Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

game plan

One way is to spend time with people in different social, racial, and ethnic groups.

Another way is to stop celebrating “color blindness.”

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.)

Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice. —CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, AMERICANAH

This is white privilege in a nutshell:

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.

Let’s Rewind

“an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks.”

Meanwhile, the road team has the secondhand pick of everything.

In 1955, Carolyn Bryant Donham claimed that a fourteen-year-old black boy, Emmett Till, grabbed her, menaced her, and made a sexually crude remark. Her white community believed her, and Till was captured, beaten beyond recognition, shot in the head, tied by barbed wire to a cotton gin, and thrown into Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River.

In a public interview just months later, they admitted that they did it, knowing they couldn’t be tried again because of double jeopardy.

TEN. TIMES. GREATER.

Let’s Get Uncomfortable

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.

Talk It, Walk It

What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture? —AMANDLA

The problem becomes when you borrow from a culture without citing the sources and/or knowing the history. As long as you do both of those things, you should be fine in most cases. (Key word—most.)

Let’s Rewind

Thomas “Daddy” Rice

You probably know where Jim Crow went from there. That’s right: even the name for the laws that kept the South segregated until the 1960s was a cruel hundred-year-old joke at the expense of black people.

this

Cultural appropriation happens when members of a dominant group—in the United States, white people—take elements from the culture of a people who are disempowered.

“king”

Let’s Get Uncomfortable

Think of how long their speech, their bodies, their skin color, their culture has been seen as lesser than.

The key is to celebrate it as black culture—not to take it as your own.

Talk It, Walk It

Yes, it might be uncomfortable, but there’s a strong chance it will also be enlightening.

extra

If the first goal here is to stop being ignorant, the second goal is just to learn more about one another. And that can be a lot of fun.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. —JAMES BALDWIN

“The Myth of the Dangerous Black Man,”

“apprehensive”

learned,

indoctrination.

Let’s Rewind

The current implication is someone who recognizes racism and discrimination everywhere he looks, even when he’s not a victim.

One could also call the Angry Black Man a woke black man

This is the black man as overly aggressive, menacing, and physically

threatening, especially to innocent white women.

The Birth of a Nation.

The murderous practice of lynchings, so white men claimed, often had at its heart the goal of protecting the chastity of white women.

the anger.

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.

If that were your reality, if that were the history of your forebears, how angry would you be? At what point would you get over that anger? How in the heck would you get over that anger?

“weaponizing of whiteness.”

When she dialed 911, she used three words that are almost a death sentence to black men: