Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

I have to save black people, because without me, they won’t be able to save themselves.

To Kill a Mockingbird.

“The White-Savior Industrial Complex.”

True allyship is a commitment to fight this fight for the long haul: long after it ceases to be a top-of-the-fold news item, long after the cameras have stopped capturing it. Not today, but tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade.

Let’s Get Uncomfortable

Know that when you say you are an ally, you are saying that you are willing to risk your white privilege in the name of justice and equality for marginalized voices.

The lesson there is that being an ally means showing up. Talk It, Walk It

Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century by Dorothy Roberts;

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

The Bluest Eye by Ton...

Native Son by Richar...

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay “The Case for Reparations,”

France E. Kendall’s “How to Be an Ally If You Are a Person with Privilege.”

Rachel Miller’s Vice article “How to Talk to Relatives Who Care More About Lo...

Corinne Shutack’s Medium article “100 Things White People Can Do ...

NPR’s Code Switch, a podcast the covers the subject of ...

(nextdoor.com),

Interview with author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, The Colbert Report, 2014:

Because, ultimately, it’s not about the huddle; it’s about what you do after you break.

And that work has never been done.

Let’s Rewind

The first is individual—

The second level is systemic racism:

The third level of racism is a little different; it doesn’t map onto part 3, rather it runs through and under a lot of the pain in this book.

That’s internalized racism:

When it comes to systemic racism, remember that in America, it goes back four centuries to when the first Africans arrived on these shores and links up through the advantages still enjoyed by white people in almost every area of society—education, housing, and employment, to name a few.

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.

When the first Africans arrived 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.

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—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.

white people being fragile about racial issues.

On the contrary, I want to move us toward healing. But we can’t get to that part without the hard truths being a part of it.

Plus, color and ethnicity are part of what makes people human, and to deny any of us our particularity is to deny our humanity. And, as Toni Morrison said, race is, if nothing else, human.

Let’s Get Uncomfortable

Talk It, Walk It

A world without racism is being in one country, on one continent, in one world celebrating life together, wherever we’ve come from to get there.

It’s a road we’ll travel.