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Areyouupholdingwhitesupremacy.pdf

Are You Upholding White Supremacy?

Are you a racist? No? Great! Are you sure? Few people are willing to raise their hand to provide an affirmative response to this question, but this presents a paradox: why is there such a preponderance of evidence that racism exists, and yet we have so few racists? If you are reading this book, chances are you’re not a card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan, the National Alliance, or any other neofascist, anti-Black, anti-Semitic, white supremacist organization. With that said, is it possible, even despite your best intentions, that you may still be contributing to or enabling ongoing racial disparities? It would be a hard pill to swallow if you had to respond “Yes” to this question. Indeed,

there are some who would reject the question out of hand. Some people argue that racism doesn’t mean anything anymore because people use the word “too often.” It’s true that describing something as racist has become a common, inaccurately deployed quip, a verbal equivocation, or a default insult. But arguably the word is used frequently because there’s plenty that can be accurately described as such. Maybe we should, in fact, be using the word more often and for a wider array of social, political, and economic processes, phenomena, and outcomes. But maybe we should also be more pointed and more specific about what we mean when we say that someone or something is racist. Let’s ask the question another way, and we’ll give you some nuanced ways to answer:

Do you live your day-to-day life in a way that may—intentionally or otherwise—uphold white supremacy? a. Yes, because I’m an overt racist. b. Yes, because I’m a structural racist. c. Yes, because I’m a complicit racist. d. No, I’m an antiracist.

Let’s think through these options one by one and perhaps use the process of elimination. Most people have gotten pretty good at pointing out the overt racists in the world. He’s the guy who drove a car into a group of counterprotestors at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. She’s the family member at Thanksgiving dinner who makes derogatory remarks about . . . (fill in name of an underrepresented racial group here). Their behavior evinces racial animus, bigotry, and prejudice. Their violence and epithets are interpersonal and, more importantly, individualistic. The structural racists are the Supreme Court justices who have written or concurred with

Stay Woke : A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:18.

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decisions to dismantle the Voting Rights Act or allow police to pull people over who “look illegal.”1 They are the teachers, principals, and resource officers who discipline children of color more harshly and more frequently than they do white children.2 They are the doctors who are less likely to prescribe certain medicines to or do necessary surgery on Black patients.3 And they are voters who support candidates who disparage whole groups of vulnerable populations on a regular basis in order to garner and maintain the support of people who are racially resentful.4 Their behavior affects others in a structural way, shaping institutions and contributing to patterns of racial disparity. (Let’s also be clear that some people are both overtly and structurally racist.) The complicit racists are people who do absolutely nothing in their day-to-day lives to

prevent either overt or structural racists from further enmeshing racial inequality into our society. This group of people may not intentionally work to perpetuate negative stereotypes, support candidates whose policies exacerbate racial inequities, inundate people with microaggressions, or whitesplain, but they are not antiracists either. By latching onto hegemonic ideologies like colorblindness and respectability politics, however, many people across all racial groups enable the perpetuation of white supremacy. They fail to recognize that the lives of white people are more greatly valued by a variety of institutions and that interpersonal racial hostility and prejudice alone cannot fully explain persistent racial disparities. Being a complicit racist is easy because it only calls for you to stay out of the way. Being a

complicit racist is easy because it’s business as usual, it’s normal, and almost everyone is doing it. Being a complicit racist is easy because we all have a script in our hands, ready to be recited when something looks suspicious but doesn’t completely raise up our red, that’s- so-racist flags. Staying woke, on the other hand, is a process of developing habits of antiracism, such as

vigilance, speaking out, stepping up, using one’s privilege to undermine racism, and broadening your understanding of how racism works. Staying woke means honing your skills to notice when the racial rules of the game are changing, becoming cognizant of the underlying assumptions of dominant racial ideologies, and listening to the ways in which racial grammar evolves so that you can combat new forms of oppression. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight some of the scripts that many of us have learned

in order to be good, friendly complicit racists. These scripts are coded as ostensibly progressive, but their purpose is to avert or diminish accusations of racism and to allow people to maintain a humanist image of themselves and of US society. The everyday repetition of these scripts sounds normal and innocuous, but they inadvertently uphold white supremacy. In deconstructing common narratives that are rooted in colorblindness and respectability politics, we hope to get you thinking about how you can intervene in the socially acceptable reproduction of racial inequality.

