Over the past two weeks I have noticed many people tweet and make posts to acknowledge their white guilt and the persistence of their white privilege.
I noticed this particularly moving Instagram post by NPR host, Guy Raz, who proffered emotive and inspiring images of the German Chancellor of 1969, Willy Brandt, on his historic visit to Poland to acknowledge Germany’s culpability in the unconscionable murder of 3 Million Polish Jews.
Subsequently I have also been tempted to retweet such a post in service of the plight of the victims of racism.
But whenever I think about a possible meaningful response, I am reminded of the contradictory voices I’ve encountered over the past couple of years on this exact topic. §
Zadie Smith once shared this thought, which I think speaks directly to the issue at hand.
“I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so.”
Coleman Hughes, a young writer, highly esteemed by African-American intellectuals like Glenn Loury, John McWhorter and Thomas Chatterton Williams, testified in front of Congress against reparations for slavery, saying the following (watch his full testimony here):
Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery... Reparations by definition are only given to victims, so the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent. Not just that, you’ve made 1/3 of black Americans who poll against reparations into victims without their consent, and black Americans have fought too long for the right to define themselves to be spoken for in such a condescending manner.
John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, once said, (I selectively stitched together a few sentences from his article, but if you’d like to read about his practical suggestions for meaningful progress and discover the entirety of his argument, then you can read the full article here.)
Any effort to repair problems in black America must focus on helping people to help themselves... When reparations fans grouse that “it’s time America acknowledged slavery,” one wonders just what they thought the War on Poverty was… What [reparations activists] are seeking is an emotional balm, a comprehensive mea culpa by white America for everything that ails blacks. Pre-1960s civil rights leaders would barely recognize this version of “civil rights.”
McWhorter continues in another cogent refutation of the 1619 Project,
…amid the superficial satisfactions—and that is what they are—of casting America as a grand original sin, what is the actual purpose of teaching young people that a grievous injustice against black people is the very warp and woof of our polity? What is the endgame? In which way will an America in thrall to this conception be better?
No sensible person can deny that white privilege exists. Amongst many other privileges, white people are more likely to have a path to success, are less likely to live in poverty, and consequently are less likely to encounter a cop.
But once acknowledge, John McWhorter encourages me to ask, if I am to take 30 seconds and retweet an image of black power, how would it be helpful to the cause of black people, to their actual living conditions and to their life experience?
Superficially, it may improve my personal social stance in the world, and for a short period in time, a certain group of people may feel that the world finally gets it, that they are victims and that real change is on its way. But instead, in the long term, I would be culpable in teaching young people of color that it is “more enlightened to think of [themselves] as victims than as actors. [When], at no other point in human history have any people, under any degree of oppression, conceived of this kind of self-image as healthy,” wrote McWhorter.
What alarms me, is the fact that so many people seem to discourage critical thinking, exactly when it is needed most, in order to find meaningful answers for those that are suffering.
If certain questions are off-limits in the same way that certain questions about God and faith are off-limits, then we are bound to perpetuate the sins of the past.
McWhorter gives color to this argument when he asks, “Why is it important for a Black Lives Matter activist to probe Hillary Clinton’s heart, as opposed to thinking about what policy she will take in terms of criminal sentencing, or the housing policy or the on-the-ground sorts of things we really need to be thinking about if we want to help black people.”
Watch his eloquent and thought-provoking treatise below.
In listening to McWhorter, one may become aware of the deeper, more complex issues that shape reality for so many people across the globe. Consequently, the reader might draw one of two conclusions:
1.) McWhorter is clandestinely employing “complexity” and “nuance” to obfuscate the so-called real issue at hand, that being structural racism, or;
2.) The reader may recognize the inherent complexity as true, realize just how deep the rabbit hole goes and as a result, lose all hope that anything would ever change.
Unfortunately, wishing the complexity away, does not make it disappear.
If, through careful study we discover that structural racism is only, proverbially speaking, the tip of the iceberg, and deeper, more complex policies are responsible for the persistent injustices, then chipping away the tip of the iceberg would still leave the more dominant structural causes unaffected, lurking below the surface to continue to haunt the most vulnerable in our society. With the tip of the iceberg removed, it would definitely appear as though we’ve made progress, but only superficially so, and only temporarily.
