Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Beloved, you must admit that denial of fact, indeed denial as fact, has shaped your version of American history. This is how you can ingeniously deny your role in past racism. You acknowledge that bigotry exists. For instance, you will often say that separate but equal public policy was bad. You just don’t find too many current examples of the persistence of racism, like the fact that, given they have the same years of education, a white man with a criminal record is often more likely to get a job than a black man with no record. Or that even when they commit the same crime, black folk are more likely to do more time than a comparable white person. Or that a black male born in 2001 has a 32 percent chance of going to jail—a one-in-three shot—whereas a Latino has a 17 percent chance, and a white male a 6 percent chance. Or that black women are far more likely than others to be evicted. Or that police stop black and brown folk far more than white folk. Or that black folk are frequently illegally excluded from jury service. Sure, there are no white and black water fountains, but inequality persists.

White denial thrives on shifts and pivots. “It was my ancestors, not me, who did this to you.” But what looks like confession is really denial. The “them, not me” defense denies how the problem persists in the present day. It is best to think of systems and not individuals when it comes to racial benefit in white America. Thinking of it in individual terms removes blame from many of you who are present beneficiaries of past behavior. The institutions of national life favor your success, whether that means you get better schools and more jobs, or less punishment and less jail. Not because you’re necessarily smarter, or better behaved, but because being white offers you benefits, understanding, and forgiveness where needed. A great deal of white advantage has nothing to do with how you actively resist black success, or the success of other people of color. It’s what you do for each other, how you take each other into account, that makes up a lot of what we have come to call “white privilege.”

The failure to see color only benefits white America. A world without color is a world without racial debt.

Beloved, I can’t help but notice that affirmative action is the bee in so many of your bonnets. You look around in your classrooms and you think every black person is there because they got an unfair shake from the system. You look at your job and you think that your black coworker got an unjust nod of approval from the powers that be. You never stop to think how the history of whiteness in America is one long scroll of affirmative action. You never stop to think that Babe Ruth never had to play the greatest players of his generation—just the greatest white players. You never stop to think that most of our presidents never rose to the top because they bested the competition—just the white competition. White privilege is a self-selecting tool that keeps you from having to compete with the best. The history of white folk gaining access to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale is the history of white folk deciding ahead of the game that you were superior. You argue that slots in school should be reserved for your kin, because, after all, they are smarter, more disciplined, better suited, and more deserving than inferior blacks.

Many of you are “shocked, shocked!” that black folk have taken to reminding you that “Black Lives Matter.” Some of you are just peeved, but others of you are enraged. That’s because you’re used to distorting and diluting our history without much frontal challenge. You fail to realize that the nation has already set the standard for determining which lives matter and which don’t. Black lives were excluded from the start. The reason “Black Lives Matter” needs to be shouted is because American history ignored black history, didn’t tell black stories. The founding documents of American society didn’t include black life. When black folk say “Black Lives Matter,” they are in search of simple recognition. That they are decent human beings, that they aren’t likely to commit crimes, that they’re reasonably smart. That they’re no more evil than the next person, that they’re willing to work hard to get ahead, that they love their kids and want them to do better than they did. That they are loving and kind and compassionate. And that they should be treated with the same respect that the average, nondescript, unexceptional white male routinely receives without fanfare or the expectation of gratitude in return.

You shield yourselves from what you don’t want to understand. You reveal your brute strength in one contemptible display of power after the next, and yet you claim that we reap benefit by playing the victim. To be blunt, you are emotionally immature about race. Some of you are rightly appalled at the flash of white racial demagoguery. Yet you have little curiosity about the complicated forces of race. You have no idea that your whiteness and your American identity have become fatally intertwined; they are virtually indistinguishable. Any criticism of the nation is heard as an attack on your identity.

my friends, your innocent whiteness is too costly to maintain. We are forced to be gentle with you, which is another way of saying we are forced to lie to you. We must let you down easy, you, the powerful partner in our fraught relationship. Your feelings get hurt when we tell you that you’re white, and that your whiteness makes a difference in how you’re treated. You get upset when we tell you that whiteness has often been damaging and toxic. You get angry when we tell you how badly whiteness has behaved throughout history. But we must risk your wrath to speak back to a defiantly innocent whiteness.

White fragility is a will to innocence that serves to bury the violence it sits on top of. The fragility of ego versus the forced labor of slavery, the lynchings of Jim Crow, the beatings and the police violence sparked by the endeavors of desegregation.

Beloved, to be white is to know that you have at your own hand, or by extension, through institutionalized means, the power to take black life with impunity. It’s the power of life and death that gives whiteness its force, its imperative. White life is worth more than black life. This is why the cry “Black Lives Matter” angers you so greatly, why it is utterly offensive and effortlessly revolutionary. It takes aim at white innocence and insists on uncovering the lie of its neutrality, its naturalness, its normalcy, its normativity.