Zone1 Unearthing the Roots of Racial Inequity in America

[IM2]

Many of the members here grew up in this same situation. Some have come to the reckoning this guy has. Unfortunately those who do get dissed by others, and I expect this guy will get labeled as guilt ridden and self hating. You have to wonder about people who say such things.

Unearthing the Roots of Racial Inequity in America​

Chapter One of A Family History of White Lies: American Roots of Racial Injustice
As chance and ancestry would have it, my life as a White American began on White Street, at the end of the first week of May 1955, in the small town of Clinton, in DeWitt County, smack dab in the middle of the state of Illinois. Clinton was, on the day of my birth, a town of six thousand souls — all but a handful of them White people — hemmed in on all sides by freshly-turned soybean and corn fields.

For the first eighteen years of my life, I lived in Clinton, in the middle of middle America with my middle-class White family in a medium-sized white house on West White Street. Although I have spent my adult life far from the rural Midwest and my racially-isolated hometown, in many ways, “White Street” — think of it as the racially-privileged version of “Easy Street” — is the place I have always called home.

Growing up in an overwhelmingly White community, I was immersed in racialist thinking, actions, and institutions. I have lived my entire life in a world where my Whiteness mattered and has given me rights and freedoms denied to others.

Despite the unquestioning faith in the superiority of Whiteness shared by all my childhood family, friends, and neighbors — or perhaps, because of it — as a child, I was convinced I was not at all racist. I could look back to the time of my parent’s childhood and see clear evidence that racism was a much more serious problem in their generation than it was in mine. As a child in the 1960s, imagining myself as fully enlightened on matters of racial equality and civil rights, I felt my generation would be the ones to solve the problem of White supremacy in America once and for all. I had no idea how far we had to go.

As a child, I was not only ignorant of how deeply White supremacy was embedded in American history and culture, I also possessed a completely groundless certainty about the geographic limits of racism in America. I looked south from my central Illinois hometown and imagined a dividing line, a western extension of the Mason-Dixon line marking the border between the tolerant North and the racist South. In general, I grew up thinking White supremacy was primarily a problem of a different time and a different place, not something related in any way to me or my community.

But, of course, the history and geography of racial inequity in America are far more pervasive and complex than any younger versions of myself ever could have imagined. As a White American male, I have lived a life of entitlement and privilege and yet, until very recently, the myriad ways I was advantaged by ancestral legacies of Whiteness remained invisible to me, too ordinary-seeming to attract notice.

We cannot know ourselves until we know our true history. But the truths of White American history have been intentionally buried. For generations, White Americans have taught their children a history full of white lies, a sanitized and whitewashed version of American origins designed to maximize (White) American pride and minimize any feelings of discomfort (for White folks).

Unearthing Roots of Racial Inequity in America

Chapter One of A Family History of White Lies: American Roots of Racial Injustice

medium.com

This is an example of part of the solution. Whites understanding of the complete history of this country in order to get a real knowledge of today. Then once that is done take steps to erase whatever racist beliefs you have, which in turn will allow this country to take the proper steps to repent and to reconcile by fixing the damages created by white racism.

 

[IM2]

America is so racist, black millionaires have to pay someone to oppress them.

And they were black.



View attachment 842857

And since blacks control 2 percent of the wealth and you post an anectdote, recognize that this story is about whites.

 

[IM2]

Facing up to the hard truths of racial injustice in American history is not something that comes easily for most White Americans. As a White child in the 1960s, in the small town in rural Illinois where I grew up, I was taught not to talk about race. The folks in my family and community were uncomfortable talking about race for the same reasons they were uncomfortable talking about cancer. Such unpleasant topics were best avoided. Cancer could not always be ignored. It sometimes struck close to home. But the White folks in my hometown rarely felt a need to mention race. Race was considered somebody else’s trouble, not ours.

Everything I learned as a child about my family and about my family’s history made me think race had very little to do with who I was. I was taught to see myself as a member of a family and community made up of just plain Americans, ordinary White folks. We often heard news about racial “unrest” in other parts of America, but it felt like news from a foreign land, not something connected in any way to my family or to the families of any of the White folks in my rural, central Illinois hometown.

Even now, a half century later, the White folks in my hometown, like other White folks throughout America, continue to deny any personal connection to racial hierarchy and inequity in American society. But this denial of reality takes a toll. Refusing to face the obvious injustices and suffering resulting from America’s race-based social hierarchy comes at a high cost.[iii]

Our collective failure, as White Americans, to confront our personal stake in maintaining systems of White racial domination undermines our sense of self-worth and diminishes our capacity for compassion. Self-deluding denial of responsibility for the persistent inequities and injustices resulting from White racial domination causes many White people in America to live in a constant state of distress and agitation, cowering in fear of blow-back from fires of racial subjugation and violence we ourselves have ignited and constantly refuel.

