was a good thing that Tamir was “put down before he got a real gun.”  I fail to see a significant emotional and spiritual difference between the callous bigot who celebrates the murder of a kid and the white liberal who says it’s all really sad, but he shouldn’t have been waving around a gun. Both responses are distancing and victim-blaming: one pathological and the other quite ordinary and therefore, often unquestioned and uncommented upon.

“He shouldn’t have punched a cop,” is what a white man said in the sushi bar tonight about Mike Brown.  So he obviously deserved to die. I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to start a brawl at the sushi bar.

He shouldn’t have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He shouldn’t have been big and scary. He shouldn’t have been black.

In my call for empathic imagining, I am going to ask, again and again, under what circumstances, exactly, would any of us accept an 18-year old member of our congregation to be shot dead by the police and left in the street for four and a half hours? Under what circumstances would we not move heaven and earth to get answers from a police chief after such a horrific occurrence? Under what circumstance can any of us imagine tolerating hearing one of our sons described as a raging hulk, would stand for the characterization of our child as some kind of beast by a police officer whose “injuries” sustained at our son’s hands are a pink mark barely visible to the naked eye?

On what planet do we really think it’s acceptable for a police officer to kill a teenager who may or may not have stolen a few cigars from the corner store, who may or may not have behaved in a belligerent way and then have the police chief and governor respond to our community’s outrage over his murder with tanks and tear gas? How would we feel, how would we respond, what would we demand, if there was no official comment or information for the an entire day after one of our teenagers was shot dead in the street?

Oh, they looted.

Oh, they burned down their own property. How stupid is that.

Oh, this guy really knows what he’s talking about. He is so spot on in his scathing critique of the violent and destructive response in Ferguson. Tsk, tsk.

Bad and destructive choices made by some people in Ferguson or anywhere affected by police brutality does not excuse white people from allying themselves with African Americans in the struggle for justice. When justifiably enraged black people take to the streets in violent ways in protest, or in crime sprees or to kill each other, that is not white people’s cue to retire to our armchairs, light our pipes and descend into the comfortable form of white superiority that manifests as condescending intellectual curiosity.

If Johnathan Gentry wants to speak to his own African-American community about the stupidity of looting and the futility of civil rights songs, that is his privilege. There is a conversation that is happening within the African-American community that no white person is entitled to comment on.

I have tried to avoid providing a lot of links to articles that support my points in this post because I know that someone who disagrees with me will only post their own links in retort, and that is a game that white people can afford to play while black men die in the streets. We need to have more respect, for God’s sake.

I realize that this post was a bit confusing. I started with Eric Garner and then I segued to Tamir Rice and then I referenced Mike Brown. Cleveland, Ferguson, Staten Island — who can keep up with it? It all blends together and I have compassion fatigue. I know. I do, too. I have outrage fatigue. But to sit back in the armchair because we’re too tired of reading articles does not honor the witness being borne by the African-American community right now. Perhaps taking to the streets is not your style, or is not possible for you. For many white folks, the longest and most important distance to travel in our claims to be an anti-racist, justice-seeking people may be from our heads to our hearts. Our longest march may be the one that takes us down from the dais of of competitive debate and rational inquiry to the common ground of listening, witnessing, mourning and embracing.

Put down the newspaper and the computer. There are caskets going by.