Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

At the same time, you’re responsible for your biases, if for no other reason than that there are ways to make them more conscious. And when an idea is conscious, you can change your mind.

you don’t even have to know you’re racist for the damage to be done.

To all of my readers who are wavering on whether white privilege is real, I pose the same question Lentz posed to the skeptical white man. What do you have to lose by believing in it?

It’s problematic for a number of reasons. For one, it trivializes historic oppression. It also lets people show love for a culture while still remaining prejudiced toward the people of the culture and lets privileged people profit from the labor of oppressed people. On top of that, it can perpetuate racist stereotypes.

Finally, make a point to engage with cultures on more than an aesthetic level. If the first goal here is to stop being ignorant, the second goal is just to learn more about one another.

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

you want to oppress someone, you’re gonna need power over them as a group—and no group holds it over white people. There literally aren’t enough black people with institutional authority over white people to facilitate systemic racism against them.

systemic—remember, white people will always have that several-century head start.

there’s a definite difference between a kind of unfairness that befalls you as the unintended effect of a policy that’s rationally, empathetically trying to right years of wrongdoing and the kind of unfairness that is pursued as an end itself.

But if you are going to be proud of the history of white people, you have to acknowledge the whole history of white people. And if we put all those great things in context, we must admit that they occurred in an America that rigged and denied opportunities to others, so that white people could thrive.

For the purpose of “healing the union” after the Civil War, they basically let the South have their way and thereby squandered all the promise of Reconstruction.

Before I go any further, a few words on the worst of all arguments: that this is just how black families are. As if black people are genetically disposed to this brokenness. If broken families were in the nature of black people, how do we explain all those efforts in the wake of war? How to explain why black people didn’t have broken families when they were back in Africa?

Lots of scholars argue that you can draw a straight line between the too-many black single-parent households today and the severe economic hardship after emancipation.

It’s tougher to keep a family together when you’re fighting for your mental health, if not your life. Oh, and it’s a recap at this point, but let’s not forget the unequal education system, the stereotypes that vilify young black men, the justice system that forms a prison pipeline, discrimination in hiring, and for good measure, those racist housing practices. All those things work together to destabilize black people, making it harder and harder to keep families intact.

So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING

Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year; it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

there’s a real danger in centering our narratives of racial struggle on well-intentioned white people,

MORRISON: It’s just a human race. Scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct—a social construct. And it has benefits: money can be made off it. People who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So, it has a social function. Racism.