Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

I don’t mean to be the Bad News Bears, but we are living in an America that necessitated the Black Lives Matter movement. A country in which the simple declaration that people who look like me are worth saving has become controversial.

Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance. —NATHAN RUTSTEIN

At the same time, you’re responsible for your biases, if for no other reason than that there are ways to make them more conscious. And when an idea is conscious, you can change your mind.

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.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was the starting gun. All right now, black people, you’re free, start running. Oh, one thing: I know we promised you “forty acres and a mule,” but we’re actually going to give that land back to the white people who started this war. Also, watch out for hurdles—here are laws to make it hard to vote, here are landowning practices to keep you poor and in debt, sharecropping for generations on the land you were promised. Then in the early 1900s, we say, “Yeah, we know we’ve created these Jim Crow laws to keep you segregated, but, black people—you keep right on running. Come on and catch up.” Then in the late 1960s, we say, “Okay, black people, you can really go now, we’ve signed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts. Run harder and faster (we’ve seen how fast you can run) and catch us if you can.”

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.

address the rich-versus-poor question. 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. TEN. TIMES. GREATER. Put another way, black people own about one-tenth of the wealth of white people in this country, adjusted for population. And check this: the wealth gap persists regardless of a household’s education, marital status, age, or income. Now you tell me if the race is fair.

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.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION IS always an uncomfortable conversation. Think of how long black people have been demeaned in America. Think of how long their speech, their bodies, their skin color, their culture has been seen as lesser than. Now imagine how hurtful it would be to have those same characteristics taken on by white people and celebrated as their own.

YOU’RE INTERESTED in aspects of black culture, in braids or another hairstyle, in wearing ethnic fashion, in listening to black music or reading literature by people of color or watching movies grounded in another culture, you should do your homework. Find out about the genesis of the culture you want to engage with. If you want to wear braids, fine. But research where they came from. Be able to talk about it.

make a point to engage with cultures on more than an aesthetic level. If the first goal here is to stop being ignorant, the second goal is just to learn more about one another.

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

Let’s Get Uncomfortable LIKE I SAID, in many cases, the anger of the black man is justified, if not for an immediate offense, then for the long train of historic offenses. It’s not white people’s job to police the feelings of black people, but as fellow human beings, please grant black people the right to the full gamut of emotions regarding their wounds.

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.

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.

Our public school system is just as flawed, and for related reasons. In most states, school funding breaks down like this: state taxes (45 percent), local taxes (45 percent), and federal taxes (10 percent). While states sometimes subsidize funding shortfalls, it’s not usually enough to level the playing field. If the homes in a school’s neighborhood are worth less than the homes of schools in other neighborhoods, then those owners pay less taxes. If there are fewer businesses in the particular neighborhood, there will also be much less tax revenue. So schools in poor neighborhoods are forced to do more with less. Not only that, 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.”

We must never lose sight of the truth that when black people were enslaved, they were forbidden to read and write, that their white owners did everything they could think of to keep them illiterate, undereducated, ignorant. Imagine what kind of effect that had on those enslaved people, and on their children, and their children. Here’s a little more perspective. Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in America. The oldest historically black college and university (HBCU) is Cheyney University, founded in 1837. So, there’s a two-hundred-year gap of higher education between white and black people.

Black people have had to face many hardships because of that gap, because of attending perennially underfunded schools, and because of white people for generations trying to indoctrinate them toward anti-intellectualism. Time after time, research has shown that gaps between black and white students begin early in childhood and only widen with age. The socioeconomic makeup of a school can play a larger role in achievement than the poverty of an individual student’s family, and a poor education has a huge effect on later fortunes.

Then there is the possibility of jail or prison. Pick your stat: According to a 2012 Annie E. Casey Foundation study, a student failing to read at their grade level by the end of the third grade is four times less likely to graduate. According to a 2009 study by Northeastern University, high school dropouts are sixty-three times more likely to be incarcerated than college grads. You needn’t be a statistician to see a correlation between schools and prisons, one that’s now known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

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. Ironically, some say this started with a little adjustment to the U.S. Constitution called the Thirteenth Amendment. “Neither slavery not involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Yeah, I bolded that clause for a reason. Plenty of scholars have linked that exception clause to the rise of what’s now called mass incarceration or the prison industrial complex. Around the time the amendment was passed, Southern white people were inventing Black Codes, laws that penalized black people for stuff like not showing proper respect or doing “malicious mischief,” and punished those “crimes” as misdemeanors or felonies depending on how severe someone (almost always a white person) decided they were. 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. States were then able to put prisoners to work through “convict-leasing” deals that sent the imprisoned back to slave owners. While the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery on the surface, its loophole paved the way for returning many black people to slavery.

