“A bill is coming in that I fear America is not prepared to pay. ‘The problem of the twentieth century,’ wrote W.E.B. Du Bois around sixty years ago, ‘is the problem of the color line.’ A fearful and delicate problem, which compromises, when it does not corrupt, all the American efforts to build a better world — here, there, or anywhere.” — James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 1962
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I barely know where to start. As if the grim reality that more than 100,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, and more than 370,000 worldwide, wasn’t heart-wrenching enough, to see the collective pain and racial unrest across the nation after the murder of George Floyd (and many other black victims of police brutality) at the hands of an overzealous, white cop, has left me in a state of despair and, frankly, hopelessness that things will change any time soon.
My feelings on the current state of affairs barely register on the scale of what it must be like — I can never know and won’t pretend to know — to live in constant fear that your body or the bodies of your friends or family members could be broken — in the year 2020, in the “greatest nation in the world.” That line is in quotes because we are, as it has been proven over and over, by our collective apathy, by our arrogance, by our selfishness, by our disregard for the interests and safety of black people in America, by our failure to reform the justice system, by our failure to hold people in power accountable and by our negligence, that we are far from the greatest nation in the world. In fact, I’m not sure we even rise to the level of “good” by the scale and scope at which we have utterly failed to protect our fellow citizens and our fellow human beings.
I’m aware of my place in this as a white male who grew up in the South. I’m aware that I can’t escape my upbringing, and I can’t escape the white guilt that comes with it. A white person growing up in the South in the 1980s could hardly escape the legacy of racism and bigotry that is almost soaked into the soil in places like Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and my home state of South Carolina. The blood and sweat of slaves during the American Civil War and those who suffered and died during Reconstruction is, indeed, literally soaked into the soil.
I’m also aware of the impulse of white liberals to want to swoop in and “save” black people. A white firebrand named John Brown, who was a domestic terrorist for his half-cocked plan to invade the federal stronghold at Harper’s Ferry and for his murderous escapades in Kansas three years earlier, thought of himself as the literal savior of slaves in the run-up to the Civil War, donning the “armor of God” to overthrow the system of slavery. Unfortunately, God couldn’t protect him from the noose after he and his co-conspirators were caught. In any case, Brown’s actions paved the way for the coming war, and he is largely credited with having “seeded civil rights,” in the words of his biographer David S. Reynolds.
A term, “white savior industrial complex,” was coined in 2012 by novelist Teju Cole, who said WSIC refers to the “confluence of practices, processes, and institutions that reify historical inequities to ultimately validate white privilege” and that it includes a “big emotional experience that validates privilege.”
Brittany A. Aronson, in the scholarly essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex: A Cultural Studies Analysis of a Teacher Educator, Savior Film, and Future Teachers,” wrote the following about saviorism:
Ultimately, people are rewarded from “saving” those less fortunate and are able to completely disregard the policies they have supported that have created/maintained systems of oppression (i.e. The U.S.’s exploitation in Haiti has contributed to poverty and corruption, yet Americans can feel good about their charity after the Earthquake). The rhetoric around how Americans often talk about Africa—as a continent of chaos, warthirsty people, and impoverished HIV-infected communities, situates these countries as places in need of heroism. This mindset perpetuates the need for external forces to come in and save the day, but what gets left out of this conversation are the roles settler colonialism and white supremacy have had in creating these conditions in the first place.
So, extending this to current circumstances in America, what’s at play here with the saviorism concept is that white people can feel good about sympathizing with the plight of black people, and even support causes that bolster black lives either physically or financially — all the while assuaging their sense of white guilt — but the underlying problems that created the conditions of inequality and injustice remain unaddressed, whatever good intentions white people had at the onset.
Some in the black community have rejected the notion of having “white allies” outright if it does not work in tandem with requisite political change and the annihilation of whiteness itself as a construct.
In a blistering critique of white saviorism, Gyasi Lake, for the Black Youth Project, wrote last year:
In a reality where whiteness affords you the luxury of choosing whether or not to leverage your privilege and be revered uncritically, despite glaring flaws, Blackness can never flourish. Until whiteness is dismantled indefinitely, white voices will continue to be elevated and championed above the voices of the most marginalized communities.
The revolution can’t be sponsored and/or acceptable to those we are revolting against.
As a student at Clemson University, I took a course that addressed this very subject called “Whiteness in America.” One of the authors we explored was Noel Ignatiev, whose book, “Race Traitor,” argued that “whiteness” should be abolished altogether and that white people should eschew opportunities to use their privilege to their advantage. Race, for sure, is nothing more than a construct.
As James Baldwin said in “The Fire Next Time”:
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality. But this is a distinction so extremely hard to make that the West has not been able to make it yet. And at the center of this dreadful storm, this vast confusion, stand the black people of this nation, who must now share the fate of a nation that has never accepted them, to which they were brought in chains. Well, if this is so, one has no choice but to do all in one’s power to change that fate, and at no matter what risk — eviction, imprisonment, torture, death.
