To My White Liberal Friends

It's been years since I tried to consolidate my thoughts into a publicly available blog, and even then, I was mostly writing stream of consciousness fun-time nonsense. Am I old enough now to speak as though I know what I'm talking about? I think that was always my embarrassment with blogging, the self-assuredness it requires to speak in public, the inevitable regret afterwards at having attempted to speak authoritatively. I guess I also eventually found it embarrassing to have a pubic record of my blinding confidence in positions I changed months later. Easier to say nothing, right? That's been my policy for some years. 

 

Photo by Joe Raedle, taken from Getty Images

But all this Trump business has got everyone thinking lots of thoughts, and I just can't resist putting mine out into the universe. 

The thing is, we progressives thought we were moving forward, that we were going in a good direction, and we saw the alt-right openly racist white uprising happening, but we just thought it's ok, those people are dying out, they're increasingly marginal voices, we can trample them on the way to our progress. Plus there are still so many horrific injustices occurring, even in Obama's America. Mass incarceration, for-profit prisons, extra-judicial executions of black and brown people in the streets, the militarization of our police forces, rubber bullets and hypothermia in North Dakota, and so on, and that's just talking about our justice system and law enforcement. There's also sprawling income inequality, Citizens United, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the erosion of collective bargaining rights, the stripping of workers compensation benefits, sky-rocketing healthcare costs and a for-profit healthcare industry, America spying on its people, state control of female bodies and reproductive choices, entertainment and profit driven media, unprecedented closures of public schools, etc. We already had plenty to worry about without a white uprising, and it's disorienting to realize that at least 63 million Americans are either actively in favor of subverting their own interests or so grossly misinformed that they would vote for the guy who is guaranteed to make all of these problems worse, along with almost certainly weakening America's symbolic power as a force for democratic values, decency, moral leadership, etc. 

But it happened. It did, and as Obama said, we lick our wounds, we regroup, we learn our lessons, and we do better next time.  But what are our lessons? 

I get why so many people feel the lesson is that we need to be more vocal about the white supremacist ties of the men preparing to run the White House, more vigilant in educating our Facebook followers on privilege and the dangers of the leaders they've elected. We would all be better off if everyone understood these things. But the problem we're all beginning to see is that the more fervently we stand with our black and brown and gay and trans and Muslim friends, the more enflamed and angry we sound to the people we're trying to awaken. We're mirroring the invective of the alt-right. Their entire presence on the internet is one giant bait, and we are collectively taking it again and again. 

Instead of reacting, why don't we return to our principles? Equality, decency, fact-based analysis. Why don't we take this moment to evaluate what we may have been missing, and before we lose our minds thinking 63 million Americans actively hate all non-WASPs, why don't we sit for a moment and ask ourselves if maybe the picture could be somewhat more complex than we're acknowledging? 

For one, a robust equality has to include white people. I mean white people who don't have the benefit of wonderfully articulate, compassionate, patient people of color in their classrooms or social sphere. White people who see their cultural influence waning and are understandably frightened by what feels like a loss of their way of life. White people who don't have the training or intelligence to effectively navigate the maze of the modern media landscape without absorbing more than a few falsehoods. We can dismiss these people as racist and ignorant and wrong, but we can't throw them away, we can't keep them from voting, and if we actually care about kindness and equality and diversity, we shouldn't want to. 

A note about privilege: Yes, privilege is real, but it doesn't mean white people are always and everywhere in positions of power. Many white people work for lower and lower wages in hard jobs with unforgiving bosses, many white people hurt all day, feel stomped on all day, and the way they see it, that's life, so they take it and do their best. They can't begin to comprehend the magnitude of difference between the struggles they face and the struggles of systematically disenfranchised peoples. Or maybe I take that back, maybe they too are being systematically disenfranchised, but are just being trained by those in power to see black and brown grievances as categorically different from theirs and illegitimate, so as to keep the bottom 90% of us from banding together  and creating a country that actually works for us. Afterall, that has been the strategy of the powerful in this country essentially since its founding. And so the more we try to tell working class white people to just shut up and listen to what people of color have to deal with, we are just feeding into and solidifying that narrative. We leave white people with the sense that none of their difficulties are worth acknowledging and everyone else's difficulties are completely foreign. We're widening the gap, I mean, and this is not the way that positive cultural change happens. It happens through coalition and consensus building, seeing our commonalities and working toward shared goals, appealing to our better selves, not shaming people. 

Yes yes I know. It is actually, on the whole, much harder in America for people of color, categorically harder. There are many challenges POC face that white people can't begin to imagine. But I promise you they're never going to try to imagine as long as you're calling them names, and as long as you're not acknowledging and addressing their worries. 

At the end of the day, the world is changed by compassion. There must be disruption and righteous anger and critiques of the status quo and radical voices and activism, but the only way anyone ever opens to it is compassion. Compassion compassion compassion. Compassion is the safe space where understanding begins, and understanding gives birth acceptance, and once people feel accepted, then they are free to begin listening. Most people when attacked or accused naturally respond defensively. There is a lot of talk in communities of color about tone-policing and the burden of protecting white feelings, and it makes sense, and it's true that people under attack shouldn't have to worry about responding in a way that doesn't put their oppressors on the defensive. There is a place for anger, and people absolutely need to have space to express those sentiments. But for us white people who have taken on the task of educating our fellow white people, maybe we do need to work a little harder at compassion and understanding. Maybe it is courageous to tell your relative saying Muslims are all terrorists that he is in fact a racist. But maybe it's also courageous to listen to him, to ask him questions, to not try to prove him wrong. It doesn't make any sense, but compassion softens people, and I think we could all use a little softening towards one another this Thanksgiving.