Not knowing black folk intimately exacerbates the distance between the white self and the black other. One solution is new black friends. It is distressing that so few of you have more than a token black friend, maybe two. Every open-minded white person should set out immediately to find and make friends with black folk who share their interests. It’s not as hard as it seems. Black folk come in every variety of belief, ideology, and politics, just as any other American does, and the vast majority of us are morally upright.
Honestly, the fact that you do not know real, ordinary, splendid black folk is astonishing. The more black folk you know, the less likely you are to stereotype us. The less you stereotype us, the less likely you are to fear us. The less you fear us, the less likely you are to want to hurt us, or to accept our hurt as the price of your safekeeping. The safer you feel, the safer we’ll be.
Beloved, hopefully your new friends will make it easier for you to speak up against the injustice that black folk face. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that we would have to repent not only for the “evil words and deeds of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.” We need to hear your voices ring out against our suffering loud and clear.
When a black or brown youth is railroaded in a court system for possessing a negligible amount of marijuana, it makes a difference if a sea of white witnesses floods the airways, or cyberspace, or community halls, or prosecutors’ offices, or congressional staff with e-mails, letters, speeches, and commentary about the injustice of such acts. If white folk take to social media and testify to how they got away with the very minor offenses that cause black and brown folk trouble—that cause our kids to be sent to jail or prison—it might move the needle of awareness and set change in motion. If honest white voices speak up about how your own children are not expelled at the same rates as black and brown kids for the same offenses, it will put pressure on local school boards to reconsider their unjust policies and practices.
When there are traumatic public events that the world can see, we need clear white voices of resistance that the world can hear.
Beloved, your voices are crucial because the doubt of black humanity, the skepticism of black intelligence, and the denial of the worth of black bodies linger in our cultural unconscious and shadow our national politics. If you challenge white ignorance, or indifference, to the plight of people of color, it will lend our cause needed legitimacy.
One of the issues about which you might speak, especially in your own circles, is the distinction between the immigrant and black American experiences. Of course those experiences overlap; we often forget that black folk who hail from the Caribbean or from Africa come to America seeking opportunity like any other immigrants. I have in mind the argument that black folk should do like the European immigrants who came to America and worked hard to become successful. The best response to such a baseless comparison is a direct one: whiteness matters. My friends, in the short term, and in the long run, too, being Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish hasn’t been as large a deficit to achievement as color has been for black folk. It is true that the barriers of language, ethnicity, and culture are big ones, but they don’t make the same difference that being black makes.
White immigrants came to this country, and still do, with white skin, the biggest asset possible in a country where whiteness still has tremendous value. It makes no sense to tell black folk to do what white immigrants did to become successful.
My friends, if whiteness matters, slavery does too. The legacy of inequality is both formal and informal, both a matter of law and a matter of social convention. European immigrants certainly faced their own barriers to assimilation. But neither the government nor our society used its legal and political power to stop immigrant success the way America did to stop black folk for nearly three centuries.
Black immigrants often have a leg up on American blacks as well. They have arrived from societies where they enjoyed equality without regard to color. Thus they arrive with great assets, skills, and experiences, allowing them to compete in the American marketplace. These black immigrants faced no color barriers to human capital like those we face in America. Neither can we discount the exotic appeal of foreign blackness. Many white folk find it far more attractive to deal with a black person from the Caribbean or Africa than American blacks. Foreign blacks lack the common history of oppression that binds black Americans together. That difference is a big one for white folk. You don’t feel the sort of pressure of history when you encounter many of those immigrant blacks. Neither do you feel the sort of white racial guilt you may experience in the presence of American blacks. If you do a good enough job of reading up on the black experience, you can fight those arguments in your own circles.
Beloved, you can also range far beyond your circles and visit black folk in schools, jails, and churches. My friends, you should identify a school that you, or your office, or your company, or your peers, might adopt. And then visit that school to share—your insight, resources, or expertise, or just your affirming, concerned presence. Become a mentor and offer career advice to older kids. Offer a word of encouragement to younger kids, too, especially through school counselors who know that black kids must see folk being what they one day wish to become—engineers, lawyers, architects, construction workers, and, yes, firefighters and cops.
You should visit jails and prisons too. I make frequent trips to see my brother in prison, and I also visit other jails and prisons throughout the country. It is an eye-opener. There is a pipeline, my friends, one that runs from classroom to jail, from the playground to the prison. When you visit the incarcerated you’ll see how utterly decent most of these men and women are, how they got a bad deal because they were poor with no one to advocate for them.