— “It Doesn’t Matter If You’re Black or White or Green or Blue!”

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Colorblindness has become the dominant racial ideology in the US (though not the only one), putting us in what the anthropologist Lee Baker calls the “color-blind bind.”5 Sociologists like Ruth Frankenberg explain that a colorblind ideology is a “mode of thinking about race organized around an effort not to ‘see’ or at any rate not to acknowledge race differences,” because this is perceived as the “‘polite’ language of race.”6 A colorblind narrative suggests that we can get rid of the last, lingering vestiges of racial inequality by ignoring race altogether. There are two assumptions here. First, the logic erroneously presumes that there is only a “little bit” of racism left, and second, it suggests that ignoring the problem will solve it. Taken together, these assumptions serve to perpetuate racial inequity because they lead us to falter in addressing the issue for what it is: racial inequity. Though it has become a common belief that being colorblind is best for everyone,

colorblindness is actually an evolved form of previous, harmful racial ideologies and attitudes. This ability to transform and appropriate the values of contemporary (middle-class) whites and to discard the parts that would make it irrelevant or too obviously transparent is what makes some people call racism a “scavenger ideology.”7 We have to keep in mind that a racial ideology is simply a story we tell ourselves to explain what we see in this world. So during the “Jim Crow” racism era, people relied on a narrative that suggested that Black folks’ subordinate social, political, and economic status resulted from their inherent inferiority. After Jim Crow was dismantled through civil-rights-era policies—such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968— many whites, arguing that the playing field was now leveled, became indignant over additional race-conscious efforts, such as affirmative action, which sought to close the racial disparities in opportunity. These racially resentful people asserted that if any trace of the racial inequities that were developed during the previous four hundred years still existed, it was because Black people did not live up to their newly presented opportunities to succeed. Today, colorblindness leads people to rely on logic that claims that since race shouldn’t matter, it doesn’t matter; in fact, some believe we would be better off if we just didn’t “see” race altogether. The claim to “not see race” does us all a disservice because race does shape the lives of

every living person in the United States. Relatedly, many people on the left claim that “identity politics” is the opposite of colorblindness and thus is harmful because white nationalists use the same identity-based “rationale” as people of color to demand redress for their perceived loss of racial privilege. This logic and argument are lazy and careless. As is often said, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. If we shift our perspective from a position of privilege to that of the most marginalized, then we can more easily understand that identity politics is not “just about who you [are], it [is] also about what you could do to confront the oppression you [are] facing.” The women who founded the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist organization in the late 1970s, used the term “identity politics” to highlight the fact that “Black women’s social positions made them disproportionately susceptible to the ravages of capitalism, including poverty, illness, violence, sexual assault, and inadequate healthcare and housing, to name only the most obvious.”8 Though identity politics is yet another concept co-opted and abused to maintain white supremacy, its originators conceived of it as a means not only to bring attention to

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interlocking sets of oppression but also to respond to them politically and radically. In order to buck the colorblind trend, you need not make essentialist assumptions about a

person on the basis of the person’s race. It is fine to notice people’s race (along with other aspects of their identity, such as gender), if you plan to use that recognition for good—for compassion, empathy, or consideration of how a person might have to navigate a particular space or situation differently or to remedy the effects of racism. Besides, it’s annoying, hurtful, and psychologically taxing to hear people say, “I didn’t even notice you were Black.” Ironically, straight-up overt racists admit to seeing race, but they just do so to actively pursue injustice or violence or to respond apathetically to injustice or violence. But those who stay woke know that simply saying nothing and doing nothing effectively makes you part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

— “I Voted for Obama”

