[Libs-Or] The Greatest Barrier to Ending Racism

Thu Mar 9 11:06:37 PST 2023

You and I are the greatest barrier to ending racism. Not members of the KKK. Not members of the Proud Boys. You and me...just average everyday white folk.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. knew it.(1) Reni Eddo-Lodge knows it(2)...like, painfully knows it.(3) Rachel Cargle knows it.(4) James Baldwin knew it.(5)(6) Ta-Nehisi Coates knows it.(7) Leonard Pitts knows it.(8) Lorraine Hansberry knew it.(9) Sam Reason knows it.(10) Maya Angelou knew it.(11) Cristina Garc¨ªa knows it.(12) Roxane Gay knows it.(13)

Now we know it, too.

Love is doing something about it.

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1 - "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor 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 can't agree with your methods of direct action.'"

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail,  https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf

2 - "I can no longer have this conversation, because we¡¯re often coming at it from completely different places. I can¡¯t have a conversation with them about the details of a problem if they don¡¯t even recognise that the problem exists. Worse still is the white person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said racism, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. We don't."
- Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I¡¯m no longer talking to white people about race, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race

3 - "Amid every conversation about Nice White People feeling silenced by conversations about race, there is a sort of ironic and glaring lack of understanding or empathy for those of us who have been visibly marked out as different for our entire lives, and live the consequences. It¡¯s truly a lifetime of self-censorship that people of colour have to live. The options are: speak your truth and face the reprisals, or bite your tongue and get ahead in life. It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you¡¯re finally asked to listen. It stems from white people¡¯s never-questioned entitlement, I suppose."
- Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I¡¯m no longer talking to white people about race, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race

4 - "White people love to be the victim in the conversation about race."
- Rachel Cargle, I Refuse to Listen to White Women Cry,  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/09/11/feature/how-activist-rachel-cargle-built-a-business-by-calling-out-racial-injustices-within-feminism/

5 - "Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves."
-  James Baldwin, Letter From a Region in My Mind, https://worldcat.org/title/20787638

6 -  "...and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. ... But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, https://worldcat.org/title/1065393680

7 - "And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race,' imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment."
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, https://worldcat.org/title/912045191

8 - "So often in today¡¯s culture, Americans will affix 'personal responsibility' on minorities to defend or deflect blame for prejudicial and, at times, deadly treatment. There is almost never an acknowledgement from a majority of white Americans that racism remains a very real threat to minorities.
- Leonard Pitts, Pulitzer Prize winner: Many Americans in denial about 'innocence,' https://www.elon.edu/u/news/2015/09/24/pulitzer-prize-winner-many-americans-in-denial-about-innocence/

9 - "We have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical."
- Lorraine Hansberry, http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/lhansberry.html

10 - "If someone¡¯s blatantly racist, you know their agenda, their motive, and you know exactly what they¡¯re saying and why they¡¯re saying it. But when people make subtle racist comments, they often don¡¯t believe or realize they¡¯re being racist and maybe don¡¯t mean it. So, if you challenge them, they¡¯ll often be defensive, 'I¡¯m not harming anybody, it¡¯s only a joke'. Or, they may think I¡¯m being over-sensitive. But imagine if you were on the receiving end of that joke? How would you feel?"
- Sam Reason, Black Voices: Learning to speak up against racism, https://www.zurich.com/en/media/magazine/2021/black-voices-suppressing-my-blackness

11 - "Many members of that early band of twentieth-century pilgrims must have yearned for the honesty of Southern landscapes where even if they were the targets of hate mongers who wanted them dead, they were at least credited with being alive. Northern whites with their public smiles of liberal acceptance and their private behavior of utter rejection wearied and angered the immigrants."
¨D Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter, https://worldcat.org/title/233591904

12 - "There are white people who know how to act politely to blacks, but deep  down you know they're uncomfortable. They're worse, more dangerous than those who speak their minds, because they don't know what they're  capable of."
- Cristina Garc¨ªa, Dreaming in Cuban, https://worldcat.org/title/1262788734

13 - "There is no collective slavery revenge fantasy among black people but I  am certain, if there were one, it would not be about white people, not at all. My slavery revenge fantasy would probably involve being able to  read and write without fear of punishment or persecution or a long  vacation in Paris. It would involve the reclamation of dignity on my own  terms and not with the 'generous' assistance of benevolent white people  who were equally complicit in the ills of slavery."
- Roxane Gay, Surviving Django,  https://www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/surviving-django-8opx

Matthew Baiocchi
REFERENCE LIBRARIAN
__

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