Denying complicity in the maintenance of White supremacy is reinforced by faith in the false narrative of the Unites States as a quintessentially White nation. To maintain our faith in this illusion of a White America we are compelled to make a hollow shell of American history. We pledge our allegiance to a nation defined by White lies, a nation dedicated to White supremacy.

Unearthing Roots of Racial Inequity in America

Chapter One of A Family History of White Lies: American Roots of Racial Injustice

medium.com

 

[DukeU]

It reflects the experience of millions, including you.

You speaking for whites now?

 

[IM2]

Scraping away the Whitewash from American history and laying bare the roots and infrastructure of race-based hierarchy is a starting point for attacking White supremacy. By telling the truth about how racial identities and statuses came into being in America and how notions of race have evolved and adapted to maintain the dominance of Whiteness throughout American history, we can begin to expose and subvert the institutions and actions maintaining White supremacy in the United States now and into the future.

Dismantling racial inequity and White domination in America will not be quick and it will not be easy. The systems and ideas supporting racial inequity in America will not disappear simply because we wish it so. Race-based hierarchies and inequities are deeply entrenched in American culture and society. Dismantling structures of White racial hegemony will take time and hard work. Change will come slowly, but change, over time, is inevitable.

Revising historical narratives of American origins has an important part to play in promoting change. Origin stories of racial and national identity are constantly being supplemented and revised. To create the political will needed for the long hard work of dismantling systems of racial inequity and injustice in the U.S. we need new multiracial narratives of our history, new stories of our origins as a people and a nation.

Stories of racial injustice and violence have too often been pushed aside as footnotes to the mainstream narrative of American history. In old-school American history, race is depicted as a primeval and somehow “natural” categorization of humans. As a result, the American history most White Americans have learned contains nothing about how White identity and dominance first developed in America and how Whiteness has adapted and remained dominant in the face of multiple historical challenges.

Far too many White people in America still imagine the origins of our racial identity and status as determined by biology or by divine will. In truth, the actions, institutions, and ideology of White racial domination are neither natural nor divinely-ordained. But many White Americans are reluctant to acknowledge the human decisions and actions that created and continue to maintain systems of race-based hierarchy and inequality in America.

Unearthing Roots of Racial Inequity in America

Chapter One of A Family History of White Lies: American Roots of Racial Injustice

medium.com

 

[IM2]

You speaking for whites now?

No, but the truth is what it is. Face it like a man.

 

[IM2]

White racial domination in America is perhaps best understood as an ongoing socio-historical phenomenon, a series of “racial projects,”[iv] an ever-adapting work in progress created through the actions of our ancestors and updated and maintained by actions we take every day.

To be sure, for White Americans like me, facing up to the race-based violence and injustice hiding in plain sight in our family trees can be a daunting and emotionally challenging task. For many of us, ignorance seems a better choice than shame and guilt. Tommy Orange, in his novel There There, noted the reluctance many Americans might have to take a close look at the facts of their own family history:

If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger.[v]

By choosing ignorance and misrepresentation of our ancestral legacies, we can maintain the illusion of ancestral innocence, an illusion that prevents us from acknowledging and confronting the reality and persistence of race-based inequity and injustice in our own lifetimes.

Unearthing Roots of Racial Inequity in America

Chapter One of A Family History of White Lies: American Roots of Racial Injustice

medium.com

 

[DukeU]

No, but the truth is what it is. Face it like a man.

You first.

 

[IM2]

You first.

I have. You can't.

 

[IM2]

If ignorance, in the case of White American ancestry, can be bliss, why awaken the sleeping tiger? For me, and, I believe, for many other White Americans, taking a critical look at our White American family history can help us understand and reckon with the privilege and social and economic injustice embedded in the legacies of Whiteness, White supremacy, and White Christian nationalism we have inherited from our ancestors. It can also help us recognize the centrality and importance of racial identity in our lives, the many ways in which our Whiteness unjustly works to our advantage and to the disadvantage of others. It can help us become active participants in the subversion of the institutions and ideology supporting race-base hierarchy and inequity.