Complexity is the unfortunate reality of large human societies, but very few people appreciate the significance thereof.
Yes, complexity cannot be easily employed (or weaponized) as an activist slogan in a protest, nor be easily utilized against the protestors by a populist, narcissistic leader. But it appears as though our lack of appreciation for complexity have a longer, evolutionary history.
I don't think our human biology has advanced as rapidly as did our societies recently expand, and of course, nor has it advanced as rapidly as our technologies. Consider the following scale of the evolution of human societies:
Humans have lived in hunter-gatherer bands and tribes (of hundreds) from before 50,000 years ago.
Chiefdoms (of thousands) have formed around the agricultural revolution of 8 to 10,000 years ago.
The first nation state (of millions) is believed to be either the English Common-Wealth of 1649 or France after the French Revolution (1787-99).
I.e. humans have lived in simple societies, of a few hundred, for tens of thousands of years, but within complex nation states of millions, for only a few hundred, and some nations only a few decades.. Binary solutions may certainly have been apt in smaller societies, but such simple solutions are very seldom useful in larger, more complex societies.
Throughout history, the rate at which certain societies (collectively referred to as the West) have advanced (due to sheer geographical good-luck), in comparison to the majority of the rest of the world who lagged behind (due to sheer geographical bad-luck), have precipitated monumental disparities that, initially had nothing to do with race, and to this day have had very little to do with intelligence. [1]
Unfortunately, man’s animalistic and inexorable predilection for power and self-preservation, along with the human propensity for simplicity (especially pre-science) have limited his ability to look back in time and recognize the true complexity and the true forces that allowed him to progress more rapidly than others. Instead, he opted for the more easily explicable version, as captured by optics and most evident when a slave and his master are seen side by side. And so man conceived of the more simple explanation, the construct of racism. Utterly false, but eventually the dominant and indelible narrative by which an unfortunate group of people experience subjugation, lack of respect, less opportunity, and everything else that limits their freedom of being.
Onto this world stage steps a man, (not sure if he's even worthy of this title of 'man') who still acts with the mentality of an 8,000 BC Chiefdom chief, who doesn't even recognize that the very thing against which "his" people are protesting and rioting, that being police who abuse their power, he chooses to employ against them in the hope that it would pacify them.
Can he really be this blind? This narcissistic? All he appears to know is power, fame and the preservation of his orange crest.
One day, if this man has to retreat into a bunker for fear of his life, he would still be armed with the most powerful weapon in history: Social Media—also the most effective weapon in history against science, reason, progress and sanity. This pernicious tool of mass destruction micro targets individual instances of injustice, amplifies them for a global audience, and weaponizes an individual case as evidence of a larger structural problem… which have already been shown to be merely the tip of the iceberg, but only for those who care to read more than 144 characters on Twitter, or vitriolic comments on Facebook.
Why am I, a white man interested in topics of race? Because I live in South Africa and wish to engage meaningfully, with understanding, with my fellow human being. I am also an artist who wish to engage with these topics, not superficially, but meaningfully. I don't want to live in my white bubble, but I also don’t want to be culpable in helping to solidify the status quo.
Understanding takes time, research and engagement.
I don't merely retweet images of black power from across the Atlantic in order to score points with my friends of color. When all of this is shoved aside by the next crisis and the second wave of Covid-19 takes center stage, now magnified exponentially, not only by irresponsible rioters but also military brutes, many of the virtue-signalling re-tweeters will merely return to their caffé laté's and Covid-safe internet jobs and forget about the daily struggle of their friends of color.
Instead, I have grappled deeply with these concepts for a number of years now, because I recognize that:
If you care about justice, you should care about facts.
It's been said that the truth will set us free. Unfortunately, most people who espouse this truism, only want THEIR version of the truth, not THE truth.
With love,
Notes & further reading:
Jason Riley, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute explores true black power and how it could help society bring about meaningful change.
John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University explores the latest official statistics on police brutality.
Coleman Hughes (Columbia University) explores the disproportionate killing of people of color.
Glenn Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, reminisces on his experiences as a black man and what we can do to help.