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“Whites are most likely to own their own homes (76%), followed by Asians (61%), Latinos (49%), and blacks (48%). Race matters when it comes to being a homeowner. Being white makes you significantly more likely to own a home than if you are Asian, black, or Latino…. Even though Asians are more likely to be homeowners than blacks and Latinos, given that Asian median income is higher than white median income, we might expect to see even higher homeownership
rates for Asians than whites—yet we do not…. Homeownership disparities by race and ethnicity are not solely attributable to differences in income.
Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.
For me, people of color means “not structurally white,” as in not a part of the structural power across institutions that want others dead or disenfranchised or deported or made invisible to white lives through voter suppression or passive or aggressive legislative defunding and criminalizing of certain segments of the population based both on race and ethnicity.
The Sentencing Project reported that “in 2001, black children were four times more likely to be incarcerated than white children.” But in 2015, black children were five times more likely than white children to be incarcerated.
all the narratives end up naming blacks with words that begin with the letter “N.” Nurse could be one. Nanny another. No one, could be yet another.
How long is now?
How is it these children don’t end up in comas like their European counterparts, refugees in countries like Sweden? Those children suffer from “uppgivenhetssyndrom” also known as “resignation syndrome.”5 They give up on life and the state and a nation that rejects them; they give up on a life that feels like “too much.”
But giving up might be what our lives will look like looking back. Not comas nor emaciated near-death Muselmänner but indifference and tolerance for the unspeakable under the category of helplessness.
Have so many become so vulnerable to white dominance that the pathways to imagined change are wiped out of our brains and our default consciousnesses are in their lowest levels of activity, meaning we can no longer envision
new type of future or even really see what’s happening in our present?
In the liminal space in the train station in Boston Back Bay a recording reminds me and my fellow travelers, “If you see something, say something.” But then, as if the automated response suddenly understands to whom it speaks, it...
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Once the victory occurred, white people claimed it as a break in their racism despite the fact that a white majority did not vote for a black candidate in either election. But, suddenly, falsely, it was the whites’ possession and progression.
E pluribus unum might have been the first national mistake. Is there a “one” that the rest of us should step out of the way of or map ourselves onto?
“And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”
In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn’t possibly have happened. Or, to use a phrase only slightly out of context, something that can’t happen here.”
For some of us, and I include myself here, remaining in the quotidian of disturbance is our way of staying honest until another strategy offers a new pathway, an as-yet-unimagined pathway that allows existing structures to stop replicating. Until then, to forfeit the ability to attempt again, to converse again, to speak with, to question, and to listen to, is to be complicit with the violence of an unchanging structure contending with the aliveness and constant movement of all of us.
Ruby Sales, who remains committed to engaging what she names “the culture of whiteness,” always have my undying respect. In 1965, when a white man, Jonathan Daniels, knocked her down thus taking a shotgun blast meant for her, fired by another white man, Tom Coleman, she says she stood between the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.