The 2008 and 2012 elections of Barack Obama were objectively historic: Obama was the first self-identified Black person elected to the United States presidency. The first time around, the New York Times’ front page declared, “Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout.” Another headline suggested, “Change Has Come.” A below-the-fold article in the Washington Post claimed, “America’s History Gives Way to Its Future.” People were excited. Jessie Jackson was crying. Tehama was crying—this guy was her professor for goodness sake! Everyone was crying! People were excited to divulge what had typically been taboo— publicly announcing the way one filled out one’s secret ballot: “I voted for Obama.” For many people, “I voted for Obama” denoted that they helped to usher in what many believed would be a postracial reality. But “I voted / campaigned / donated to / knocked on doors for Obama” has also become currency that can be cashed in when accusations of racism arise. “I voted for Obama” is the twenty-first-century version of “I marched with Dr. King” or “My friend/neighbor/cousin-in-law is Black.” Here’s the thing: none of these things means that you are antiracist. Voting for a political party or candidate that explicitly aims to reduce inequality is a step in

the right direction, but it is not sufficient to dismantle an embedded system of racism. You know who else voted for Obama? Jason Kessler, the guy who organized the Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, which not only gathered modern-day Nazis, white nationalists, and racist internet trolls but also led to the murder of Heather Heyer and the injuries of nineteen other people and provided the forty-fifth president the opportunity to double down on the bullshit idea that there was “blame on both sides.” All said, your vote is a blunt instrument to translate your preferences into political action. What people loved (or hated) about Obama was that he was a symbol of racial progress.

Here’s the thing about Obama. He was the safest Black candidate the Democratic Party could add to an otherwise-curated lineup of primary candidates. He’s a Black man with a biracial heritage and an Ivy League background; he was a third-culture kid9 who can code switch, a skill that he often used to speak in front of Black audiences with an authentically Black tone

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of voice but with messages of respectability politics. He has light-skinned privilege in a society where colorism is rampant. In experiments, researchers show that darker-skinned versions of Obama received much less support from white Americans.10 Though he did not just stroll into the White House, he did have middle-class privilege and the cultural currency of his white family, which he cashed in regularly on the campaign trail. He never made any promises on the campaign trail to address structural racism; he didn’t even mention racism until he was forced to.11 While Obama did take steps to change policies and create initiatives aimed to help people of color and sometimes spoke eloquently on racial issues, racial wealth inequality actually increased under his presidency, and his words of racial uplift were often laced with messages of Black blame.12

We have to be careful how we talk about racism and also racial progress because the words, rationales, and concepts that political liberals and racial progressives use often get co- opted by racial conservatives. Case in point: while many white liberals proxy “I voted for Obama” to mean “I cannot be racist,” racial conservatives have co-opted the election of Obama to argue that we live in a postracial society. If Obama, a Black man who was raised in a female-headed household, could become president, neoconservative logic leads us to the notion that it’s quite obvious that structural racism is not what prevents Blacks and other people of color from earning the same life chances and enjoying the same opportunities as whites.

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In the run-up to the 2008 election, the artist Ray Noland was commissioned by Obama for America to create posters for the presidential campaign. Noland says, “After numerous talks with Director of New Media, Scott Goodstein, I realized the campaign had an issue with the way I presented Barack Obama’s image. From their comments, I felt they thought I made [Obama] look ‘too black.’” After parting ways with the official campaign, Noland continued to create artwork supporting Obama’s run. In creating this poster, Noland presents Obama as “unapologetically brown and at times jet black, to stress the point” of his racial identity. (Designed by Ray Noland; first-edition printing, 2006, by Steve Walters, Screwball Press, Chicago; second-edition printing, 2007, at Crosshair, Chicago; quotations from email correspondence, September 2, 2018)

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While many people understood Barack Obama’s election as being made possible by a legacy of struggle for freedom and equality, as depicted in this cartoon, it was by no means the culmination of their efforts. We must continue to build on their victories. (Cartoon by Matt Wuerker)

Antiracists have to resist not one but three sets of logic that uphold a society marked by a racial hierarchy: that of well-meaning complicit racists, that of structural racists, and that of overtly racist conservatives—all of whom rely on Obama’s election either to suggest that individuals should be absolved from the fact that they enjoy white privilege or to assert that large-scale policies to eradicate racial disparities need not be developed because the United States in toto became postracial on November 9, 2008. An antiracist is aware of the misuse and abuse of political symbols and works instead to produce tangible outcomes that produce racial equity.

— “I Did Not Vote for Trump”

There are plenty of people who honestly believe that their choice to support a candidate who Stay Woke : A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:18.

