Here’s How White People Can End Racism Forever

by Drew Franklin & R.L. Stephens on June 20, 2015

What can white people do to end racism in the wake of the Charleston massacre? Two editors at Orchestrated Pulse sat down to discuss one of the hottest topics in think piecing:

R.L.: Something, something education… allies… healing… speak up like Mitt Romney… watch MSNBC… and that’s how White people can end racism forever.

Psych… The conversation pervading circles of self-described White allies is so far divorced from what I’m feeling, from what my Black family is feeling. I was talking to one of my relatives, and she’s seriously contemplating if she needs to arm herself for church this weekend. A White man, inspired by the Charleston killings, stood outside a Richmond , Virginia church and terrorized parishioners, banging on the windows and threatening to kill every Black person there. That’s where we’re at, and anyone who isn’t hip to that reality is just not relevant to the struggle.

Drew: True. I find some of the assumptions inherent to this method of race discourse rather insulting. The soft approach to social change should appear absurd to anyone who’s actually been in a position to try it. I’m diagnosed with PTSD from violence and betrayal at the hands of family members with whom I still have vicious arguments about the Confederate flag. What about that? What do you say to white people for whom the consequences of “privilege-checking” is physical violence? How do you prepare them for the reality that confronting white supremacism might get you hurt?

R.L.: There is a long and bloody history of well-meaning people underestimating White supremacy. In 1979 the Communist Workers’ Party held an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina titled “Death to the Klan March.” The activists forcefully spoke out against the Klan for months. They did all the things that these think pieces are now encouraging people to do. But they underestimated the power of White supremacy. The day of the march, the Klan showed up and murdered 5 demonstrators; what’s worse, they were later acquitted at trial. The massacre was captured by a television crew. The Party never recovered.

Drew: This subject hits closer to home for some white people than others. Very recently I had a minor revelation. It occurred to me that a family reunion I attended several years ago was on a property that, in hindsight, seemed suspiciously like a plantation. I decided to investigate and, sure enough, there it was. Not only was it once a plantation (now billed as resort), some of the slave-quarters that housed thousands of stolen Africans remain standing and provided the backdrop to our lily-white family gathering. I felt pretty dumb for having missed what should have been very obvious to me, especially since my last memory of that trip is hearing my great uncle lament that, while cleaning out the house of a recently deceased relative, he’d discovered an antique “bill of sale” in the attic. That was when I learned for a fact that at least one of my ancestors was a slavemaster.

I’m sharing this anecdote to provide some context about my family life. Growing up in Chocolate City and going to public school inevitably led to me befriending Black people, and this was a HUGE problem for my parents–so much so, that our already bad relationship completely deteriorated to the point that when I was 15 I was sent to an actual re-education camp for two years. Since then, DC has been flooded with outsiders from higher income, majority-white regions. The activist milieu is increasingly made up of members of this social group, and they aggressively maintain a hard line on acceptable discourse in the form of rigid identity politics. But how many of the bourgie transplants that preach to me about “allyship” have any inkling what I’ve experienced as a direct consequence of America’s white supremacist legacy?

I live this shit. We all do. We are all affected one way or another by the master-slave dialectic. Resolving that contradiction doesn’t come about from privilege-checking, or heart-to-heart conversations among white people, or from the uncritical sloganeering that pervades the progressive Left. You have to bleed for it.

R.L.: Looking at Dylann Roof’s manifesto, it’s clear that the so-called anti-racist left continues to be woefully unprepared to confront real White racist power. As you said, the common thread in any of these checklists is a call for conversation and awareness. But Roof didn’t have a problem with talking about race. He was known to go on racist rants. Plus, his manifesto reads “I can say today that I am completely racially aware.”

Dylan Roof is part of a network of White nationalists who are increasingly organized and becoming more dangerous by the minute. Conversation and awareness are not the answers. What we have here is a crisis of power, a lack of real political organization. These anti-racist types want to send people out to confront White supremacy with nothing but superficial awareness and good intentions. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Drew: You are not exaggerating. Last month saw nationalist motorcycle gangs organize an anti-Islam rally outside a Phoenix mosque. This was just days after a shoot-out involving biker gangs killed 9 in Waco, Texas. Their threatening display got some attention in the press, but the coverage glossed over one very alarming detail–some of the armed participants openly displayed fascist symbols, namely the Nazi SS insignia.

