The Rapidly Expanding Frontiers of Fighting Our Racist History

These are amazing times…and I think the question I and many others are starting to have is what it all means. When Senate Republicans are open to renaming military bases named after slaveholding traitors, we are really getting somewhere. When Christopher Columbus statues are going down, we are really getting somewhere. When Clemson is renaming buildings named after John C. Calhoun, we are really getting somewhere. When protestors are taking direct action to bring down Jefferson Davis statues in freaking Richmond, we are extra getting somewhere. When NASCAR (!!) bans the Confederate flag, I mean wow. For revanchist elements in our rising fascist nation, this sort of thing is a huge cultural defeat. President Scumbag can’t get beyond being the reanimated corpse of Andrew Johnson, so he is losing it.

I think the question here, as things go forward, is to what extent does this become a racial version of greenwashing, where corporations and politicians and white people in general pay lip service to our racist past but change nothing about their behavior. I do think it is positive for the New York Times to start giving their employees Juneteenth as a paid holiday. Does the NFL closing its offices on that day mean anything? Maybe, though June 19 is not exactly a critical day in NFL land. What about all the companies and sports teams who are offering words of support but that aren’t really lined up with actions to back them up?

It’s absolutely a positive that corporations are starting to pull their advertising from Tucker’s White Power Hour. But are they going to change their hiring practices? Give pay raise to their lowest paid workers, who are usually people of color? What about the janitors who clean the offices? What about the oppressed people of color in their supply chains who suffer and die to make their products?

In other words, what whites are doing to support Black Lives Matter and other racial justice organizations is a highly positive development. But to say the least, it’s not even close to enough. There has to be a widespread commitment to actively fighting the many disparities that very include murder of Black people by police, but also include who dies of COVID-19 and who doesn’t, who has access to a quality education and who doesn’t, who has access to quality food and who doesn’t, who has inherited wealth and who doesn’t, etc. This means seeking remedies to alleviate the effects of slavery, the effects of genocide for Native Americans, the effects of dispossession and oppression for Mexican-Americans. It means actively fighting white supremacy. And while no white person has the answers for all of this, the first thing we can do is to listen to Black people and be allies. Such as at the University of Texas, where football players are announcing a stop to all activities until their demands are met. It means not only buying and reading the works of anti-racist authors such as Layla Saad and Ibram Kendi, but putting their suggestions into action. It means taking on ALL the structural inequalities in this nation, following the wise words of Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor. It means getting uncomfortable. It means admitting that all white people are racist and have racism within them. It means doing the work to push racial justice forward, in tandem with economic justice, with environmental justice, with sexual justice, and with gendered justice, as all of these movements are inherently intertwined in our web of oppression.

There’s a lot of work to be done. Let’s find a way we can each push that forward as allies to the Black community. Otherwise, it just becomes another set of corporate do-gooderism that accomplishes little. This is about the past, but it is also about the present and the future. And that means a long, hard struggle.