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claimed that he could shoot a person in public and not lose any votes, declared that most Mexican immigrants are rapists who bring drugs into the United States, mocked people with disabilities, asserted that if time travel were possible, he would still intern Japanese citizens, argued that Muslims should be banned from the United States, promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn marriage equality and rights to access abortion services, believes that Black people have “nothing to lose,” and admitted that he likes to grab women “by the pussy” was not in and of itself a choice to support the oppression of whole groups of people. A number of these people will even say they voted for him begrudgingly; embarrassed by his crude immorality, they clung to something redemptive they saw in his brash speech, his late-in-life cozying up to the religious right, his eight-year utter revulsion of Barack Obama, or the fact that he wasn’t Hillary Clinton. Then there are the hardcore Trump voters with no reservations, no qualms, no disclaimers—this was their guy, the man they’ve been waiting for their entire lives, MAGA all the way. Are these two groups of people exactly the same? No. Did they cast their one and only ballot for the same man? Absolutely.

The Women’s March, the largest single day of protest in US history, was organized by a cadre of seasoned activists. Galvanized to speak on issues of political, social, and economic inequity, millions of people across all seven continents protested on January 21, 2017, the day after Trump’s inauguration. But it will require persistent activism and the regular exercise of the franchise to upend the structural problems that participants sought to highlight. (Photo by Candis Watts Smith)

Meanwhile, there are also plenty of liberals who in their efforts to distance themselves from the so-called Basket of Deplorables13 pridefully note that they did not vote for Trump but in the very next breath suggest that during the next time around (e.g., 2018 midterm elections and later in 2020), Americans, generally speaking, and the candidates of the Democratic Party, more specifically, should focus more on the plight of poor and working- class white people, whose primary concerns include job loss due to globalization, a sense of vulnerability due to the increasing racial diversity of US demographics, and increased crime

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and drug addiction that comes from feelings of disenfranchisement. By endorsing a platform that privileges the plight of certain white people, rather than one that exploits Americans’ anxiety over and animus toward immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, these liberals fancy themselves morally superior to their Trump-voting counterparts. But here’s the thing: the problems of poor white America are problems that arise because

the social safety net set up during the New Deal and Great Society has been weakened. Public schools are not well funded, and teachers are undervalued. The national minimum wage is a not a living wage. The Affordable Care Act (though imperfect) is being dismantled one piece at a time. And only time will tell whether the opioid epidemic will be treated with the crime-and-punishment tools of the crack epidemic, given that the forty-fifth president was slow to deem a pandemic that kills almost one hundred people per day a national emergency and appointed an attorney general who wanted to revive some of the worst aspects of the failed War on Drugs.14 Much of this is happening because conservative political elites have led racially resentful whites to believe that undeserving, lazy people of color will benefit from evidence-based, dignity-sustaining public policy at the expense of whites.15 “Not only do these attacks have consequences for ordinary Black people, but they are also a ‘Trojan Horse’ shielding a much broader attack against all working-class people, including whites and Latino/as.”16 The effects of this combination of policies have been crushing Black and Brown folks, including those in the middle class, for decades and now are more readily eating away at the lives of ostensibly dispensable poor white Americans. Ignoring any of these facts consigns anyone, even a liberal, to the Basket of Deplorables. Okay, so you object to the “Basket of Deplorables” terminology? And you’re not too crazy

about the idea that Clinton-voting liberals might be deplorable too? Let’s think about this in another way. We tend to associate racism with particular groups of people (e.g., whites) who live in certain regions of the country (e.g., the South) or particular areas of our states (e.g., rural). We also tend to focus on interpersonal racial discrimination and overt bigotry to make determinations of membership in the Basket of Deplorables. But staying woke means recognizing that the dominant mode of racial ideology is colorblind, and racism, generally speaking, is best understood as deeply embedded in our society—it’s structural, it’s almost invisible, and it’s insidious. You can use your vote as a blunt proxy for your principles, but electoral politics is only

one stop on an antiracist’s path to making change. In fact, your vote for candidates in either major party may actually serve to exacerbate inequality. But there is no shortage of organizations to join, to donate to, to canvass for, to use your skills to make change in your community—ranging from the ACLU to local chapters of Black Lives Matter. You might join in a collective protest, picket, or boycott. Or you may still decide to join the campaign of a candidate who is explicit about the ways in which she or he wants to address vast racial inequalities in our society. Or you may become that candidate yourself—for school board, city council, or state representative. Doing something is better than nothing, but solely relying on your vote for or against a candidate is just enough to uphold the status quo.