On the other hand, refusing to examine our own history as White people makes us complicit in the perpetuation of racial inequity and ignores our responsibility for helping to put an end to racial injustice in America. In a 2020 essay, Eve L. Ewing makes this connection explicit:

As long as White people do not ever have to interrogate what Whiteness is, where it comes from, how it operates, or what it does, they can maintain the fiction that race is other people’s problem, that they are mere observers in a centuries-long stage play in which they have, in fact, been the producers, directors, and central actors.[vi]

A critical approach to family history, specifically, an examination of the roles of race and racial power dynamics in shaping our ancestors’ social, political, and economic opportunities and status, is one way for White Americans to begin to understand the roots of race-base hierarchy and inequity. Critical family history can open a window on the origins of the institutions and ideology of White supremacy and reveal the ways White racial identity has adapted to withstand challenges and perpetuate systemic racism.

Unearthing Roots of Racial Inequity in America

Chapter One of A Family History of White Lies: American Roots of Racial Injustice

medium.com

 

[DukeU]

I'm speaking to you. Face the truth like a man.

Didn't ask who you were speaking to.

And again, you first.

 

[IM2]

Filling in the missing multi-racial social contexts of the lives of my American ancestors has helped me envision the long historical process through which racial inequity has become embedded and continually renewed in core American institutions, in our economic system, in our political and justice systems, in our churches and schools, and in our families and communities.

Failure to confront personal and family connections to the history of racial violence and inequity is not a problem confined to small towns and rural backwaters in America. It is a failure of the United States as a whole. Other nations have done far more than the United States to confront the trauma of a history of racial injustice. Unlike Germans who have made efforts to memorialize the Holocaust or White South Africans who have taken steps to recall and take responsibility for the damage done by Apartheid, too many White Americans remain mired in willful forgetting. In the end, the possibility of experiencing some discomfort or shame cannot justify ignoring the facts of history.

As uncomfortable as it may be for many of us, the path to racial healing begins with bringing old wounds into the light. Unearthing uncomfortable facts of American history is the only way to prevent the deep wounds of enslavement and genocide from continuing to fester, continuing to block the emergence of the “beloved community” dreamed of by Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many other anti-racist activists.

Unearthing Roots of Racial Inequity in America

Chapter One of A Family History of White Lies: American Roots of Racial Injustice

medium.com

 

[IM2]

Didn't ask who you were speaking to.

And again, you first.

I DGAF. Face your history like a man instead of a mouse. I've faced mine from the time I was in first grade.

 

[DukeU]

I DGAF. Face your history like a man instead of a mouse. I've faced mine from the time I was in first grade.

My history is no different than yours, and yes, I too have faced it my entire life.

 

[IM2]

My history is no different than yours, and yes, I too have faced it my entire life.

Your history is very different from mine. Your comment is another example of the psychosis some whites live with.

 

[DukeU]

Your history is very different from mine. Your comment is another example of the psychosis some whites live with.

Not different at all.

White people have been slaves, same as blacks.

White people have been owners of slaves, same as blacks.

White people have faced racism, same as blacks.

We're all part of the same race, the Human race and each of us have faced the exact same injustices.

It's the history of the world.

 

[IM2]

Not different at all.

White people have been slaves, same as blacks.

White people have been owners of slaves, same as blacks.

White people have faced racism, same as blacks.

We're all part of the same race, the Human race and each of us have faced the exact same injustices.

It's the history of the world.

Spare me the denial of what has gone on in America. You can't face your history. This post is proof.

 

[DukeU]

Spare me the denial of what has gone on in America. You can't face your history. This post is proof.

Spare me the denial of your history, it's the same as mine.

 

[NewsVine_Mariyam]

I'm speaking to you. Face the truth like a man.

That's what confusing for "it"

 

[Weatherman2020]

Filling in the missing multi-racial social contexts of the lives of my American ancestors has helped me envision the long historical process through which racial inequity has become embedded and continually renewed in core American institutions, in our economic system, in our political and justice systems, in our churches and schools, and in our families and communities.

Failure to confront personal and family connections to the history of racial violence and inequity is not a problem confined to small towns and rural backwaters in America. It is a failure of the United States as a whole. Other nations have done far more than the United States to confront the trauma of a history of racial injustice. Unlike Germans who have made efforts to memorialize the Holocaust or White South Africans who have taken steps to recall and take responsibility for the damage done by Apartheid, too many White Americans remain mired in willful forgetting. In the end, the possibility of experiencing some discomfort or shame cannot justify ignoring the facts of history.

As uncomfortable as it may be for many of us, the path to racial healing begins with bringing old wounds into the light. Unearthing uncomfortable facts of American history is the only way to prevent the deep wounds of enslavement and genocide from continuing to fester, continuing to block the emergence of the “beloved community” dreamed of by Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many other anti-racist activists.

Unearthing Roots of Racial Inequity in America

Chapter One of A Family History of White Lies: American Roots of Racial Injustice

medium.com

Blacks lack the ability to even get an ID, right?