A: I used to have a co-worker who reported that she had a friend who wanted to have a button made up that would say, “Both things are true.” Systems are made by persons, based on shared beliefs. Our systems were mostly designed by rich White men based on a widely shared belief that White people are supposed to have everything good because White people are everything good—especially rich White people and even more especially rich White men—and everyone else is supposed to pay dearly for the leftovers, unless the leftovers start looking good, in which case White people, and most especially rich White men, are supposed to have those, too.
The Constitution that set out the system of governance of the United States of America was written by and for a relatively small group of wealthy White men, including human traffickers and enslavers, to benefit themselves. Elie Mystal’s characterization of it as “trash” is charitable. And because they were already justifying slavery by imagining that the people they were trafficking and enslaving weren’t even really people, those men gave us a cast-in-concrete system of White supremacy. Every single concession to the human traffickers and enslavers has come back to bite us, and while they may seem to be biting us extra hard lately, in fact they’ve been biting us very hard all along.
So focusing on our personal issues is important. Malcolm X said it best: “Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action.”
Changing our thought patterns and our attitudes drives systemic change; systemic change makes an accommodation for changing our thought patterns and our attitudes. Thus, we progress. Otherwise, resistance to systemic change will continue to be fueled by the core beliefs and fantasies of White supremacy driving too many White people to fight systemic change with everything they’ve got, and we’ll continue to be assailed by too many people who think that storming the seat of government for the purpose of upholding White supremacy is a good idea. The personal really is political, and we’re not doing all this work on ourselves just so we can be nice people. If we want to be able to take effective actions to make real change, we need to be healthy, whole human beings. And we certainly can’t make people who aren’t White welcome in hitherto White spaces if inwardly we’re recoiling from them.
21