Reading the Syllabus

Okay let’s open with two facts about myself. 1) I am a white man, from the middle class, a child of priviledge, and like all priviledged people I hate to admit it. 2) I’m not planning to agonize too hard about how to put things (because I have no readers so wth) so I’m probably gonna say something racist or idiotic or both and I can only hope that the context will show that I’m not that terrible. Okay let’s get started.

 

In my thinking and speaking about race I have always tried to be objective, but I think it is important to also be subjective. I have been wanting to write about my personal experience in this racist world as a white person, but been afraid to because most people that do that are racists. But I think that by examining my own racism and experience I may be able to shed some light on the motivations of racists in general. This idea is supremely important to me because as long as the narrative is woke poor and middle-class people versus racist poor and middle class people the establishment will continue rakeing in cash while we’re busy fighting eachother. Ultimately the poor and middle-class must come together and that means racism either must be dealt with or eradicated, and it’s not ever going to be eradicated. Okay lets get started (again)

 

I’m a white man of priviledge but unlike many like me I grew up surrounded by black and brown people, some from an economic situation similar to my own and many who were more poor. Mark me though, I said I was surrounded by them but I did not grow up with them. Black people hung out with black people, Latinos hung with Latinos, and whites with whites, with few exceptions. Almost all my friends were white, and looking back I don’t think I was ever in the home of someone from a lower economic class until after I graduated college. I had one true friend in college who was black, but we mostly just got drunk and talked about classical music (I went to music school), I didn’t have a black friend with whom I actually talked about race until after I graduated college and got a job in retail. So issue one, it is incredibly easy for a middle-class white person to go their entire life without ever really knowing a thing about the lives of minorities or of the poor other than whatever is said on the news.

 

Okay on to the important point, as a white person surrounded by white people taught by mostly white people we still learn a lot about racism, in school and in life. We learn what words you can say, which you can say but probably shouldn’t, and the word you should never ever say. We learn which opinions are racist, we learn what parts of our history are racist and which are okay, so on and so forth. But white people never engage with racism, we do not examine and parse racist opinions, we ignore them, or re-word them so they don’t sound racist anymore. We learn to have some radar for racism and we shut people down when we sense racism from them, we shut ourselves down when we know that what we have to say sounds racist, or is racist. BUT THAT DOESN’T MAKE THE RACISM GO AWAY. Being scared to talk about it just lets it fester within us, and that fester produces anger. We find ourselves in a situation where hearing racism feels like a release because it’s been bottled within us for so long, where we forgive hate speech because we are so hungry for honesty.

 

Finally, I think it’s important to realize that many white people feel persecuted. We didn’t enslave anyone, we didn’t support Jim Crow, and when you feel like you’re struggling the last thing you want to talk about is your priviledge. This is racial guilt, passed onto us by our fathers. Do we deserve this guilt? I don’t know, that sounds like a philosophical question. But that’s the thing about guilt, it doesn’t matter if you deserve it, or if it’s rational, it exists. This guilt is definitely rational, I don’t know if we deserve it (like I said, get philosophical), it is definetly a burden which we must bear. Does that make you angry? , be glad you don’t have the burden of a black face, a black body which is so feared and distrusted. Everyone knows that it’s more obvious what you can’t have than what you do have. White people can’t use some words, white people can’t express certain opinions or if they do they have to bend over backwards to say it in an appropriate way. I’d guess that most white people deal with this internally at least once a day. Meanwhile we generally fail to notice the special treatment we get in public, by law enforcement, in the job market and everywhere else; we’ve always gotten it, it’s like noticing the nose on your face.