What you and I call white supremacism is not an ideology, but the foundational political and social order in the United States. Groups that are conventionally referred to as “white supremacist,” on the other hand, are better described as fascist. I mean this in a strict sense of the term. White nationalist groups strongly identify with the Third Reich. These violent extremists have crystallized white supremacism into an ideology, and their numbers are growing. They are armed and well organized and pose an immediate existential threat to people of color, queer and trans folk, and anyone who identifies with Leftist politics. This is a political movement that instigated a world war, yet the state appears to protect them, and the press white-washes their prominence. Why is that?

R.L.: It’s White supremacy’s widespread institutionalization that makes the Left’s underestimating of White nationalism so disturbing. Many of us are convinced that if we get stories of racial injustice in national media and spark these conversations on race™, then that will naturally combat White supremacy. Ironically, it was the barrage of media coverage following Trayvon Martin’s murder that, according to the manifesto, sparked Dylann Roof’s racial awakening. He writes, “How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?” That’s White racial backlash in a nutshell, and we’re not prepared for it.

Drew: Having spent my career in broadcast news, and after studying the public relations industry, I believe you’re on to something substantial here. The function of the mainstream press is to shape public opinion. That’s it. So when you observe radical shifts in the headlines, as with this unprecedented rise in coverage of police brutality that culminated in the Rachel Dolezal circus, it signifies a very serious crisis in the social order. Something that has been brewing for a long time is reaching critical mass, and the PR industry is coalescing to recuperate the narrative.

No matter how prevalent these discussions become in the media’s gaze, the mainstream will never articulate that white supremacism is fundamental to the health of the American empire, whose continued existence is maintained through widespread violence and death. This is hard for many people to appreciate, especially with the emerging popularity of abstractions like “epistemic violence.” At the point of physical confrontation, there’s nothing abstract about it. All people, especially so-called allies, need to understand that when you really struggle against power systems, you expose yourself to deadly harm. Your enemies–the pigs, flanked by the Cliven Bundy’s and the Dylan Roofs of the world–have guns. And they have demonstrated their willingness to use them.

With that in mind, I think it borders on recklessness to tell white people there are a few simple things they can do to change the situation. If you follow that advice, you’ll either be completely ineffectual, or you’ll get fucked up. Either way, you’ve failed. Struggling for abolition requires that you first accept the inevitability of violent reaction, and then prepare yourself for it. As things stand, very few of us are in any position to deal with that reality.

R.L.: What should organizing that effectively reaches White people look like? Capitalist exploitation is perhaps the single most significant potential point of unity we have. Yet, none of these “talk to White people” articles mention White poverty even once. Dylann Roof wasn’t some college educated White guy making an off-color remark in your social justice non-profit. He’s a poor, unemployed, White kid who spent numerous nights sleeping in his car. White nationalists recognize the physical and psychological toll economic deprivation takes on people, the feelings of inferiority it engenders. They take advantage of that desperation, and they offer plausible yet false racist theories to explain that pain. That’s how you get a Dylan Roof.

Drew: And of course we can’t talk about poverty without talking about property. That’s why an integrated class analysis is not allowed. The narrative has been completely sanitized in the interests of the people who own the media platforms that have produced this commodification of analysis in the form of think pieces. We would all do well to study the propaganda model and think twice before taking news and pop discourse at face value.

R.L.: Exactly, Roof isn’t some outlier; he’s the product of concerted forces. Fortunately, we have models for how to actually organize against White supremacy, and in ways that even include White people. Fred Hampton, speaking at a church in 1969, made it plain.

We got to face some facts: that the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class–and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

Drew: There you have it. In order for white people to take part in uprooting this deeply entrenched status quo, we have to first do away with the notion that we can do so “as white people.” Whiteness itself–that is, the white racial identity–precludes class consciousness. It is a fiction that must be destroyed if the masses of ordinary people are to come together and organize.

What can white people do to that end? They can get real. There is no effective anti-racist strategy that can be distilled into an op-ed or blog post. I wish I had a more concrete answer than that, but we have a lot of work to do before we can formulate a concise strategy. In the meantime, read DuBois.