Note: I originally posted this in July 2020 on a Facebook account I use to interact with my family and people I grew up with in rural Connecticut. I wrote it with that audience in mind, but I’m sharing it publicly now.
When I was young and began learning about the Civil Rights movement, I was fascinated by photos from the American South that showed white people marching alongside Dr King and other Black leaders of that time. Like many do even to this day, I had then a self-contradictory and unconscious bias that led me to believe that racial inequality was a problem for Black people to solve. So seeing white people in the pictures caused a sort of joyful cognitive dissonance for me: “Look at this handful of white people marching alongside these Black heroes.”
When I looked at these images as a kid, I often thought, “What would I do if I were alive back then? Would I have marched with Dr King?” I know that many of you had this same thought, because we talked about it at the time. The pictures felt like “history” even though it had been only 20 years or so since the depicted events occurred, and that question always seemed theoretical and unanswerable…until now.
The current fight against racism in this country IS the Civil Rights movement of our time. How you are reacting to it now is how you would have reacted to it then.
If you’ve had uncomfortable conversations about race with your family and friends in recent weeks, you would have done so then. If you look at racial inequality as Black people’s problem to solve now, you would have felt so then. If you feel the current leaders of the movement are “too radical” now, you would have said so then. If you deny systemic racism is a problem now, you would have done so then. If you use sporadic looting to dismiss the tenets and value of the whole movement, you would have pointed to the riots and argued the same point then. If you can’t bring yourself to say “Black Lives Matter” now, you wouldn’t have sung “We Shall Overcome” in solidarity then.
And if you are silent now, you would have been silent then.
But we were not raised to be silent.
As children, we heard of the injustices that Black people had faced in America dating back to the founding of this country. We learned not only about the centuries-long horror of slavery, but about the era of Jim Crow that followed (I know you remember the phrase “Plessy vs. Ferguson” even if, like me, you might be vague on the details), segregation, and, of course, the movement led by Dr. King, whom we now understand to be an American hero.
Despite our view through the rose-colored lens with which white Americans now peer into history, Dr King was not widely hailed as a hero by white America at the time he was alive: once whites could no longer ignore him, he was vilified and pilloried. Over the course of 10+ years, he was investigated and harassed by the FBI, he was called un-American and an extremist, he was attacked by stone-throwing white mobs, he was jailed, and ultimately — lest we forget — he was assassinated by a white supremacist.
During this time, millions of white Americans — “well meaning” conservative and liberal Americans who, I’m sure, did not consider themselves “racist” — did nothing to address racial injustice. They left it to Dr King, Coretta Scott King, John Lewis, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, Whitney Young Jr, many other Black leaders, and of course thousands of other African-Americans to fight against racism and for equality. Even as the police brutality and extra-judicial killings escalated, white America largely stood by in silence.
In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Dr King himself called out white “moderates” for this lack of action, and described the way in which inaction and silence are more pernicious than overt racism, as they delay indefinitely the end of systemic racism. He wrote:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
Nonetheless, some white Americans did stand up against racism. Despite the movement’s long-time unpopularity, despite the risks to their physical safety, despite losing relationships with family and friends, they were not silent. They got up, marched in the streets, and demanded equality for Black Americans.
The choice they made is the choice we make today.
And we were not raised to be silent. I know this because I grew up with all of you: we grew up in the same small towns; side by side, we colored with crayons the same mimeographed portraits of Dr King in elementary school; we knew and befriended the same few Black kids in our area; out of race-related ignorance and in some cases malice, many of us said and did things we remember now with shame; and we studied the same history of slavery and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era. Even with all the omissions in our textbooks, we clearly understood who the villains were in those stories: the Presidents and governors whose racist ideologies, rhetoric, laws, and orders perpetuated racist abuse of African-Americans for centuries; the business owners and local governments behind the “Whites Only” signs and other anti-Black policies; the police who violently suppressed peaceful protestors with batons, dogs, and firehoses.
As we grew a little older, no doubt many of us had to reconcile our anti-racist sentiments from our school curricula with the racism we were exposed to, and sadly often unconsciously inherited, at home. For many, our early anti-racist leanings were at best supplanted with the good-enough self-assurance of being “not racist.” And that was the end of it because, unlike the Black people we knew then and know now, we have had the privilege to choose to ignore it.
But we have a choice now: we can be anti-racists in our work lives, in our personal lives, and in our professional lives. As I shared with all my coworkers when discussing the topic a few weeks ago, doing so does not always feel “easy:” it can be uncomfortable and will cause chagrin, shame, and even anger for myself, amongst people close to me, and people who have authority over some parts of my life. But, as a white man, any discomfort I feel in openly discussing racism and behaving in an anti-racist way in new settings is nothing — NOTHING! — compared to the pain still endured daily in this country by Black Americans in white environments and within white power structures. Therefore, I choose to be vocal; I choose to act. I hope you will join me and the thousands of others in this country who made the same choice in recent months and in so doing, carry on the tradition of the Civil Rights movement.
I’m interested in any thoughts, strategies, and experiences you would like to share.
Photo credits: AP and AFP photos of civil rights demonstrators, led by Dr Martin Luther King, John Lewis, others, in Alabama, March 1965.