We now have a disturbingly long and terrible list of black people who were victimized by police brutality or negligence and who did not deserve to die. They include (far from comprehensive):
George Floyd
Breonna Taylor
Ahmaud Arbery
Trayvon Martin
Eric Garner
Dreasjon “Sean” Reed
Philando Castile
Jamar Clark
Botham Jean
Michael Brown
Freddie Gray
Ezell Ford
Tamir Rice
Laquan McDonald
Michelle Shirley
Redel Jones
Kenney Watkins
Stephon Clark
Compounded with these outright injustices, there is a long list of families in the inner city who live under the weight of a system of housing, justice and welfare that do not serve to make their lives better. In many cases, their lives are worse because of systemic racism that now threatens to rot the core of democracy. Indeed, policies under both administrations, but especially the Republicans, during the last five decades have failed to provide adequate and affordable health care and family support services for low-income families, have failed to make the inner cities safe, have failed to root out drugs, have failed to get guns off the street and have failed to offer compassionate economic policies that lift all of the boats, failures that can not be absolved with a $1,200 check. In fact, policies that prop up the rich and benefit inanimate corporations and Wall Street have been put in place at the expense of low-income Americans. And because we have failed the inner cities and because we have failed black people and because we have failed immigrants and because we have failed to take care of the poor and disabled among us, we have failed as a nation, and we have failed as human beings.
After Barack Obama was elected president, some people were ready to declare that racism in America was a thing of the past, but as we have seen, it hasn’t gone away, and maybe it hasn’t even diminished. The period between the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was something of a wandering in the desert for black folks. Black men finally got the vote through the 15th amendment in 1870, and some were even able to win public office, but thanks to the Ku Klux Klan and other fireeaters in the South, black people were intimidated and forced by compulsion to stay away from the polls. Ulysses S. Grant left the presidency after two terms, and Reconstruction fell apart. Civil rights would essentially be at a standstill until the mid-20th century, and former plantation owners in the South simply re-subjugated their former slaves.
The civil rights movement under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and many others, including a coalition of white supporters, experienced a watershed moment with passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Great Society social reform programs in the mid-1960s. The nation showed promise as we were seemingly poised to finally address poverty, economic disparity and social inequality. Unfortunately, while many of LBJ’s programs remain in place to this day, the project of improving life in the inner city fell by the wayside in the late 1970s and early 80s with the introduction of the supposed “War on Drugs,” the gradual privatization of prisons and tougher sentencing regulations for nonviolent drug offenses. These, coupled with a host of policies by conservative lawmakers that bolstered the rich at the expense of low-income workers led to the conditions by which inner city black Americans not only felt economic pressures just trying to make ends meet, but racial tensions and built-in, generational animosity among white people about new rights afforded to black folks, was a noxious recipe for a gathering storm of racial unrest that has spilled across the last four decades.
So, when Obama was elected as the first black president in the nation’s history, the racists and bigots, who briefly came out of hiding to dabble in the newly formed Tea Party in support of John McCain and Sarah Palin, scurried back into their basements to listen to Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and the myriad other far-right conservative voices on talk radio at the time.
Thus, the legacy of racism and prejudice in America is bound up with politics, and at the core, while some racism may be learned or is generational, some of it comes from white animosity that stems from the Civil Rights Era, animosity that is completely unfounded since America was built on the idea of white supremacy and privilege, ideologies by which many in power still operate. White people have always been in charge and have held all the cards.
Just because I am writing about racial injustice and care about black lives doesn’t mean I’m immune from the perils of white saviorism or privilege. As such, I must continually remind myself that I write from a privileged position inside my white skin.
That said, I, like many white people protesting alongside black people, want to help in the cause of reforming the police and the criminal justice system, ending systemic racism and discrimination and holding malevolent officers accountable for their actions. We need extremely harsh sentences for cops who wantonly kill black people with overzealous, dehumanizing behavior. We need every cop to have a body camera, one that they cannot deactivate. We need to end the militarization of police. Studies have shown that militarized policemen only fuel unrest. We need policies that, once and for all, bolster the inner city and increase educational opportunities for children. And people who display hateful or racist behavior need to be marginalized to the fringes of society. There is no place for them in modern America; for, we, white people, must take the following posture in solidarity: when racists speak ill of black people, they speak ill of me and this nation. There can be no tolerance for racism in 2020.
And at the very least, I want to raise awareness about the problems we face as a nation, provide some historical context and support my fellow human beings. Because of my health situation, I’m unable to get out and protest, but will continue to advocate for black lives, for justice and for equality.
The time for change is now — “the fierce urgency of now.”