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A lot of white America is shocked and fatigued right now because for the first time in any of our lives, we’ve pressed pause nationwide on pretending that racism isn’t a ubiquitous feature of our country’s makeup as opposed to an occasional bug in the system.
And for many, they had no concept of how comfortable they were until confronted with it. There will always be those who deny it, because that’s how dissonance works. There were white people in the 1950’s who thought things were fine and talked about being “friends to the negros”
But the discomfort a lot of white people are feeling right now is actually a good thing because it’s a reminder that they do know right from wrong and the reality is registering. The next step to take is abandoning the defensiveness and denial and committing to dismantling it
And the excuses of saying “we can’t judge people from the past by today’s moral standard” have to answer for how there were plenty of people in the past who saw slavery in real time and decided to be abolishionists. Plenty who saw Jim Crow and decided to be activists.
If we’re going to lazily dismiss clearly morally depraved action based on the times, we’ll never fully reconcile. We also can’t keep an honest accounting of damage done and how it has carried forward from one generation to the next along the way.
We don’t exist on a separate timeline or in an alternate universe from this country’s racial legacy. So even if you’re naive enough to believe that racism “ended” when slavery did, or in ‘64 when Civil Rights Act was passed, you also have to connect that contemporary impact.
& to be clear, that’s about 90% of the battle. Everything about this country and the way we deal with our history is designed to protect white people’s image of American exceptionalism, which is why so often you hear rudimentary talking points like “NoOnE aLIVe 2DaY wAS eNSlaVED”
Because the history taught is severely sanitized and riddled with omissions, some more glaring than others depending on state or region. Many people aren’t able to register anything racist beyond slavery, the KKK and Jim Crow Laws.
And now, finally in 2020, for reasons I’m still not entirely sure of (?), white people are collectively being inundated with all the bits of information they’ve been protected from for centuries and they can’t escape it as easily. And some of y’all are freaking the fuck out lol
