“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” — James Baldwin
June 10, 2021
By Rob Ellis
“How can I help?”, “What is white privilege?”, and “Would you tell me about the Black experience?” are questions I’ve received a lot over this past year. Most likely because systemic racism, police brutality, and Black Lives Matter were trending topics on social media. As a Black doctoral student and storyteller, I am naturally inclined to share what I know, but questions like these often left me feeling confused, exhausted, and frustrated. I imagine that many other Black people felt the same way and I hope that the white people who were asking Black people these questions were doing so without the intention of harming us. Despite ambiguity of intention, such questions have a way of being negatively impactful. Therefore, due to a sense of duty, I will provide three realizations why these questions and others like them are harmful for people who look like me.
Realization One: You ask questions that can be easily researched because you are looking for justification, not an answer. In my adolescence, I asked my grandmother, “Why do we know everything there is to know about them [white people], but they know nothing about us? I know that they raped, murdered, and eradicated Native people. I know their presidents, laws, and history. I know their rituals, their Gods, and beliefs about themselves and about us. Yet, they know nothing of me — of us. Do they not know that they enslaved us? Treated us like second-class citizens, even worse, like beasts? Do they not know we fought back against their oppression, injustice, and inhumanity?”. Staring off into a distant familiarity, my grandmother said, “Whiteness is invisible but omnipresent — a part of every fabric in our society. Your Blackness, however, was hidden by people who wanted to forget.”
Nearly fifteen years later, my grandmother’s words still ring true, as I am inundated with questions about race. Questions that can be easily answered given the plentiful and accessible information written in books and articles by Black people more knowledgeable than me; told in stories by Black people wiser than me; and exemplified through protest and struggle by Black people braver than me. Yet, you ask me because there is nothing more convenient than free labor. I know that you do not ask me these things because you truly care, but because being presented as the villain in a story has a way of making one feel guilty, implicated, and responsible. Unfortunately, guilt is not sturdy enough to withstand the work necessary for unlearning that Black people are property or tools and learning to see Black people as you see yourself — human. Moreover, guilt is not enough to reach beyond your own complicity to examine your own personal history — moments where you have disengaged or engaged in situations to maintain comfort.
Realization Two: You are not only forcing Black people to relive trauma but are making them pay a cultural tax for being Black. “Minority tax” or “cultural taxation” is a term coined by Amado Padilla in 1994 to describe the unique obligation minoritized people have to institutions, by which they are expected to serve its needs for ethnic representation in committees, panels, and organizations, or to speak on behalf of one’s cultural group for the benefit of white faculty and colleagues. This cultural taxation benefits institutions, faculty, and colleagues, but is often traumatizing and unrewarding for the one providing the service.
By the time I realized that I was paying the cultural tax, a large debt had already been incurred. Having worked in academia, corporate America, and politics, I had served on many diversity and inclusion committees and shared intimate pieces of my experience as a Black man in America. These spaces, shaped by white supremacy and both intellectual and socioeconomic elitism, have a tendency of distorting one’s view of the value of lived experience. On one hand, I have watched lived experiences fill arenas, theatres, and concert halls — Black artists exchanging relived cultural and personal trauma for wealth. Yet in spaces like academia, corporate America, and politics, lived experience is often exploited and rarely ever rewarded. I have had instances where my grades suffered because I refused to share my personal experiences of racism with a class full of white people who found the Black people’s suffering as a concept to be debated, and I would have succumbed to the pressure to perform had it not been the resolve I found in the words of James Baldwin who said, “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression, and denial of my humanity, and right to exist.”
Reason Three: The end of racism is as complicated, laborious, and fraught as the origin of racism. My aunt, a Trans-Atlantic slave historian, and I have a shared disdain for how white and Black history and current racial injustice is taught in this country. The way Americans talk about our past minimizes the struggle and difficulty of how we got to where we are today. For instance, prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, Black people were portrayed in America as docile and ignorant. The exact opposite was true. There were over 500 revolts on ships crossing the Middle Passage despite slaves being shackled and weakened by starvation. Once in the Americas, slave owners were greatly outnumbered. For instance, in Jamaica in the 1730s there were more than sixteen slaves for every white slave owner. Wars for liberation and democracy, both abroad in the French Revolution and at home in the Civil War, made it increasingly difficult to maintain White slave owner power and authority. Moreover, racial segregation necessitated a dual society where there had to be two of every public service and facility — wasting many resources and nearly bankrupting many Southern states. The effects are still felt today as many of the Southern states have the lowest education rates, most poverty, and highest rates of mortality and morbidity. I provide this synopsis of American history to show the great effort, complex schemes, paranoia, and brutality it took to create the world where white supremacy, systemic racism and police brutality thrives. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the solution to racism in this country should require an equal or increased amount of effort, complexity, and drastic change.
To the white people who have asked me how they can help, the answer is complex and difficult. Asking Black people this question is traumatizing because the disease of racism and whiteness does not belong to us, but to you. Essentially, you are asking the victims that your parents, grandparents, great-parents and in some cases, yourself have harmed, how can they help you to stop oppressing them. Because we are the ones who must carry the burden and want to relieve ourselves of this burden, we wrack our brains attempting to construct an answer that is concise, palatable, and non-demanding. Having toiled and labored for centuries in the name of faith, we know the odds are stacked against us because in the end we are depending on you to cure yourselves of your disease. We are counting on you to see us as humans which demands that you relinquish a fantasy that has kept you safe, powerful, and comfortable since before this country’s inception.
If you have made it to the end of this, I can assume two things: either you are angry and have reclined back into the comforts of whiteness, or you want to be better. While I cannot give you a simple and concise answer to ending racism and relinquishing whiteness, I can suggest that you take in the complexity, difficulty, radicality, and discomfort of the work necessary to undo centuries of pain and suffering. It requires you to carry your own emotional and intellectual burdens. This work entails more than simply pretending to be therapists to the Black people you are comfortable with. This work necessitates real and tangible action to combat the undeniable oppression and inequality Black people have faced for centuries. This work looks like seeking out and engaging with the work of Black scholars, such as James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk, who have dedicated their lives to elucidating these issues and theorizing solutions. This work looks like educating yourself on significant events and legislation that established and maintained white supremacy, such as the redlining, The Social Security Act of 1935, Dred Scott Case, sharecropping, Rodney King, Black Panther Party, and busing in Northern states in the 70s-80s. This work looks like donating money and resources to Black organizations, supporting Black businesses, influencing the deconstruction of racist policies and laws, community service, protest, and teaching other white people you learned.