get defensive. When an eighteen-year-old student asks me why he should have to come to college and be made to feel bad for being white, there’s some power in my being able to admit I used to feel that same way—that I grew up encouraged to reject any talk of the advantages of white skin as an attack against white people. My goal is not to make him feel bad about being white so much as it is to make him think about what it means to be white in context of the history of this country. Since he’s concerned about feelings, I’ll have him read W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, which asks, “How does it feel to be a problem?” or Moustafa Bayoumi, who borrowed Du Bois’s question for its title of his 2009 book How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. I’ll have him read the words of Mamie Till-Mobley, whose fourteen-year-old son Emmett Till was brutally murdered after he was accused of having whistled in the direction of a white woman. If this student is still stuck on the idea that the real injustice here is the assault on his feelings, he needs to keep reading.
Don’t expect to be congratulated. I stood at a New Jersey protest and vigil in the wake of the white nationalist march on Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the protest organizers—a white woman—kept encouraging cars at the intersection to honk their horns in solidarity with our cause. When a black motorist chose not to participate, the organizer, smiling, shouted, “Come on and join in! We’re doing this for you!” Don’t expect people of color to join in, or even acknowledge, whatever efforts you’re making. Anticipate that people of all colors might be puzzled and even put off by your efforts.
How could someone so committed to organizing protests say something so ignorant? My guess is that she got so swept up in protesting that she was temporarily blinded by self-righteousness. She got so swept up in her conviction that she was being a good person that for a moment she forgot how to be one. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen it happen. I saw countless protestors step over a disabled veteran asleep by his cardboard sign as we marched to Philadelphia’s City Hall for a health care repeal die-in. Perfectly healthy citizens planned to play dead to put on a show for our senators, while this man was actually dying on the street.
Confront hate, but correct ignorance. Boycott corporations. Demand resignations from the CEOs and celebrities. But approach private conversations less with the intent of winning an argument than winning a listener. The racism expressed in everyday interactions has a particular insidiousness that can make black Americans worry that they’re being too paranoid or too over-sensitive or too stereotypically angry or that they can’t help viewing the present moment in the context of so many centuries of bad history. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen shows the poet finds it easier and more fulfilling to confront outright hate (a white man referring to a group of black teenagers as “niggers,” in front of Rankine, a black woman),7 than an insidious comment from a white professor interviewing her for a job (“his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there”8) or a friend complaining that her son lost his legacy-secured spot in the incoming class at a prestigious university (“because of affirmative action or minority something—she is not sure what they are calling it these days and weren’t they supposed to get rid of it?”9). It may be easier and more fulfilling to confront outright racist aggression, but the most aggressive racists are also the ones least likely to be persuaded to consider your point of view. Facing covert racism, Rankine finds herself caught between biting her tongue versus reinforcing the stereotype of being too sensitive, too aggressive, too quick to play the race card. It would take a tremendous amount of poise and restraint for her to take it upon herself to educate her aggressors, to see each daily slight or microaggression as an opportunity to serve as a patient instructor. I won’t recommend black Americans remain patient in the face of ignorance. After all, it’s been more than fifty years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that he could no longer wait. Why should this work of patiently educating white Americans fall squarely in the laps of black Americans?
White allies can do their best work when they find opportunities to take on the work of patient education. The vast majority of white Americans have the luxury of never having to think much about race, but they sure like to talk about it. We may be unsure if offhand racist comments are rooted more in lack of education than outright hate, or if the intimacy of a one-on-one conversation between whites simply allows for a passive-aggressive masking of hateful attitudes with the excuse of having innocently misspoken. But we cannot make the mistake of using someone’s positive qualities (she’s a protest organizer, he volunteers every Thanksgiving at a homeless shelter) as a way to convince ourselves that such a good person couldn’t possibly mean the racist things he says. Instead, see his potential: he could be an even better person if he studied more history and listened to more black voices and learned how misguided his thinking is. I don’t mean to spare white feelings so much as keep a white friend or colleague from closing her ears to the message, but my strategic patience must not be mistaken for coddling ignorance or acknowledging ignorance as a position as valid as any other.
As a white ally, I can do my best work by heeding the calls for patience and politeness that it would be ridiculous to ask back folks to heed. Without letting racists off the hook or even taking it easy on them, white allies can strategically take on the burden of the restraint that America has for far too long encouraged from black activists. From Martin Luther King Jr’s “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’”10 to the notion that Black Lives Matter should be more polite, critics have tended to see a particular rudeness in the calls for white Americans to stop killing black Americans. An ostensible commitment to politeness underlies the calls for us to listen to each other, but I don’t buy into the idea that we should give racists a platform so that they can explain where they’re coming from. Racist thinking is rooted in ignorance, and what good is understanding where someone is coming from if it’s a place of ignorance? “Whites, if must frankly be said,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, “are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”11 Too often that white sense of superiority feels assaulted by the suggestion that talking about the lives of black Americans does not require that we give white voices equal time.
That sense of superiority often leads whites to want to dictate not only who gets to talk but how the conversation should sound. Many whites support black causes so long as the activism doesn’t make white people uncomfortable. After Black Lives Matter activists in Seattle snatched the mic at a Bernie Sanders fundraiser in 2015, Ijeoma Oluo wrote, “The reaction to these protesters shed light on the hidden Seattle that most black people know well—the Seattle that prefers politeness to true progress, the Seattle that is more offended by raised voices than by systemic oppression, the Seattle that prioritizes the comfort of middle-class white liberals over justice for people of color.”12 Just months later, the issue of politeness was raised again when Bill Clinton shouted at and admonished BLM protestors in Philadelphia. (The protestors didn’t like the 1994 crime bill that President Clinton signed into law, worsening the mass incarceration of black Americans, and they didn’t like Hillary Clinton’s having referred to youth offenders as “superpredators” in 1996.) Lincoln Blades found Clinton’s exasperation refreshing. “Often,” he wrote in Rolling Stone, “liberals are so well-versed on the polite conventions of respectable and appropriate speech that they can become talking-point robots rather than individuals who have their own set of beliefs … There’s nothing scarier for a minority than not really knowing what the person across from them actually thinks about their intrinsic worth and their fight against oppression.”13
Both writers above point to a particular self-satisfaction on the part of whites who consider themselves forward-thinking or liberal-minded. This self-satisfaction is also wielded against other whites via the schism in class and social standing that makes it easy for educated white liberals to become comfortable in their superiority to the unwashed masses of whites whom they blame for everything from segregation to the election of Donald Trump. If my ambition is to spread knowledge, I cannot approach