— Stay Woke : A People's Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, edited by Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, and Candice Watts Smith, New York University Press, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5839299. Created from du on 2020-06-16 15:56:18.

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“When Old People Die, We Will Finally Be Done with Racism” Are you relying on the next generation to help us take a turn toward a postracial reality? We sure hope not. First, the problem of racism is an urgent one. We cannot wait for small people to grow up and become leaders and herd us to the promised land. Second and perhaps most importantly, the next generation has not come to us as fully formed people who love diversity and multiculturalism and support interracial marriage and have an insatiable desire to stomp out systemic injustice. Children are raised by adults who teach them stuff or, in academic parlance, socialize them. And herein lies the problem: grownups are not necessarily providing children with the proper tools to dismantle racism.17

Colorblindness characterizes the environment in which young whites have been socialized. Research shows that white parents, in particular, are teaching their children that they should love everyone regardless of their color, which is great. But it’s what adults are not teaching children that is messing them up. Folks are teaching their children this love- everyone business through the logic of colorblindness. For instance, you know that game where you have a bunch of faces, and the person on the other side has to guess which of the characters is your favorite: Guess Who? Kids are failing to do well at this game because they don’t want to ask, “Is your person Black?”! The social psychologist Evan Apfelbaum and his colleagues show that whites adopt what they call “strategic colorblindness,” or an effort to completely avoid mentioning race even in a task for which pointing out someone’s skin color is actually helpful.18 This group of scholars found that by the age of ten, white kids have been fully socialized to avoid mentioning people’s race altogether even if describing someone’s race can help them successfully complete a task.

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It’s never too early to begin to cultivate an appreciation for justice. (Women’s March in Washington, DC, January 21, 2017; photo by Candis Watts Smith)

Children have an astute ability to connect dots. For example, on a flight to Canada, our resident mini person, André, explained, “When we go up in the air, everything will get very small,” and then he consoled, “But don’t worry. When we come back down, things will get back to their normal size.” Correct. (Mostly.) Sometimes, children make logical connections between concepts and ideas but come to inaccurate conclusions. One of the conclusions that they may make is that if Obama, Beyoncé, and Chance the Rapper can become president or some other well-to-do public figure, then the sky is the limit for Black people who are willing to work toward their dreams. In arriving at this conclusion, they will likely arrive at others: meritocracy functions perfectly because the playing field has been leveled for everyone; people on welfare are failures because they don’t try hard enough to make a living for themselves; and you cannot act out an implicit bias if you value diversity. By avoiding conversations about race, racism, and inequality, we are doing a disservice to

ourselves and our children. We already know that overt racists are most likely to teach their children to think and act as they do, but it’s the passive act of not teaching our children about

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racism in all its forms—structural, implicit, overt, interpersonal, complicit—that serves to sow more seeds of inequality. We have listed a series of children’s books at the end of this chapter that will help you to explore some of these tough issues with the young people in your life. It is difficult to talk about racism, but we do ourselves a disservice by keeping them in a bubble, pretending that they don’t notice what’s going on, and by preventing them from developing a language and ethos of antiracism.

— “All Lives Matter”

If you walked into a room full of people and asked, “What is the purpose of saying ‘Black lives matter?’” invariably somebody will say something along the lines of “Well, I think it’s important to say ‘All lives matter.’” Okay. First of all, that is not an answer to the question, but the response does illuminate the notion that contemporary racism is rooted in the epistemology of ignorance and apathy. Contrary to what some people believe, “Black lives matter” is a universal claim to value the lives of all people. The philosopher Clevis Headley explains this well:

Most people prematurely denounced the Black Lives Matter Movement because they uncritically interpreted this movement as a particularism that is opposed to the universalist view that all lives matter. . . . We live in a society that gives lip service to this universalist recognition but behaves as though Black lives are irrelevant and are, therefore, excluded from the universalist position. Thus, the only way to include Black lives into the universal position is to explicitly assert that Black lives matter. . . . Accordingly, it expresses this recognition by calling attention to the fact that the universal declaration of the value of all lives is atrociously empty if the lives of Black people are not equally valued.19

