Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

You need a counter voice in your head when you notice your internal monologue ushering you toward making a biased decision or judgment against black people.

Instead of being color blind, be introspective. Try to identify your prejudices and hold them up to scrutiny.

Pay special attention to your biases when you’re stressed, as that’s when they are more likely to pop up without you noticing.

Avoid lumping people into groups in general. Meet your peers as individuals.

Meanwhile, we’ve acted as if it’s been a fair race, when in all honesty, black people were held back for hundreds of years.

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,

if you see a black man and he is angry, obviously don’t assume he’s angry because he’s black, but also don’t assume he’s even angry at anything racism-related in that moment. Let people have emotions. See him as an individual.

As always, try to reflect critically on how you use language and the extent to which your language reflects your innermost thoughts and feelings.

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

At about 13 percent of the U.S. population, black people make up more than one-third of those in federal and state prisons.

It wasn’t that black people had all of a sudden become criminals; it was that the laws began to criminalize black people.

If you want to oppress someone, you’re gonna need power over them as a group—and no group holds it over white people.

For similar reasons, it’s at best insensitive to say “All lives matter” when someone says that black lives matter. White lives have never been in danger from black lives to the degree that black lives have been endangered by white people and whiteness, and that’s on an individual level and a systemic level.

Poverty, not race, is a more accurate predictor of who commits crimes.

When race conflicts have been instigated by white people, law enforcement has often responded on a spectrum from doing little to almost nothing, to deputizing other white people to participate, to being participants themselves. When instigated by black people, they have strong-armed protestors, arrested them, killed them.

Another fun fact about the evolution of names: historically, the more black people use them, the less white people use them.