Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

Especially for those of you who believe yourself to be a good person, who don’t consider yourself a racist, who want to treat people fairly. But that’s all the more reason to discuss your biases, to learn about them, critique them, to try to trace where they come from. 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.

about white privilege, and he shared a conversation he’d had with another white man. “‘It’s just not real,’” Carl quoted the man as saying. “Okay,” Carl said. “Let’s just say it’s not real. Let’s just say I’m wrong about white privilege—but I believe in it. It means I will have lived my whole life looking out for other people. Making sure everybody else gets the first shot and I get the second. Make sure people who are not in the mix get in it.” If he found out he was wrong after all that, he’d still have a life of good deeds to show for it. On the other hand, Carl told the man, “If you find out that you were wrong at the end of your life, that white privilege was real and you didn’t acknowledge it, it means that you were stepping on the necks of others your whole life. Even if I’m wrong, my wrong is better than your wrong. What do you have to lose?”

“What do you have to lose by believing in it?“

The conflict between those brave black people and the white Tulsans who wanted Rowland’s life erupted into what’s now known as the Tulsa Race Riot or Tulsa Massacre. Those angry white people burned an area of Tulsa known as Black Wall Street, which was the economic beacon you probably guessed it was, killing an estimated 300 people, destroying more than 1,200 homes, and burning down almost all other structures. (Meanwhile, Dick Rowland would be found not guilty: he had tripped and accidentally grabbed the elevator operator.)

It 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. Back then, white people had American thugism on straight lock. (Remember, black people were still enslaved or, in other words, they didn’t possess the freedom to even be thugs.)

Calling someone a thug is putting them on a continuum that ends with a superpredator. It’s a way of saying: this is what you are, not just what you do—or more often, what other people who look like you have done. A thug is the fictional archetype of Dilulio’s nightmares, a stand-in for a black man that is hopelessly lost to violence or drugs; a vector of crime that needs to be feared and stopped; a caricature instead of a human being.

To call it a broken black family makes it seems like the brokenness is somehow normal, just how black families are—when we know by now that the disjoint owes a lot to systemic forces. What if we called them broken-apart families instead? That would put more emphasis on the fact that black families didn’t become fractured all on their own.

Black people being murdered by law enforcement, specifically, is what led to the formation of Black Lives Matter in 2013, a crusade to end police brutality and achieve social equality for black people. In many ways, it follows in the footsteps of other movements in this country aimed at obtaining true freedom for black people—the abolitionist movement and the civil rights movement being two of them. In all of those campaigns, black people have needed white allies,

in 1619 in Virginia, there was no such thing as a white person. 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. Before that, people were known by their nation of origin, what we might now refer to as nationality or ethnicity. Anti-miscegenation laws, the laws prohibiting Europeans from marrying (and having children with) people of African descent, forged the white race. Let’s think about what this means: race was a political creation, an economic creation

Secure economic power via sugarcane harvesting abd enslavement of people, ensure power of class via law implementation. But then if invented could also be unlearned

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

white allies are needed totake on the issue of oppression and racism as their own, even when it means giving up some of their privileges.