Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

Tom Smith’s essay “Changing Racial Labels: From ‘Colored’ to ‘Negro’ to ‘Black’ to ‘African American.’” And check out Kee Malesky’s “The Journey from ‘Colored’ to ‘Minorities’ to ‘People of Color,’” published on npr.org.

The question of whether to use black or African American is ultimately a preference, one that helps a person present their identity to the world. Each person you meet might not have a preference, but maybe they do. Trust me, language matters.

In hospitals, bias can literally determine whether a person lives or dies. According to Eliminating Racial Disparities in Maternal and Infant Mortality, a 2019 report published by the Center for American Progress, black women across the income spectrum and from all walks of life are dying from preventable pregnancy-related complications at three to four times—I REPEAT: THREE TO FOUR TIMES!—the rate of non-Hispanic white women. The death rate for black infants is twice that of infants born to non-Hispanic white mothers. If we assume the doctors and nurses of this nation mean well, what’s going on? Black women have long been thought capable of bearing more physical pain, have received less careful, attentive, thorough health care, and have failed to be treated with dignity by health care professionals. Those factors create a chain of biological processes known as weathering that undermines black women’s physical and mental health. It is literally killing their babies. And a major reason for why it’s happening is implicit bias.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, has biases. It’s the job of empathetic and considerate people not to let them dictate actions that harm others.

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.)

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.

WHILE THE TERM existed before she did, scholar Peggy McIntosh is credited with igniting a broad conversation around white privilege in her groundbreaking 1988 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”

Another part of white privilege is the omnipresent benefit of the doubt.

If you’re accused of a crime, it’s the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, the presumption of innocence sometimes even when proven guilty.

Yes, there are poor white people, and yes, there are rich black people. But let’s scope out—white privilege is economic, too. The average net worth of a typical white family in 2016 was $171,000, a figure nearly ten times greater than that of a black family, at $17,150.

And check this: the wealth gap persists regardless of a household’s education, marital status, age, or income.

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.

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

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.

For one, it trivializes historic oppression. It also lets people show love for a culture while still remaining prejudiced toward the people of the culture and lets privileged people profit from the labor of oppressed people. On top of that, it can perpetuate racist stereotypes.

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 softening of the hard ER is key, as is the fact that it’s reserved for intimate, black-to-black exchanges. It’s a way for black people to commune, to create a space that’s only for us. It is not, like any of the other forms of the word, a word that is available to white people.

Maya Angelou once said, “The N-word was created to divest people of their humanity. When I see a bottle [and] it says ‘P-O-I-S-O-N’ then I know [what it is]. The bottle is nothing, but the content is poison. If I pour that content into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.” This was Angelou’s response to those black people, like Ice Cube, who had reappropriated and assimilated the word. She appears to have thought that there was no softening or sanitizing or transmuting it, even for her own people.

systemic racism is the legitimizing of every dynamic—historic, cultural, political, economic, institutional, and person-to-person—that gives advantages to white people, while at the same time producing a whole host of terrible effects for black people and other people of color. Those effects show up as inequalities in power, opportunities, laws, and every other metric of how individuals and groups are treated. Which is to say: systemic racism is making the unequal treatment of people of color the national norm.

biased homeowners’ associations to hair-trigger evictions. And while redlining was outlawed in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act, it’s still in practice in plenty of ways today, shaping what neighborhoods look like all over America. According to a 2016 Pew Research Center study, only 43 percent of black households are homeowners, contrasted with nearly 72 percent of white households. Add to that stat the fact that homeownership is the most common way to build generational wealth, and you can begin to see how white families pass down advantages to their children, while black families aren’t able to set up their kids for the future. And the cycle continues.

the American educational system is de facto almost as segregated as it was during Jim Crow, because of those redlined neighborhoods, the defeat of busing programs, and lobbyists for local school districting—often simply (white) parents who want to make sure their good schools stay good. It all adds up to a system described by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones as “separate and unequal.”

At about 13 percent of the U.S. population, black people make up more than one-third of those in federal and state prisons. That overrepresentation is not an accident but the product of systemic racism. Black people are not any more criminal than anyone else (more on that in chapter 10), but they’ve been criminalized as much or more than any group in America.

About the latter, I’ll cite an answer Dr. Ibram X. Kendi gave during a CNN interview last year: You have black people who believe that they can’t be racist because they believe that black people don’t have power and that’s blatantly not true. Every single person on earth has the power to resist racist policies and power. We need to recognize that there are black people who resist it, and there are some who do not. And then you have black people, a limited number, who are in policy, making decisions to institute or defend policies that harm black people.

When I say that reverse racism is a myth, what I mean is that, though individual black people can be prejudiced against white people, reverse racism by black people at large against white people at large just doesn’t exist. It can’t exist, because that’s not how collective power works in this country.

If you want to oppress someone, you’re gonna need power over them as a group—and no group holds it over white people. There literally aren’t enough black people with institutional authority over white people to facilitate systemic racism against them.

but black people are still only 13.4 percent of the population (white people still make up 59.7 percent).

