I said, “I do not know how to speak.  I am too young!”  But the Lord answered me, “Do not say, ‘I am too young.’  To whomever I send you, you shall go; whatever I command you, you shall speak.” Jeremiah 1.6-7

In my last post, I wrote about the need for white folks to listen, to hold in some sense a long moment of silence, so that we could hear the voices we have dismissed.  I still want to suggest it as the default mode for white people, a disposition of awareness.  Here are just one or two examples of the voices that white Americans, from Trump to the police to white protesters, need to listen to: Desiree Barnes and Philonise Floyd, of course there are many others.  For examples of how white speech can be harmful, see Lindsey Graham and Mark Meadows.  Maintaining a posture of listening is an opportunity for white people to learn and understand the truth of what we have done over the last 400 years.  If we are ever to get to reconciliation, we will need reparation; and before we can get to reparation, we will need to confront the truth both in our personal lives and in the history of our nation.  And that will require listening.

Yet silence can be a form of domination and just being quiet is not going to get us white folks where we need to go, and so I would like now to think about things that need to be said, or rather conversations that need to be had.  White people pretend they don’t want to talk about race, but white folks have always engaged in what Toni Morrison has termed “race talk.”  We know this when we hear it.  Here’s an example.  About five years ago, I was at an open house for a private elementary school in the area.  While I was there, I learned that the school was going to be moving to the east side of town.  I asked why they were moving since they seemed to be in a nice enough location, a former Catholic school.  The white lady I was speaking to responded by saying, “Well the street outside the school is a little sketchy.”  In that one word – sketchy – she conveyed to me everything that needed to be said.  I knew that street.  There was a gas station, a church or two, a cell phone store and a convenience store.  And black people.  Of course, she didn’t say, “Black people walk up and down that street.”  That would not have been progressive, something this school was very set on being.  Instead, sketchy provided the information and the plausible deniability of our race talk.  This is a common experience for white people and good evidence that we know quite a bit about how race and whiteness work in America.

White folks need to start having new kinds of race talk with each other, in which we confront our past, challenge each other to grow, and speak up for justice.  We need to become contemplatives in action – maintaining silence so we can listen, and then from that space of awareness, we need to speak truth to power to change the racist systems in our country and bring about racial justice.  We will also have to speak to people of color.  As individuals, as a collective, and as a country, we will need to deliver a substantive apology, whether in words or deeds or both, so that we can dismantle what we have created and repair the pain we have caused.

Resources

Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility.  Beacon Press, 2018.

Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Anti-Racist Ally. 

Toni Morrison. “On the Backs of Blacks.” Time (1993 Fall) 57.