The Tribune

A young black Jesuit priest in the United States is depressed and frustrated. He lives in an overwhelmingly white religious community and works in overwhelmingly white institutions. He is exhausted with having to constantly explain to white colleagues and friends the legacy of racism he and other blacks endure day after day.

“Why?”, he demands plaintively, does he have to explain the entrenched racism and its effects to those who have benefitted from white privilege and white supremacy, including members of the Jesuit order in the United States, which once owned slaves and benefitted from the slave trade.

Why does the family of George Floyd and black America have to explain to white America the pernicious legacy of racism which led to a white police officer suffocating a black man with his knee with brutal lethality 157 years after the so-called emancipation of slaves?

Legal Defence Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill described Floyd as being killed with, “excruciating deliberation”.

Last week, a dear older white friend in her late 70s who lives in New York State, not far from the infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility, participated in a memorial for George Floyd and other victims of racism.

Along with others she knelt for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the suffocating amount of time that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck. She felt physical pain in her older knees, a very slight and passing glimmer of the pain felt by Floyd.

Following the killing of Floyd and other high-profile killing of black Americans by police and civilians in the past few months, black people around the world have found themselves yet again reciting for whites the brutal legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, slavery by other names and forced labour after emancipation, and the cancerous racism which engulfs and sickens America.

A perennially offensive question is: “Why are black people so angry?” A former activist had to explain to a white Irish American priest his outrage about the legacy of slavery and white supremacy in The Bahamas when the latter expressed concern at how angry was the young black man fighting for racial equality in his country.

Privileged

Even a number of black people, including some of the privileged black bourgeois in America and The Bahamas, do not grasp the evil of racism upon which America lives and moves and has its being.

Many black and white Bahamians do not understand the racial history of America, often parroting the racial prejudice and insipid memes and lies of white supremacy. Some of these are the “special blacks” who feel that they have been accepted into certain bastions of white privilege and who often lap up being told how well they speak and how smart they are.

One particularly nauseating response to the Floyd killing is those who complain that he was a “thug” and reportedly had prior criminal convictions. Does this justify his killing or devalue the ferocious response to his death?

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, also often grew exasperated by whites asking him to explain aspects of racism of which the questioners benefitted but refused to or could not see.

In a speech entitled, “The Other America”, King articulated the diabolical legacy of whites having had their knees and institutions on the necks, bodies and souls of black people from the inception of the white supremacist enterprise of the United States:

“I remember the other day I was on a plane and a man starting talking with me and he said, ‘I’m sympathetic toward what you’re trying to do, but I just feel that you people don’t do enough for yourself.’

“And then he went on to say that, ‘My problem is, my concern is that I know of other ethnic groups, many of the ethnic groups that came to this country and they had problems just as Negroes and yet they did the job for themselves, they lifted themselves by their own bootstraps. Why is it that Negroes can’t do that?’

“And I looked at him and I tried to talk as understanding as possible but I said to him, it does not help the Negro for unfeeling, sensitive white people to say that other ethnic groups that came to the country maybe 150 years ago voluntarily have gotten ahead of them and he was brought here in chains involuntarily almost 350 ago.”

Dr. King continued: I said ‘It doesn’t help him to be told that’, and then I went on to say to this gentleman that he failed to recognise that no other ethnic group has been enslaved on American soil. Then I had to go on to say to him that, ‘You failed to realise that America made the black man’s colour a stigma’.”

Explanations

A good number of white people who ask for so-called explanations as to what is going on, know full well the bounty of white privilege they enjoy. The calls for explanations are oftentimes self-serving, condescending, an attempt to placate and a denial of responsibility for the attitudes and structures which dominate blacks.

Amy Cooper, the white woman in Central Park who called the police on the black bird-watcher Christian Cooper after he asked her to leash her cocker spaniel understood all too well the power of her white privilege.

In a video of the incident posted by Christian Cooper on Facebook, Amy Cooper said calmly and deliberately:

“I’m taking a picture and calling the cops … I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Imagine if the black man’s dog was unleashed and threatening her. The meme would have been: “These black people can’t obey the rules.”

In his “The Other America” sermon King further explained some of the economic basis of inequality:

“While white America refused to do anything for the black man at this point, during that very period, the nation, through an act of Congress, was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and mid-west, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

“Not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges for them to learn how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming and went beyond this and came to the point of providing low interest rates for these persons so that they could mechandise their farms, and today many of these persons are being paid millions of dollars a year in federal subsidies not to farm and these are so often the very people saying to the black man that he must lift himself by his own bootstraps. …

“Senator Eastland, incidentally, who says this all the time, gets a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, not to farm on various areas of his plantation down in Mississippi. And yet he feels that we must do everything for ourselves. Well, that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor.”

Kaepernick

Just as other civil rights activists have had to explain throughout American history, today’s activists like NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick are still explaining, denouncing and articulating to America that racism still rages in America.

He was often viciously attacked verbally, including by Donald Trump, who called him, “a son of a bitch”. He was pilloried by many white players and Americans and sidelined by the League because, during the playing of the U.S. National Anthem, he protested against racial inequality and police brutality.

Kaepernick endured the threadbare excuses of aggressive indifference and protected privilege: he was told he was too radical and unpatriotic, that change takes time, that things weren’t so bad in America.

The NFL has now seen the light in the wake of protests, including by many whites, which has caught the League off-guard as it plays catch up, no doubt out of self-interest and monetary considerations.

The white British anonymous artist and political activist Banksy recently wrote in response to the global protests in the wake of Floyd’s killing:

“I thought I should just shut up and listen to black people about this issue. But why would I do that? It’s not their problem, it’s mine.

“People of colour are being failed by the system. The white system. Like a broken pipe flooding the apartment of the people living downstairs. The faulty system is making their life a misery, but it’s not their job to fix it. They can’t, no one will let them in the apartment upstairs.

“This is a white problem. And if white people don’t fix it, someone will have to come upstairs and kick the door in.”

Meaningful change will only prevail if many more white people stopped asking for explanations about the brutality of white supremacy and start to understand and acknowledge the pervasive racism which still haunts America and the world, and that they must join wholeheartedly in the struggle to dismantle this historic evil.