So…I am white. I am a white, heterosexual, middle aged man who grew up in a farm town in the Midwest. So what could I possibly know about racism that someone else didn’t have to tell me or show me first? How could I possibly understand what racism is like on the end of the person who is enduring it? How can I use this platform to preach about ending racism when I have never suffered from it personally?
I think about this a lot as I discuss and debate racism with people. This is my answer to that..
If you are white, I want you to imagine something for me. I want you to imagine the stereotypical white suburb. Nice houses, nice schools, a football team that always competes for the state championship. A good community where people feel safe and loved. You may even have a private patrol officer driving the streets to make sure everyone feels secure.
Can you imagine that? It doesn’t even have to be a rich neighborhood. Just a nice, predominantly white neighborhood where everyone gets along and your children grow up with dreams of endless possibilities.
Now I want you to take that same town you are imagining, and I want you to oversaturate it with police. Way too many police. I want the police to patrol the streets night and day. They can be nice, good police officers but they are still there, patrolling the town at all hours of the night. If you cross the street a few feet from the crosswalk, one of those police officers is going to blare the sirens and give you a ticket. They are going to question where you are going in such a hurry. They are not going to believe you are just going to the park to play with your friends. Maybe they’ll let you off with a warning this time but not until after they have you sitting on the curb as everyone passing by sees you did something bad. And you’ll be nervous the next time you see that cop car drive by.
Imagine your street patrolled at night. You are trying to sleep but the flashing red and blue lights are pouring into your bedroom. Police sirens can be heard in the distance. You hear stories about the kid down the street getting arrested for something he says he didn’t do.
You walk to school and you see police breaking down the door of one of your neighbors and arresting him without ever telling him why. You just hear him screaming to know what he did. You keep walking so they don’t arrest you to.
Now, I want you to imagine your school starts to get less funding from the state. The town a few miles away gets your share and suddenly they have all new equipment while yours is falling apart. When your team plays a game on the road the other teams make fun of you for having worn down equipment. They call you names and make fun of your town.
Are you still imaging this? Have you rolled your eyes at the scenario? Have you said to yourself that you’d just move away?
Well guess what, you can’t move away. You put an offer in for a home in a different town but you are denied and the bank won’t tell you why. They just deny you and give the money to someone else. They won’t tell you that you have been redlined because the town you currently live in has been deemed a financial risk. The banks see all the police cars in your town, the arrests being made, and mark you and everyone in the town a liability.
Now you are stuck in that town because you can’t get a loan to move out. Landlords won’t even rent to you once they know where you are from.
Yet that hasn’t stopped other people like you from moving into your town. It is the only town they can find a place to live.
Your once beautiful community is now over populated and over patrolled by police. Your schools are underfunded. Jobs are harder to come by now. This goes on for a while and tensions begin to rise. A few of the kids start lashing out because, psychologically, they are exhausted from being harassed by police and being made fun of by other towns. Their parents are desperate and running out of options to provide for them. Those kids are called thugs. Your kids are called thugs.
A store in town gets robbed at gun point. The robber was scared and hungry and angry. Surely the rest of the country will see this and realize your town needs help. You turn on the tv and are shocked when you hear about all the “White on White” crime in your town. Animals fighting amongst themselves. You start to lose hope. Your kids can see this. They start to lose hope. Their grades suffer from it. The school then loses even more funding because test scores are down from all the kids losing hope in an over policed town with little funding and no way out.
Now I want you to imagine this happening for generation after generation. Decade after decade of a town slowly rotting away with no means of escape. Eventually nobody will remember that it was once a thriving community. They will only see the police, the arrests, the crime. Someone will tell them to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. “If I can make it, so can you”. The people in the town will be mocked for their dependency on handouts. They will be judged without understanding. Guilty before the trial.
You ask how I, a white man, can speak on racism? I put myself in their shoes and imagine my life in those same circumstances.
You can’t understand racism by looking at just what is in front of you. You have to get your hands dirty to understand the racism in our country. It is all right there. Follow the path back. The history of our racism predates our country.
Imagine your world as a young black child with a gun in his or her face being screamed at by someone who has sworn to protect them. I want you to imagine being told to raise your hands up. You have no idea why you are being yelled at or why a gun is pointing at you. The police officer isn’t even sure you committed a crime but he has heard about this town and how bad it is. So he points the gun at you and tells you to raise your hands.
I want you to imagine complying.
Then I want you to imagine the trigger being pulled anyway.
To end racism, you must understand it and accept how deep it goes. Only then can we move forward.
