Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

Colored reigned supreme into the early twentieth century and can still be found in the name of what might be the most important black organization of all time: the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909).

W. E. B. Du Bois spurred a shift from colored to Negro as the dominant term. Du Bois pitched Negro as philosophically stronger and also as more versatile since it could be used as a noun or an adjective.

prefer it to minority, for the record, because people of color make up the global majority!

I like to use the acronym DENIAL: Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying. The first way to end racism is for my white counterparts to get out of denial, to understand that, wait a second, maybe you’ve been lying to yourself about the existence of racism this whole time.

Instead of being color blind, be introspective. Try to identify your prejudices and hold them up to scrutiny. If you don’t know what they are, you can start by taking an implicit bias test. (Here’s one: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html.)

LBJ said it best: “You can’t shackle and chain someone for hundreds of years, liberate them to compete freely with the rest and still justly believe that you’ve been fair.”

And white privilege is about the word white, not rich. It’s having advantage built into your life. It’s not saying your life hasn’t been hard; it’s saying your skin color hasn’t contributed to the difficulty in your life.

What I’m saying is that a white person’s skin color isn’t the thing contributing to holding them back, and that for all black people, their skin color contributes to what’s hard about their lives no matter what other privileges they might enjoy. White privilege is a hard

Now, imagine you were a black man and the woman you’d claimed as your wife (legal marriages between slaves weren’t allowed) was raped by your white master or overseer. Not only was she raped but she was impregnated and gave birth to the master’s child, and there was nothing you could do about it. Try to imagine the kind of hurt and anger you’d feel if this happened to you once, twice; if it happened to your children; if you suspected it had and would go on for generations.

Imagine the worst insult you’ve ever received. Now imagine that when you heard those words, what you also heard was that you’re second-class forever. That you don’t deserve any of this American dream. Imagine what you heard was: You’re an animal. Imagine you heard, You’re stupid. You’re a slave. My people owned your people, and you were better off when they did. Imagine that you heard, You won’t amount to anything, boy. And the nothing you get is exactly what you deserve. If you can picture one word communicating all of that, then you’ll have some sense of what hearing the N-word does to me and any other black person in America. I invite you to take a moment and

excuses a white person using the word nigger. There’s too much pain in that word coming from a white mouth. However, I will also say that if you’re ever inclined to use it, you can and should investigate where that inclination or compulsion comes from. That’s the difficult conversation—not if you should or shouldn’t say it but why you could want to say it at all. If the word nigger is in your heart or on your tongue, please, please try to figure out why.

anything in America that fits the definition of a national conspiracy, it’s systemic racism. Racism is a form of oppression, a.k.a. those with more power putting their thumbs on those with less power. And oppression is as old as civilization. Search as far back as you like: as soon as groups of people start creating rules for themselves, as soon as they start divvying up power, customs, a government—somebody is going to get oppressed.

systemic racism is the legitimizing of every dynamic—historic, cultural, political, economic, institutional, and person-to-person—that gives advantages to white people, while at the same time producing a whole host of terrible effects for black people and other people of color.

systemic racism is making the unequal treatment of people of color the national norm.

According to a 2016 Pew Research Center study, only 43 percent of black households are homeowners, contrasted with nearly 72 percent of white households.

Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in America. The oldest historically black college and university (HBCU) is Cheyney University, founded in 1837. So, there’s a two-hundred-year gap of higher education between white and black people.

a student failing to read at their grade level by the end of the third grade is four times less likely to graduate. According to a 2009 study by Northeastern University, high school dropouts are sixty-three times more likely to be incarcerated than college grads. You needn’t be a statistician to see a correlation between schools and prisons, one that’s now known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

13 percent of the U.S. population, black people make up more than one-third of those in federal and state prisons. That overrepresentation is not an accident but the product of systemic racism.

Those vague laws coerced more black people into prison than ever before. It wasn’t that black people had all of a sudden become criminals; it was that the laws began to criminalize black people. States were then able to put prisoners to work through “convict-leasing” deals that sent the imprisoned back to slave owners. While the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery on the surface, its loophole paved the way for returning many black people to slavery.

the compromise counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a human being for the purposes of taxes and representation. That agreement gave the Southern states more electoral votes than if they hadn’t been counted at all, but fewer than if black people had been counted as a full person. And that political leverage paved the way for nine of the first twelve presidents being slave-owning Southerners.

Not only was all their labor stolen from them, their bodies were symbolically used to grant their enslavers more power. If we’re talking an electoral fix, the Three-Fifths Compromise is the ultimate. A century on, as you know,

Poverty, not race, is a more accurate predictor of who commits crimes. To the extent that black-on-black crime exists, it’s the product of, among other systemic factors I’ve discussed, segregated housing, concentrated poverty, and unequal schooling.

One in three black men born in 2001 can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime, compared to 1 in 6 Latino men and 1 in 17 white men.

One in 18 black women born in 2001 will be incarcerated sometime in her life, compared to 1 in 45 Latina women and 1 in 111 white women.

actually comes from the Hindi word thuggee, which means “deceiver” or “thief” or “swindler.” Thugs stole and murdered in India for more than five hundred years. The word didn’t catch on in America until Mark Twain wrote about them in the 1800s, in work that colored the word with the connotation of a gangster.

our criminal justice system too often treats black people like thugs instead of like people. So the cycle perpetuates,

As far as the law is concerned, white people as a race didn’t exist until 1681, when colonial American lawmakers sought to outlaw marriages between European people and others.

Let’s think about what this means: race was a political creation, an economic creation—all this hate developed to secure the interest of some seventeenth-century dudes who wanted to get rich growing sugarcane and cotton, who wanted to make sure they’d always be the class on top. Which is to say, racism has always been about power. Which is to say, we invented racism. Which is to say, maybe we can learn to uninvent it, too.

Ending racism is not a finish line that we will cross. It’s a road we’ll travel.