The person who deflects the original question shifts attention from considering the state of Black life to, instead, focusing on a colorblind claim that decontextualizes the problems that Black people face in the United States. White people have been gaslighting Black folks since the end of the first Reconstruction, and “All lives matter” is one of the ways that self- proclaimed colorblind Americans take part in this game. To say that it is terrible that several unarmed Black people have been killed by the police

and then add that if Black people just behaved differently, they would be better off is to willfully dismiss the entire history of policing in Black communities.20 To call Black people crazy for thinking that the government has a cure for AIDS or cancer or whatever but is holding back is to aggressively reject the entire history of unnecessary medical experimentation on and state-supported eugenics policies toward Black individuals and communities.21 To claim that Black people just prefer to live in neighborhoods that have fewer amenities, low-performing schools, and slumlords because people, just like wolves and birds, naturally flock together with “their own kind” is to refuse the entire history of state-

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sponsored housing and zoning policies that segregated and still segregate US cities and towns. Actively refusing to engage with the many layers of history that are relevant to the discussion at hand is to uphold white supremacy, regardless of your intentions. Shifting the conversation to “All lives matter” is an apathetic response to the state violence that Black people face and the persistent racial inequity that people of color endure on a daily basis.

In this 1967 cartoon, a white military officer claims that Black opposition to the Vietnam War is costing African Americans support from white people in their quest for civil rights. The officer’s rationale, critiqued here by the artist, is a good example of what we consider racial gaslighting. (Cartoon by Jules Feiffer)

— “If Only He Weren’t Wearing a Hoodie”

Why was Trayvon Martin murdered? Everyone had something to say to try to explain why a Black teenager, walking in his neighborhood with candy and iced tea, would be stalked, shot, and killed with impunity by a neighbor under the guise of the neighborhood watch. Geraldo Rivera said, “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”22 He was relying on the politics of respectability. In response to the outrage that many people felt in the wake of Zimmerman’s acquittal, many people on the right wanted to know why there wasn’t more dialogue about “Black-on-Black” crime. They were relying on the politics of respectability. The conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly elaborated, “The reason there is so much violence and chaos in the black precincts is the disintegration of the African-American family. . . . Raised without much structure, young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that, again, it is a personal decision.”23 He was relying on the politics of respectability. By saying that “Bill O’Reilly doesn’t go far enough” and then providing “five things that you [Black people] should think about doing”—don’t sag, do not use the N-word, don’t litter in your neighborhood, finish school in order to break the cycle of poverty, and do not have unplanned, out-of-wedlock pregnancies—the Black CNN anchor

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Don Lemon was practicing the harmful politics of respectability.24

The basic assumption underlying the politics of respectability is that if Black folks could show that they were just as clean, thrifty, polite, sober, morally upright, and sexually prudish as white people, whites’ negative stereotypes about Blacks would dissolve and so would racism in the United States.25 It’s perfectly unclear how not wearing hoodies or doing any of the five things that Don Lemon suggests will dismantle voter disenfranchisement, raise the minimum wage, integrate schools, bring jobs to predominantly Black neighborhoods, close the wealth gap, end the War on Drugs and mandatory-minimum sentencing policies, expand Pell Grants, reduce the price of SAT prep courses, build sidewalks and parks in low-income neighborhoods, or create policies that will lead to fewer police and citizen vigilantes murdering unarmed (or legally armed) Black people. Totally unclear. The politics of respectability implicitly requires Black folks to prove themselves worthy

to earn the rights that are already promised to them as citizens. It requires Black people to convince everyone else that racism is wrong. The most damning implication of respectability politics is that it implies that not all lives matter, or it at least suggests that some lives matter more than others. Those who do not follow traditional, white, middle-class, heterosexual patriarchal norms are (perhaps unintentionally) deemed as deviants and, thus, as not “grieveable.”26 But people have a breaking point. When Black people see that no matter what they do, they can be the next Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Tenisha Anderson, Philando Castile, Rekia Boyd, Oscar Grant, Charleena Lyles, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, or Tamir Rice, it’s an insult to suggest that they pull up their pants in order to avoid a similar fate. This ever-growing list of slain Black people “[drives] holes in the logic that Black people simply doing the ‘right things,’ whatever those things might be, could overcome the perennial crises with Black America.”27

