Against the White Moderate
I see white people as equivalent to the Germans during the Holocaust who stood by and did nothing as the Jews got gassed to death in Auschwitz. You may think this comparison absurd, but slavery in America has existed for 243 years and continues to exist. It’s just called the prison-industrial complex now, in which America incarcerates more people than any nation on earth and disproportionately black people who perform prison labor. Turns out the 13th Amendment doesn’t apply to “criminals.”
White people claim they aren’t racist with their every breath; that they don’t support white supremacy. Yet words are just hot air. What do their actions do?
The elite on the left twist their hands and bemoan the actions of insurrectionists on the right, while doing absolutely nothing to help. At least the neo-Nazis openly admit who they are. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t fail in the South, the supposed hotbed of racism. He failed in the North; in Chicago, when he came up against Daley’s Democratic machine and the intransigence of Northern racism thinly disguised as segregation by choice.
Perhaps you are familiar with “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” where MLK writes of the problematic white moderate. That is what I see as well. We may celebrate MLK today by naming streets and a national holiday after him but we celebrate the sanitized version of MLK digestible to white people. Towards the end of his life (he was assassinated on April 4, 1968), as his activism turned against the Vietnam War and uncontrolled capitalism, his popularity declined. Today American schoolchildren learn of his “I have a dream speech” and while that is good it is not enough.
In the name of fear, the GOP has weaponized racism ever since LBJ dared to sign into law the Civil Rights Act of 1965, saying as he did so that the South would be lost for a 100 years. The voting rights enshrined in that act, King’s legacy, have been gutted by SCOTUS.
In the name of law and order, white people stood by as one by one black leaders got assassinated, sometimes violently by the government, such as Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther Party.
White people reviled Malcolm X because of his nationalistic and militant rhetoric when it came to anti-racism, while ignoring the uplifting of the black spirit that he performed.
White middle class people watched in horror on January 6th. Yet they continue to do nothing. Where are the protests in the streets? The exercise of our First Amendment rights, the ones the Founding Fathers chose to place first of all other amendments in the Constitution? Where is the outrage against black prison labor? Where is the outrage against the new Jim Crow laws? Where is the outrage against housing discrimination that continues today? Where is the justice not just for the victims of police brutality, but the victims of all of the lynching that started as soon as the Civil War ended and black people were no longer considered the valuable property of white people? White mobs are responsible for the murder of a child like Emmett Till. How many of those who supported lynching have ever been brought to justice?
Unless you perform antiracist acts, you are in denial about your complicity with a system that has long centuries of being racist against black people.
When you complain about affirmative action, you are ignoring the centuries of affirmative action white people have enjoyed. Thanks to a SCOTUS decision regarding the University of California system, affirmative action can no longer legally be enforced. Guess which political party has used its control of the Presidency to appoint SCOTUS judges while denying Democratic presidents like Obama their SCOTUS nominations?
Racism is not going to die easily. To paraphrase a famous quote, it only takes good people to do nothing for evil to prevail.
