Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

Ask anybody: to be fluent in a language, you have to study abroad. I studied Spanish all four years of high school, but I was never fluent because I never set foot in Spain. Well, my childhood was one big study abroad in white culture—followed by studying abroad in black culture during college and then during my years in the NFL, which I spent on teams with 80–90 percent black players, each of whom had his own experience of being a person of color in America. Now, I’m fluent in both cultures: black and white.

I believe an important part of the cure, maybe the most crucial part of it, is to talk to each other.

The goal here is to build relationships—and, ultimately, to help us recognize each other’s humanity.

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.

I like to use the acronym DENIAL: Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying. The first way to end racism is for my white counterparts to get out of denial, to understand that, wait a second, maybe you’ve been lying to yourself about the existence of racism this whole time.

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.

Say you and I are in a race and the starting line official held me back for the first two hundred meters, giving you a two-hundred-meter head start. If that were to happen, the only way to level out that race would be to either stop you from running or put me on a bike to catch up to you. This is white privilege in a nutshell: what we’ve done in America is said, “Okay, Emmanuel, you’re free to run.” Meanwhile, we’ve acted as if it’s been a fair race, when in all honesty, black people were held back for hundreds of years. And still are.

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.

Voting privileges, juries: it’s a difficult conversation for anyone who counts political ideologies as an important part of their identity, because you want to believe that your party is on the up-and-up. Our democracy is supposed to be fair and impartial, but the truth is that both Republicans and Democrats engage the Fix to some degree. You don’t need to be a political scientist to see how unfair the political system has been to black people. We must continue to bring up these tough conversations, between one another, on our social media platforms, in our newspapers, and so on.

The simple version is that an ally is a person from an empowered group who acts to help an oppressed group, even if it costs them the benefits of their power.

MORRISON: It’s just a human race. Scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct—a social construct. And it has benefits: money can be made off it. People who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behavior that are wrong or misleading. So, it has a social function. Racism.

When the first Africans arrived in 1619 in Virginia, there was no such thing as a white person. As far as the law is concerned, white people as a race didn’t exist until 1681, when colonial American lawmakers sought to outlaw marriages between European people and others. Before that, people were known by their nation of origin, what we might now refer to as nationality or ethnicity.

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.