Again, we are in a one-against-three situation where antiracists are pitted against, perhaps, a relatively small group of vehemently overt racists as well as the great majority of Americans, which includes whites, Blacks, Latinxs, and Asian Americans who are well meaning, complicit racists propping up our racialized social system, and structural racists who are adding fuel to the fire (to mix metaphors). Overt racists couldn’t care less if Black people contort themselves to a white standard. Meanwhile, proponents of respectability politics believe that it is important to keep in mind what other people think of Black people as a survival strategy. To be sure, some folks do mean well when they make suggestions about Black people’s sartorial decisions, but the logic of respectability politics upholds white supremacy. One of the liberating ideas that Black Lives Matter advances is that the time for respectability politics is over. Black lives matter, and Black death is grieveable no matter how people are dressed, where they live, their gender identity, their sexuality, their involvement with the justice system, or their immigration status. Rather than a focus on respectability, we may all be better off to take inspiration for Anna Julia Cooper, who demanded undisputed dignity.28

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Flipping the Script Racism is not just the mean things people do, and antiracism is not just the nice things we say. Common narratives of what it means to be a “real” racist include white cloaks and swastikas, but this is only one part of a larger truth. These oversimplifications are effective, however, because they fit into our collective imagination of what evil looks like. Yes, racial inequality is advocated for by members of white supremacist organizations, but it is buttressed by regular people trying not to rock the boat. We can do something different. Actively resisting and loudly agitating against racism can

be awkward. At first, you might use the wrong words, be unaware of the entire history underlying the problems, or slip into old habits of respectability politics. And people might get annoyed with you as you try to convince the most well-meaning complicit racists to get a grip, face reality, and do something. Some people will laugh at you or look at you with dismay; they may even disown you, verbally or even physically abuse you, troll your Twitter account, call you racist and/or sexist epithets, suggest that you are overreacting or being too sensitive, or deem you a race traitor because you’re upsetting the status quo,29 but know this —you’ll be on the right side of history. Staying woke means being aware of the fact that although racism can be reproduced in our day-to-day lives—in our personal interactions, the way we do our jobs, the way we raise our children—we can all take small (or big) corrective steps to undermine the erroneous respectability politics and colorblind narratives that underwrite racial oppression.

— Questions and Debate

1 Now that you’ve read chapter 4, have you changed your answers to the questions posed in the outset: Are you upholding white supremacy? Do you intentionally or unintentionally contribute to or enable ongoing racial disparities?

2 Where do you hear these scripts used most, by whom, and for what reasons? 3 Are there other scripts that normalize, explain away, or rationalize racial inequality that you hear commonly?

4 Tamir Rice was a twelve-year-old Black boy playing with a toy gun at the park. A neighbor called the police to report that a boy was playing with a toy gun at the park. Tamir Rice was shot dead within seconds of the police officers’ arrival. How do you explain this to a Black child? Does your explanation change if you are talking to a white child? If so, why?

5 The scripts that we outlined are common and predictable, but confronting them when they occur is sometimes intimidating. You have to learn and practice new counternarratives. Consider the six scripts we posed and develop an antiracist response for each of them.

— Additional Materials to Consider

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BOOKS

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 5th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018.

Eddo-Lodge, Reni. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

Hill, Jane H. The Everyday Language of White Racism. New York: Wiley, 2009. Rosa, Jonathan. Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Tatum, Beverly Daniel. “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations about Race. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Buitrago, Jairo, and Rafael Yockteng. Two White Rabbits. Berkeley, CA: Groundwood Books, 2015.

DiPucchio, Kelly, and LeUyen Pham. Grace for President. New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2012.

Gonzalez, Maya. When a Bully Is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times. San Francisco: Reflection, 2017.

Hoffman, Mary. Amazing Grace. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1991. Kates, Bobbi. We’re Different, We’re the Same. New York: Random House Children’s Books, 1992.

Tyler, Michael. The Skin You Live In. Chicago: Chicago Children’s Museum, 2005. Tonatiuh, Duncan. Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation. New York: Abrams, 2014.

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