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A white man recently slid into my DMs and informed me that my anger at the continued daily microaggressions, racist jokes, white centric work policies, police brutality toward people of color, and systemic racism in American government, health care outcomes, housing, and safety for Black Americans, and me subsequently exposing my children to that anger “is worse than anything any slave owner ever did to any of your ancestors.”
That is a direct quote.
A local mostly-white agency told me and other Black employees that they (meaning the white upper management) decided that they have done more than enough to address bias with the predominantly white staff and therefore do not believe that anything more needs to be done.
This was an audacious and revealing declaration for a white agency to make, but it was appallingly and glaringly perfect evidence of willful self-serving bias in action. That’s because they said it on the heels of Black employees clearly and repeatedly giving the agency multiple examples of racist and biased incidents and policies that directly impacted Black employees and which contribute to employees of color leaving the agency due to the trauma of having to navigate a culture clearly (by the agency’s own admission) set up to please the white perspective on racism regardless of what it cost Black and brown employees and clients.
These two situations are not dissimilar.
This is the utter breathtaking arrogance of white people in positions of power, or even random white strangers, to be so confident in their racial superiority that they can swim in their private pool of privilege and scoff in the face of a Black or brown person standing in front of them on fire and asking for a cup of water to put it out. And to tell them, “You’re not on fire,” “We’ve decided you’ve had plenty of water,” “Stop complaining about being on fire,” and “Why are you angry?”
Many times white people in positions of power, when caught on figurative “hot mikes” saying racist, biased, and/or credentialing comments in response to being called out for their racist and biased actions, respond with eloquent apologies assuring people that what they said was “taken out of context” or “not who I really am!”
I posit that what you say and do when your guard is down is who you really are, when your statements repeatedly match your actions. Eventually you have to admit that you have to keep your guard up because otherwise racist and white supremacist things will certainly come out of your mouth. You think these things, and then you say and do them. And you do it because you have the power of white privilege, and you absolutely know that you have it.
It is sheer hubris for a white person to patronizingly use the infrastructure of white centricity to rebuke a person of color for speaking out about the truth of the trauma of being forced to operate within that same infrastructure. It is gaslighting for that white person to pretend to be unaware that they are not only cashing in on their guaranteed racist returns, but are also perpetuating the very harm that the person of color is attempting to define and address.
Why is a Black employee enduring frequent racism at her place of employment not expected to be angry? Why are white people more angry and motivated to respond defensively against Black people speaking up about racism and pointing out systems and practices that continue the abuse and historical trauma for people of color, than they are about being told that a Black person under their protection has been harmed by racism occurring as a direct result of the lack of adequate and persistent work by white people in power to dismantle the inevitable bias that follows from having a predominantly white staff and culture?
Why don’t white people, when hearing the anguish and pain endured by people of color from a lifetime of consequences directly stemming from America being designed around racist policies, get angry at that and feel motivated to do something about that, instead of putting all their effort into gaslighting the people harmed by those policies?
But no.
So many white people continue their willing and complicit participation in (and in some cases design of) racist and biased beliefs, practices, and actions to be sure that at the end of the day they can sleep easy. Once you’ve congratulated yourself for solving racism in your white agency, or congratulated yourself for putting a Black woman in her place about how uppity she is for educating white people on the fact that you all need to do better, then you are free to slip on those “WHITES ONLY” glasses of contented privilege over your eyes and continue living your racist and biased life, without taking any responsibility to work to change the very system that issued you those glasses.
Acknowledging the harsh truths exposed in columns like this would mean that you would also have to admit that you do see the person asking for a cup of water while you swim in an entire pool of privilege, but you just don’t feel like doing anything about it. You love those glasses.
My ancestors’ enslavers loved those glasses too.
Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton and writes a monthly column.
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