“On Being White and Other Lies:” A Reading List for White People Amidst Ferguson

             Michael Brown’s tragic death, the subsequent protests, and the dubious reactions from police have transcended Ferguson and made their way to the forefront of national discourse, spurring conversations on race and racism. These are conversations worth having, but we — White people — should come to the table with informed, reasoned, and humbled perspectives. This, of course, means doing our homework, and studying from material created by those who have lived experiences with these issues. Below, I’ve laced my feelings on Ferguson — and racism at-large — with a reading list that, from my White perspective, I think is useful for understanding race, racism, and the role for White people in a movement for comprehensive racial justice.

            First, we (White people) must understand that the issues revolving around Ferguson are not issues of race — but issues of racism. Which is to say, race is a social construct, and a construct — in an American context — created by White supremacy, and utilized for subjugation. Late essayist, playwright, and novelist James Baldwin articulates this idea well in his essay, “White Man’s Guilt:” “White men have used the word color, the concept of race, to justify unspeakable crimes” (Baldwin 412). Thus, when we talk about issues like Ferguson, we should frame the discussion in a way that addresses racism — i.e., the exploitation of people based on race — and not race itself, which is merely a matter of skin tone. For example, in practice this means recognizing that protesters or leaders critical of these events are not "race-baiting" — they are expressing detest of racism.

            To grapple with this topic, I suggest consulting Baldwin, most namely, The Fire Next Time, and a few of his other essays from his collection, The Price of the Ticket: “On Being White and Other Lies,” “White Man’s Guilt,” “Many Thousands Gone,” and “The American Dream and the American Negro.”  (These are relatively short, and can be read in a brief sitting; the ideas, however, are heavy, and should take some time to digest.) Baldwin is not only able to compellingly deconstruct the myth of race — or, as he describes it, a “curtain” (Baldwin, “On Being White and Other Lies” 409) — but he is also able to articulate psychological despair felt by the individual who experiences racism — despair that is impossible to fully grasp, but worth wrestling with. While White people will never be able to completely understand what it’s like to be Black, it is important to try to empathize, to begin to imagine — for the Black experience is a heavy slice of the human condition.  

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            While we should operate from the assumption that race is a social construct, it is just as important to understand that race has lived experiences. This means acknowledging that people of color are more likely to be harshly disciplined in school; are disproportionately convicted for crimes committed at same rates across racial lines; face higher rates of unemployment and lower levels of economic prosperity; and are hindered from building wealth at the same rate of Whites by nearly every measure. It is also crucial to keep in mind that these are systemic, institutionalized problems — not individualized ones.

            To gain insight on how we, as a nation, have created this context of racialized inequity, we must wrestle with — and ultimately accept — the brutality and inhumanity of our nation’s history: from slavery, to Jim Crow, to now. For myself, this historical autopsy has been predominantly, but not entirely, informed by three pieces of work, beginning with Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name, which chronicles the re-enslavement of Black people during the Reconstruction Era, and thus debunks the myth that the Emancipation Proclamation wrought the smooth, progressive, unbending arch to the end of racism. As Blackmon shows us that subjugation via chattel slavery continued after slavery until the Second World War, in “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Naheisi Coates illustrates how racist housing-policy perpetuated segregation, and kept people of color in the mid-1900‘s from acquiring the greatest wealth-building tool — a house — and, more broadly, the American Dream. While Coates is compelling in demonstrating how those policies have impacted generations of Black people up until now, Michelle Alexander is groundbreaking in shedding light on what many have described as the next monumental civil rights issue: the disproportionate mass incarceration of Black people. More specifically, Alexander’s The New Jim Crow contextualizes and explores the rise and dominance of our racist criminal justice system, a system she terms a new “tool to reduce millions of individuals to the status of second-class citizens” (Alexander 12) — a phenomena inextricable from Ferguson.

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            Finally, beyond earning a historical and theoretical lens through which to view the recent events in Ferguson — and elsewhere  — us White folks also have to stay humble and proactive. More specifically, we have to be able to acknowledge that racism isn’t only a construct that subjugates Black people, but also one that benefits us. In a capitalist economy, resources and opportunity are finite, and our privileged, race-based disposition to them comes at the expense of others. Moreover, we must also admit: we don’t get what it’s like to be racially persecuted; we’ve never been there. This humility, however, doesn’t resign us from changing the status quo. As those who benefit from White supremacy, it is our responsibility to help reveal, interrogate, and dismantle it; indeed, white supremacy created racism and race, and these are thus White people problems. 

            This, however, doesn't mean that we should be the face of the movement for justice. Rather, it means listening to those leading the intellectual movement to eradicate structural and interpersonal racism (mentioned above); expressing outrage every time a Michael Brown happens; joining in solidarity with those tempting to shift the tides; and — ultimately — working to relinquish the great amount of material and social capital that we have garnered via White supremacy. To use the words of Baldwin, “until this moment comes, there is scarcely any hope for the American Dream” (“The American Dream and the Negro Dream” 409).