Beloved, these are just a few books to get you started. Of course the classics must not be neglected, from Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, groundbreaking essays that limn the color line at the turn of the twentieth century, to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, which wrestles with the perennial black problem of not being seen by the white world. Ellison’s collected essays are masterpieces of elegance and erudition. And you should pay attention to the personal and political essays of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; June Jordan; Zora Neale Hurston (and her great novel rejecting racial uplift narratives, Their Eyes Were Watching God); and the essays of Alice Walker, along with The Color Purple, her captivating novel about the struggles of black women for room to breathe and love in the south in the 1930s. Great black autobiographies offer a peek into the struggles of some of our most important figures, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to Angela Davis: An Autobiography, and from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.
Beloved, you should read as much as you can about race and black identity in the media too. Read gifted black voices like Jamilah Lemieux, Ta-Nehisi Coates, William Jelani Cobb, Jamelle Bouie, Eve Ewing, Clint Smith, Wesley Lowery, Damon Young, Vann Newkirk, Mychal Denzel Smith, Bakari Kitwana, Rembert Browne, Wesley Morris, Nicole Hannah-Jones, and Keisha Blain. The miracle of social media permits greater accessibility than in the past to brilliant thinkers and scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Mark Anthony Neal; Marc Lamont Hill; James Braxton Peterson; Salamishah Tillet; Stacey Patton; Kiese Laymon; Melissa Harris-Perry; Treva Lindsey; Obery Hendricks, Jr.; Farah Griffin; Brittney Cooper; Stacy Floyd-Thomas; Elizabeth Hinton; Alondra Nelson; Thadious Davis; Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting; Keri Day; Eboni Marshall Turman; Lawrence Bobo; Leah Wright Rigueur; Marcylinena Morgan; Nell Painter; and thousands more.
Beloved, you must not only read about black life, but you must school your white brothers and sisters, your cousins and uncles, your loved ones and friends, and all who will listen to you, about the white elephant in the room—white privilege. Share with them what you learn about us, but share as well what you learn about yourself, about how whiteness works. You see, my friends, there is only so much I can say to white folk, only so much they can hear from me or anyone who isn’t white. They may not be as defensive with you, so you must be an ambassador of truth to your own tribes, just like the writers Peggy McIntosh, Tim Wise, David Roediger, Mab Segrest, Theodore Allen, and Joe Feagin.
It is your obligation, beloved, to school yourselves, and other white folk, too, about the seductive, mythical, neutrality of whiteness, the belief that you are somehow American without a racial identity, without racial baggage. “While it is dangerous to say that all whites have equal access to wealth and education,” one of my white students writes, “the fact of the matter is that white people will not be followed in a store, frisked on a New York sidewalk, or shot by police at the same rate as black people. Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.”
You see what my student did there, beloved? He linked white privilege and black oppression, not directly, mind you, but in a way that suggests that white privilege creates opportunities for black oppression to take hold. If white folk refuse to name white privilege for what it is, then it is more likely that you will ignore how black inequality, black suffering, exists all around you. Those of you who know better than that must tell other white people what you know. As one of my students says, “if one stays silent” then one is “actually helping racial injustice persist.” Beloved, racism and bigotry are ugly, uncomfortable issues to grapple with. But if you don’t address them, you reinforce the privilege of not having to face up to the truth.
Beloved, your participation in protests, rallies, local community meetings, and the like makes a huge difference. When we gather to express grief, outrage, and dissent, your presence sends the signal that this is not “just a black thing.” It is, instead, an American thing. Your white bodies don’t just desegregate the images that communicate social concern. Your presence also puts your bodies and reputations on the line by identifying you with folk you are not supposed to have much in common with. Your presence adds greater moral weight to the gathering. It shouldn’t have to be that way, but for now, it is.
My friends, I know that there is a valiant, even volatile, history of white participation in black struggles for freedom. And some of your mothers and fathers, and your grandmothers and grandfathers, too, got their feelings hurt when black folk told them their help was no longer needed. This was the case in the sixties when black folk were coming into our own and younger black folk in more radical organizations wanted to feel their own power, take further charge of their own destinies. Surely you know that white participation doesn’t mean white takeover.
You must grapple with how your participation isn’t just to aid black and brown folk, though that is indeed admirable. It is also to fulfill your sense of destiny. One of your great prophets, Jim Wallis, the founder and leader of the Washington, D.C.–based Christian community called Sojourners, hammered this home recently. Wallis quotes black theologian James Cone who “talks about ‘repentance for white people as dying to whiteness.’ I want to say white Christians have been separated from God by the idolatry of whiteness. So we’re not in this to help somebody else. We’re in this for our own souls.”
Wallis’ point underscores a vital need, my friends, the need to close the distance between the white self and the black other. In fact, viewing black folk—or brown folk, or gay folk, or poor folk—as the other is the problem. This country has just lived through the first black presidency in our nation’s history. Whether one liked or loathed Barack Obama’s politics, there is no denying that he is one of the most profound, impressive, gifted, and inspiring Americans this nation has seen in quite some time. And yet there was a relentless attempt to make him the “other.” The collective effort to deprive Obama of his legitimacy, of his citizenship, of his humanity, scarred the body politic and did great damage to our efforts to move this country beyond its heinous racial history.
In your own lives, at your own jobs, in your own communities—and in your own minds—you must see and root out and oppose how black folk are routinely made the cultural other. You must resist the impulse to see black schoolchildren as the educational other. You must fight the inclination to dismiss black coworkers as the other because of their hairstyles, their dress, their speech, their demeanors. You must constantly ask yourselves how you are thinking of, and responding to, the black folk you encounter in ordinary venues. When you are interviewing black folk for jobs, for fellowships, for positions in your service, are you seeing them as incapable of learning and adapting just as white folk do? The dismissal of black and brown folk in this manner, often unconsciously, scars them with missed opportunity and denied humanity.