White Like Me

(Excerpted from Tim Wise's White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son)

"You can't organize people if you don't love them. And however hard it can be to love the racists you come in contact with, doing so is the first obligation of a white antiracist.

While it is not for people of color to put up with us, or to hold our hands, or to love us (especially if loving us puts them at great risk), it is definitely for those of us who are white to show that love even as we issue the challenge. We are talking about our people after all: people who could be us but for some experience we had and they didn't. Indeed, at other times we might still be awfully close to them, might find ourselves vulnerable to the same kind of thinking, no matter how much work we think we've done on our own conditioning." (90)

I cannot put into number how many times I've wanted to say just this to people, but didn't have the eloquence to put it so perfectly:

"The most dangerous person is the one who refuses to admit that he does in fact contribute to injustice at least as often, if not more so than he truly rebels against it. Such a person is capable of learning nothing because he honestly perceives himself to be in such control of his shit that there is nothing anyone else can teach him, and that there is nothing on which he needs to work, no point at which he too is part of the problem, and not merely part of the solution to the myriad social crises that surround us." (102)

I know they are very different issues in many many ways (though a lot of folks have argued that the oppression of non-white folks and the oppression of animals stem from the same messed up ideologies), but this quote also very lovingly captures exactly what I feel when it comes to those who contribute to the suffering of animals as well:

"Racism, even if it is not your own, changes you, allows you to think things and feel things that make you less than you were meant to be. It steals that part of your humanity that is the most precious because it is that part that allows us to see the image of God, the goodness of creation, in all humankind. And our unwillingness to see that, and more than to see it, to really feel it, deep in the marrow of our bones, is what allows us, and even sometimes compels us, to slaughter one another, often in the name of the same God whose image we wouldn't recognize if our lives depended on it. Which, come to think of it, they probably do." (126)

I don't know how many times I've heard people so easily submit to defeat with regard to race-issues or animal-rights issues or feminist issues, simply because they claim that trying is futile since we'll never be able to change a system that is so firmly entrenched in backwards ideologies. With them in particular, I share these final quotes:

"'You do not do the things you do because others will necessarily join you in the doing of them,' [Archbishop Tutu] explained, 'nor because they will ultimately prove successful. You do the things you do because the things you are doing are right." (153)

"I have no idea when, or if, racism will be eradicated. I have no idea whether anything I say, do, or write will make the least bit of difference in the world. But I say it, do it, and write it anyway, because as uncertain as the outcome of our resistance may be, the outcome of our silence and inaction is anything but. We know exactly what will happen if we don't do the work: nothing. And given that choice, between certainty and promise, in which territory one finds the measure of our resolve and humanity, I will opt for hope." (154)

-------