NO ONE CAN fight systemic racism alone. It’s too big and in too many areas. On the flip side, that means there are a million ways to help. As always, a good place to start is learning more. Visit the Urban Institute online (urban.org) for exemplary coverage of structural racism in cities. At your job, advocate for diversity. If your office doesn’t have a diversity and inclusion team, push for one. Take political action whenever and wherever you can, voting for and holding accountable local and national officials, signing petitions, peacefully protesting when needed. Dismantling systemic racism is nothing short of dismantling white supremacy. It’s going to take a herculean effort by all of us to tear it down.

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. What is reverse racism if it’s not, well, real? It’s a prime example of what scholar Alice McIntyre calls white talk: a.k.a. strategies white people use—consciously or not—to insulate themselves from their collective participation in racism. Another way into this idea is the term white fragility, popularized by sociologist Robin DiAngelo. When white people are put in situations that challenge their identity, “we withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore,” explains DiAngelo. “And in other ways push back to regain our racial position and equilibrium.” Put very simply—y’all get defensive.

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.

You want to know the truth? Poverty, not race, is a more accurate predictor of who commits crimes. To the extent that black-on-black crime exists, it’s the product of, among other systemic factors I’ve discussed, segregated housing, concentrated poverty, and unequal schooling. According to the Bureau for Justice Statistics, people living in households with income below the federal poverty line are twice as likely to commit violent crime than high-income households, regardless of race.

It actually comes from the Hindi word thuggee, which means “deceiver” or “thief” or “swindler.” Thugs stole and murdered in India for more than five hundred years. 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.

Researchers say black people that experience chronic racism can develop something called racial battle fatigue, a state that includes, among other symptoms, anxiety, worry, hypervigilance, headaches, and increased heart rate and blood pressure. A study by the National Comorbidity Survey Replication and the National Survey of American Life found that almost one in ten black people actually have PTSD.

Loving v. Virginia in 1967. In that case, a white man and a black woman appealed Virginia’s rejection of their marriage all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled (shout-out to the ACLU) that so-called anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. Wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren, “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the state.” It was a great day for black-white love, but here’s a little perspective on that victory: black people had received both their civil and voting rights before they were allowed to legally marry white people.

The beautiful thing about the piano is that you got white keys and you got black keys. And the only way to make the most beautiful, magnificent, and poetic noise is with both sets of keys working in tandem. You can’t just play all white keys, because you won’t maximize what the instrument has to offer. You can’t just play all black keys, because you won’t maximize what the instrument has to offer. But integrate the white and black keys together, and that is when the piano makes a joyful noise. That’s what this “we” is all about. If we can truly integrate white people and black people together, working in tandem, that’s when our world will make its joyful noise.

black people described it as a rebellion—defined as an often-armed resistance to an established government or ruler. Given that the police and racist institutions they opposed constituted an oppressive government, they reasoned, why should their protests not constitute a rebellion? This is in contrast to the supposed spontaneity of a riot, which implies that there’s no motive involved, or there’s an illegitimate one. A rebellion, on the other hand, implies that the actions are a response to injustice.

Throughout all this history, white privilege has ruled how these conflicts were described. When it was white people instigating the violence, the media, politicians, law enforcement, and eventually historians called what was a massacre a race riot. When black people started to initiate the protests, the media called what was a rebellion a riot, a description meant to portray all white people (citizens, property owners, businesspeople), some of whom were in on the oppression, as persecuted victims of unjustified black anger and hostility, while also making white policing of the situation, no matter how brutal, into a heroic or at least justified response.

The New York Times estimates that between fifteen and twenty-six million people demonstrated over George Floyd’s death in the United States alone, making it the largest demonstration in the history of the country. Some researchers number the protestors at twenty-four million worldwide, which would make it the largest mass protest in history, period.

The 1963 March on Washington might be most famous for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but it’s also notable because the march had a specific agenda. That agenda—or list of demands, if you will—was read by activist Bayard Rustin, the deputy director of the march, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I list them all below so you can read them and ask yourself which of them, after fifty-seven years, have been met for black people: 1. Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation from the present Congress—without compromise or filibuster—to guarantee all Americans: Access to all public accommodations, Decent housing, Adequate and integrated education, The right to vote. 2. Withholding of Federal funds from all programs in which discrimination exists. 3. Desegregation of all school districts in 1963. 4. Enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment—reducing Congressional representation of states where citizens are disfranchised. 5. new Executive Order banning discrimination in all housing supported by federal funds. 6. Authority for the Attorney General to institute injunctive suits when any Constitutional right is violated. 7. A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers—Negro and white—on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages. 8. A national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living. (Government surveys show that anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.) 9. A broadened Fair Labor...

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. Which is to say, racism has always been about power. Which is to say, we invented racism. Which is to say, maybe we can learn to uninvent it, too.