It is a privilege to educate yourself on racism rather than experiencing it
Kara Walker Fons Americanus Tate Modern 2019. Photo: © Tate (Matt Greenwood)
The world is in flames and it feels stupid to talk about anything else. There’s been a lot of information to wade through on the internet about how we can best help others, which, ironically, has only made me feel more helpless about the state of the world. It’s insane the amount of work it takes to be a good person in 2020. Like so many of us, I don’t feel like my own life experience has given me the ability or tools to truly, perfectly show up in a movement that I haven’t spent that many years actively fighting for. But that’s not an excuse to not try. White supremacy does not go softly into the night; it’s a cancer that can only be dismantled from the inside. We start with ourselves and move into our communities. It is a lengthy and exhausting process, but it’s a necessary one. Would you rather let your guilt and anxiety paralize you into inaction? Or would you look deep inside you, find the bad things, and force them into the light?
My perspective is of a white Hispanic immigrant. Historically my country has not yet had to grapple with its own deeply racist history, which means I not only have a lot to catch up on in an American context but also in a white Argentinean context. Our first instinct is to prioritize the injustices we see done to our community rather than the injustices done unto others that we will never experience ourselves. The burnout, feed fatigue, and internal resistance we encounter within ourselves when we look at the staggering pile of work necessary just to become a good person is a good sign: it means that part of us is slowly dying inside. Hunt it down. Society is very quick to forgive racism and intolerance and hatred and it is a very easy thing to fall into the same patterns unless you make a conscious effort to kill that part of yourself every single day. No matter how exhausting it is to go against the current, the fact remains that it is a privilege to educate yourself on racism rather than experiencing it firsthand. From police brutality to the upcoming election, a new world is waiting for us after COVID-19. How are we preparing for it?
The wonderful thing about being quarantined is that we actually have time and resources to educate ourselves. Here’s a very tiny list of things that have helped me make sense of things in the last few days. Some of these I’ve been following for a very long time, some are new finds, all are part of a lifelong commitment to improve my understanding of the world we live in. It’s not meant to be a definitive list by any means, it’s just a place to start.
A free PDF of Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? from my alma matter, Seven Stories Press (lots of good stuff in their catalog btw!).
Films/TV/Documentaries: I Am Not Your Negro, 13th, When They See Us, Beyonce’s Homecoming, Insecure, Dear White People, BlacKKKlansman, Sorry to Bother You, The Get-Down, Bobby Kennedy for President, Explained: The Racial Wealth Gap, anything Amber Ruffin does on Seth Meyers.
Writing: James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, The Good Immigrant U.S., Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kimberly Drew’s This Is What I Know About Art, Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Candice Carty-Williams’s Queenie, Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage, Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (I recommend the Penguin Modern pocket edition but you can also get a free PDF here), Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, James Baldwin: The Last Interview from Melville House, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. DON’T read “Heart of Darkness”. Three separate English lit seminars had it in their syllabus for some reason. Honestly, fuck that book. And DO NOT BUY FROM AMAZON: IndieBound or Bookshop.org support your local indies if you don’t already know who they are.
Podcasts: Still Processing, 1619, The Read, this episode of The Daily.
Articles: Kara Walker for the Gentlewoman, anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates for the Atlantic (but especially The First White President), Kim Drew for Teen Vogue (actually, anything from Teen Vogue).
Police brutality stems from a deeply entrenched personal bias and racist history. Police departments also function within a fierce patriarchal fraternity that isn’t really visible in other spaces of public service outside the fire department (you don’t see National Park rangers running over campers). JJ Bola’s “Mask Off: Masculinity Redefined” is a good primer on why toxic masculinity sets men back instead of pushing them forward.
Donations: Philly Community Bail Fund (text "GIVE" to (833)608-5511), Black Lives Matter Philly, Up Against the Law Legal Collective (Venmo: @upagainstthelaw), Fishtown’s black-owned Harriett’s Bookshop (they’re inundated with book orders right now but you can venmo them at $HARRIETTSBOOKSHOP). There are millions more places to help, just check your social media feeds.
Argue. You know all those times you’ve ruined class discussions and first dates by playing devil’s advocate? Now you can do it for the betterment of the world!! There is nothing I can say about a black person’s experience that hasn’t already been said more eloquently by somebody else, and nobody should be looking at white people to validate black people’s perspectives in the first place. However, white supremacy is a white people problem, and we’re not going to heal until we recognize our own complicity. This is our mess to clean up. It is not up to the black community to save us from ourselves. I mean, Jesus, haven’t they suffered enough? The least we can do is argue with our racist family members at the dinner table so someone else doesn’t have to.
Note: This list may stand out because I don’t normally write a lot about activism or my own politics in this blog. This is in stark contrast with my personality, because if you talk to me in person you’ll probably hear 5 opinions in the first 5 seconds. The fact is I don’t really talk about personal things in my blog because I don’t like talking about my personal life on the internet. I also feel deeply uncomfortable with performative allyship, especially as I recognize that I myself have so much to learn and would rather clear the way for smarter voices to take over the conversation. But seeing as you’re here right now, I might as well show you who I’ve been learning from. It feels disingenuous to talk trash about Bernstein right now, and I want to respect that feeling.