Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

A country in which the simple declaration that people who look like me are worth saving has become controversial.

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.

if you see something, say something.

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.”

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.

For many white people, white privilege is the power of feeling normal. It’s the silent reinforcement of being able to walk into a store and see its main displays show products that cater to you. It’s the ability to turn on the TV and see people who look like you represented in all walks of life. It’s passing the corner office at work and seeing someone who could have been you once upon a time, and maybe finding mentors who “see themselves in you.” It’s never wondering whether the name on your résumé is “too white”; it’s talking the way your local news anchor talks, the way the authorities say is “standard” or “proper.” It’s something as simple as having a Band-Aid, or a foundation color, match your skin. It’s never having been the one the Photos app thinks is a gorilla.

Another part of white privilege is the omnipresent benefit of the doubt. It’s the safety of moving through the world without being profiled, without worrying that the police might harass you or worse just because of your skin. It’s the gift of not having your complexion be the reason someone mistrusts you financially, doesn’t show you the nice apartment, doesn’t give you the loan. It’s never worrying that one riot, one gang, one criminal, one anything might mean more prejudice against you, too. 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.

Now imagine knowing all this and walking through the world as me. Imagine clocking every time a white woman crosses the sidewalk or ends up on the elevator with you; imagine having to avert your gaze so you don’t make a white person uncomfortable, or changing your stride in front of police. Imagine always having to be on guard to gauge whether you are being perceived as a threat or are in some way playing into some white person’s negative image or idea of you.

You, dear reader, have white privilege.

Does any other race not exist? Lmao

“If you find out that you were wrong at the end of your life, that white privilege was real and you didn’t acknowledge it, it means that you were stepping on the necks of others your whole life. Even if I’m wrong, my wrong is better than your wrong. What do you have to lose?”

As with many myths, the Angry Black Man has some truth to it. Not the systematic assault on white women—the anger. In the time of slavery, black women were often sexually exploited by white men. (Read up on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.) Now, imagine you were a black man and the woman you’d claimed as your wife (legal marriages between slaves weren’t allowed) was raped by your white master or overseer. Not only was she raped but she was impregnated and gave birth to the master’s child, and there was nothing you could do about it. 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.

On the other hand, imagine that if you so much as looked sideways at a white woman, if you did nothing but were accused of violating her respect and/or chastity, you could be captured, beaten, and lynched by a posse of white men. And when it was all over, that there would be nothing your people could do lest they suffer the same fate as you. And no consequences for the white people who murdered you. 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?

Plantation shutters are a reminder of the worst thing America has ever done, and apparently they’re still a plus on Zillow.

One of the most common ways to build wealth is homeownership, and for decades there have been structural barriers in place to keep black people from reaping its benefits. Back in 1934, a dude named Homer Hoyt, then the chief economist of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), wrote a report to help his agency standardize home-ownership loans in which he ranked various nationalities by order of “desirability.” The most desired on the list were Anglo-Saxons and northern Europeans (this whole white-race business was still coming together), and at the bottom of the list were Mexicans and Negroes.

The FHA took this ranking and ran. They mapped out cities, dividing them into which neighborhoods were riskier to lend money, with no variable more important than race. Neighborhoods where the Protestant Anglos lived were marked in green, and, with other colors representing other groups in between, the neighborhoods where black people and Mexicans lived were marked in red. This is where we get the term redlining, which forced scores of black people into doing business with predatory lenders on homes in neighborhoods that were deemed undesirable and therefore less valuable than green—or rather white—neighborhoods.

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.

Dumbest shit I’ve ever read

I REPEAT: THERE is no such thing as reverse racism. 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.

WTF