Apart from being mean as shit to everyone else, White people aren’t very kind to one another, or to ourselves. You may have heard of minority self-policing—members of oppressed groups trying to stave off abuse by imposing high standards of conduct on themselves. Majority self-policing is not so genteel. Majority self-policing doesn’t stop at admonitions or name-calling: it can be lethal. White people have routinely killed other White people for being more loyal to the human race than they were to White supremacy: only some lives matter. And because White people are so dangerous to each other, our relationships with one another, as oppressor to oppressor, are fraught with suspicion and distrust. We’re constantly testing each other: did you at least maintain a prudent silence if you didn’t laugh at the racist joke? Good, you’re complicit, and you’re not going to interrupt our moment of White-racist bonding. Or, coming from the other side, I’m not going to attempt any friendship with you until I have sufficient evidence that you’re not a racist motherfucker, and that joke may just have crossed you right off my list—and yes, I will freely admit to starting from a position of suspicion with regard to other White people.
In 1962, James Baldwin said, “White people will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
It has often been said that for people accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. It might be more accurate to say that for people accustomed to privilege, the thought of equality feels like oppression, because if you can’t imagine true equality, the fear is likely to be that if there’s any change, relationships of inequality will just be flipped. There was a time—and I would not like to dwell on how long that time went on for—when I thought that relationships of inequality were all there were, and that my job was to figure out how to live within them. Now I know differently. Actually living with our fellow human beings in conditions of true equality is bliss, and we have every right to it. We may even have to accidentally fall into relationships of equality to find out what they’re really like, but then too it helps if our hearts are ready.
In the immortal, much-paraphrased words of the historian Neely Fuller, Jr., “If you don’t understand white supremacy, everything else that you think you understand will only confuse you.”
Even if you do understand White supremacy, that’s just Step One.
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