It's Time for White People to Reckon With Racism

By Eve Ensler, Guardian UK

13 July 16

Feigning ignorance or a lack of complicity is no longer acceptable – we must all work together to counter endemic prejudice in America

t is time for a collective reckoning, a moral accounting, a radical self-appraisal and calling out, fellow white Americans. Our explicit and implicit participation in crimes against black people has gone on for too long.

What allows us to justify murder? What selfish gene prevents us from intervening in the face of blatant injustice? What history of lies and distortions have we sold ourselves that keep us in our isolated boxes of superiority and denial? What truth would we have to tell about ourselves to unravel these strangulating tentacles of racism and violence?

What systems would we have to abandon or lose or claim as bankrupt?

Which one of us hasn’t seen the outright slaughter going on in the recent videos of police shootings, and the videos before them, and the lynchings before them?

Who doesn’t know the history of the very intentional policies that created abject conditions that so many black people are forced to live in: the poverty, the lack of opportunities, education, jobs, the exclusion? Which one of us doesn’t understand the daily terror that occupies the lifeblood of every black woman, man and child in America which inhibits their ability to breath, live and thrive? Which one of us hasn’t noticed the prisons filled with millions of black folks who are held and incarcerated at a rate 14 times higher than whites?

And if we don’t see or know these things, why the hell don’t we? Why have we created and allowed such a distance between us and the black people around us? Why have we inured ourselves to their suffering, their sorrow, their fear, their desires, their dreams?

It’s time now to put our white asses on the line for the freedom of our black sisters and brothers – time to be willing to forfeit our privilege and status; time to admit the failure of a racist ideology and framework. Time to stop criticizing the tactics or methods or emotions of revolutionary movements that rise with bravery, heart vision, passion, patience and heroic kindness in response to the most grotesque atrocities, murders, degradations, terror, isolation and exclusion.

Because nothing will change until we are all willing to shut up and listen and serve, willing to stop making it about us: our feelings, our hurts, our guilt. Until we are willing to say this structure that we created and mastered has failed, to stop saying that agonizing and aggressive phrase “all lives matter” when we know full well they don’t, even to many of us.

Until we are willing to be wrong, willing to be lost, willing to be quiet. Can we be quiet? Can we shut up? Can we just shut up for one moment, shut up and stop talking about us? How the pain and righteous rage of black people affects us? How blamed we feel, how no matter what we do it stays the same, how they will never forgive us blah blah blah. Can we step out of the center of the picture for enough time for a healing to happen?

Can we own our selfishness and fear and need for comfort and our desperation for power? Can we give ourselves in service without directing or determining? Can we walk behind black folks or beside them? Can we allow ourselves to get close, real close, and rub up against the burning pain of those we have abused and enslaved, raped, incarcerated, shot, lynched, ignored and degraded? Can we die that death and not make black people responsible for our guilt and neglect?

Can we stop punishing people we have harmed for reminding us we have harmed them? Can we be that honest, that generous, that vulnerable, that humble that we are able to provide support and kinship without being thanked or getting credit? Can we serve without expecting to be worshipped? Can we stop issuing instructions and offer our bodies for action instead? Can we make this terrible wrong of racism the center of our thought and moral occupation?

The truth is we are as much sinew as we are symbol. Our whiteness is our skin color, but it’s also a torn sheet draping the dead, a flag of privilege that will not surrender, a town called separateness. Our whiteness is that poisonous sky right before it rains, the color of shame.

So can we sit and be still for a minute and let the onerous truth and sorrow wash over us? Then, in that cataclysmic silence, when we have touched into the tidal wave of our responsibility, we will know what lengths we have to go, what risks we will have to take to dismantle this mad hatred – and how fiercely we will have to love to right this wrong.