Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

So, there’s a two-hundred-year gap of higher education between white and black people.

school-to-prison pipeline.

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

except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,

mass incarceration or the prison industrial complex.

Black Codes,

Those vague laws coerced more black people into prison than ever before. It wasn’t that black people had all of a sudden become criminals; it was that the laws began to criminalize black people.

“convict-leasing”

Let’s Get Uncomfortable

Talk It, Walk It

Urban Institute online (urban.org)

Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. —TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM

All I was thinking was, Let’s fight and get it over with.

reverse racism, a.k.a. the idea of black people (or anyone nonwhite) being racist against white people.

First,

Second,

a limited number.

white talk:

strategies white people use—consciously or not—to insulate themselves from their collective participation in racism.

white fra...

y’all get defensive.

Let’s Rewind

(which I don’t advocate)

One of the most common examples of white talk is calling Affirmative Action reverse racism.

In a nutshell, Affirmative Action is an effort to redress the systemic inequalities caused by centuries of discrimination.

The thing is, one can never just judge racism on an individual level alone. It’s also historic and systemic—remember, white people will always have that several-century head start.

What white people experience as unfairness as a result of Affirmative Action does not have as its aim being unfair to white people. And therein lies the main difference.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson, who in 1915 founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH).

Because white people have had a lock on significance since before this country was even a country.

All to say: No, it’s not reverse racism to celebrate Black History Month.

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.

Jason Reynolds

Let’s Get Uncomfortable

Remember it’s a definitional thing, and “white” and “black” just aren’t equal in this country, for all the systemic reasons we’ve said.

But if you are going to be proud of the history of white people, you have to acknowledge the whole history of white people.

Talk It, Walk It

Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White,

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields,

author Carol Anderson’s White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.

“What’s the best way to make the most impactful contributions to dismantling the institutions and policies meant to keep POC at a disadvantage?” —Mike

I’m not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I’m one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism. And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy; all we’ve seen is hypocrisy. —MALCOLM X, “THE BALLOT OR THE BULLET” (1964)

representative democracy.

Fix.

Let’s Rewind

I’ll focus on the long history of voter suppression of black people, and the pernicious practice of rigging juries against black folks (and other POC).

electoral college.

The result of that debate was what became known as the Three-Fifths Compromise.

In layman’s terms, the compromise counted each enslaved person as three-fifths of a human being for the purposes of taxes and representation.

And that political leverage paved the way for nine of the first twelve presidents being slave-owning Southerners.

A century on, as you know, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, which gutted the Three-Fifths Compromise.