Black history exists because of a black scholar named Dr. Carter G. Woodson, who in 1915 founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). To promote awareness of black achievements, Dr. Woodson and his colleagues created the Negro History and Literature Week, soon renamed Negro Achievement Week. They marked the week in February because it was the birth month of both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, men who played an integral role in shaping black history. Negro Achievement Week caught on like a stadium cheer: by the 1950s, it had expanded into a whole-month celebration, and in 1976 that shift was made official with the renaming of Negro Achievement Week into Black History Month. Every American president since the 1970s has endorsed that commemoration with an official proclamation. There’s no White History Month because we celebrate the accomplishments of white people Every. Single. Day. White people have always been esteemed in this country, have always been celebrated. Black people have had to push to celebrate themselves and their culture in public.

Novelist Jason Reynolds does a wonderful job of expanding on the reasons why: If you say, “No, all lives matter,” what I would say is I believe that you believe all lives matter. But because I live the life that I live, I am certain that in this country, all lives [don’t] matter. I know for a fact that, based on the numbers, my life hasn’t mattered; that black women’s lives definitely haven’t mattered, that black trans people’s lives haven’t mattered, that black gay people’s lives haven’t mattered … that immigrants’ lives don’t matter, that Muslims’ lives don’t matter. The Indigenous people of this country’s lives have never mattered. I mean, we could go on and on and on. So, when we say “all lives,” are we talking about White lives? And if so, then let’s just say that. ’Cause it’s coded language.

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)

Voter suppression laws are not a bygone practice. They are in place right now, using new and refurbished tactics with the same old objective: to disenfranchise black people.

Other states, including Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, have enacted voter ID laws using claims of voter ID fraud. This despite these ACLU stats: up to 25 percent of black citizens of voting age lack government-issued ID, compared to only 8 percent of white people.

Barring currently or formerly incarcerated people from voting doesn’t only suppress black voters, it targets them disproportionately, since they are overrepresented in prisons and jails.

BECAUSE OF VOTER suppression, there are fewer polling stations in places of lower socioeconomic status, particularly liberal places in Republican states.

The tricky thing with crime and punishment in the black community is that there is a lot of real, tragic violence being perpetrated, often against other black people—and too often dismissed as black-on-black crime, somehow less worthy of notice than the ever-feared black-on-white crime.

After American immigration picked up in the 1800s, on-their-way-to-white gangs emerged. Remember Gangs of New York? Some experts call the Irish American group featured in that movie, the Five Points Gang, still the most significant gang in American history. And yet, somehow, white men as a whole have not been marred by their violence.

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

Well, check out some of the statistics from the report An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System: Black men comprise about 13 percent of the U.S. male population, but nearly 35 percent of all men who are under state or federal jurisdiction with a sentence of more than one year. One in three black men born in 2001 can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime, compared to 1 in 6 Latino men and 1 in 17 white men. Black people are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate 5.1 times greater than that of white people. One in 18 black women born in 2001 will be incarcerated sometime in her life, compared to 1 in 45 Latina women and 1 in 111 white women. Forty-four percent of incarcerated women are black, although black women make up about 13 percent of the female U.S. population.

It actually comes from the Hindi word thuggee, which means “deceiver” or “thief” or “swindler.”

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.)

Visit the Sentencing Project (sentencingproject.org). There’s a bunch of information on how you can get involved with justice reform. You can even select your state and see what current reforms are being proposed. You should also check out the Marshall Project (themarshallproject.org), which is a journalism site focused on justice reform and reimagining the role of police in public safety. I also invite you to visit Pen American (pen.org) and read some of the wonderful writing coming out of prisons. If you’re interested in the humanity of people who are incarcerated, who better to educate you than people actually in prison?

As always, the words we use matter, and I want to focus on four of them here: protest, riot, rebellion, and massacre. When it comes to the fight against racism in this country, an ongoing question has been who gets to decide which is which, and then how they get to enforce those decisions. You may think the lines are pretty clear: a protest is generally understood as an orderly demonstration; a riot, not so much; a rebellion is an uprising; and a massacre is, well, a massacre—a tragedy of one-sided violence. And yet, as with so much else, it turns out that race has played a big part in how protests are viewed. And policed.

A note on policing specifically. 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.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) began back in 2013 when black organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi created a black-centered political movement in response to a Florida jury acquitting George Zimmerman of murdering unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. The movement really caught the nation’s attention the following year during the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, over the fatal police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. Since then, protests have been ignited all over the country, usually after the murder of a black person by a law enforcement officer—Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Eric Garner in New York, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge.

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. I also suggest the classic novels The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Native Son by Richard Wright. When you’re buying these or any of the other books, it would also be great to support black-owned bookstores with your purchases.

try Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay “The Case for Reparations,” or France E. Kendall’s “How to Be an Ally If You Are a Person with Privilege.” Also check out Rachel Miller’s Vice article “How to Talk to Relatives Who Care More About Looting Than Black Lives,” and Corinne Shutack’s Medium article “100 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice.” She keeps her list up to date. Check out NPR’s Code Switch, a podcast the covers the subject of race and identity.