for their upcoming edition entitled “Separate Lives: Why Baltimoreans Don’t Mix, and What We Can Do About It.” They are partnering with Open Society Institute (OSI) on this being as though OSI has spent about half this year rolling out their Talking About Race Series. I was only allowed to submit 300 words max for the Urbanite article, (a near impossibility for this Baptist preacher!) however, below you will read my more protracted position on the topic:
I remember coming right out of college and getting a research assistant job at Johns Hopkins Hospital. I was working in a department with other recent 22-year-old college graduates. One day during a break from work, the young African American employees began to discuss our observations related to racial dynamics at Hopkins and how they impacted our work in the community. (We were working on a project that connected us to a local middle school.) It was a totally uncensored conversation in which we expressed our frustration with the decisions being made by our supervisors who were all White. Some of them gave the impression that because they had advanced degrees and official titles that they knew better about how to engage African American youth than we did – despite the fact that we were African American! That day our frustration boiled over and we vented amongst ourselves. One of our co-workers – a senior African American woman overheard us talking, rushed over and in fearful whisper placed her finger over her lips and said, “You all have to keep it down. You don’t want other folks to hear what you are saying.” It was understood that by “other folks” she meant White people.
Since our forced arrival to these shores in the early 17th century, Africans in America have had a strong inclination to watch our words, be careful of our actions, and dismiss any behavior that could be deemed threatening to the White Power Structure for to do otherwise could mean the loss of your job, your land, your family, or even your life. It’s been a tactic of survival for many Africans in America back during slavery and even today to find creative ways to live with some measure of dignity under the dehumanizing boot of White Privilege and the White Power Structure.
Consequently, it is a feature of reality in Baltimore for many African Americans that despite the fact that the demographics of the city call us the majority, in the realm of the power structure we are still very much so a minority. The vast majority of the city’s decision makers, funders, foundation heads and political powerbrokers are White.
Even in the so-called “progressive community” – if you are a person of color who desires funding for some community project that is your passion, you will most likely have to ultimately convince a White person that it’s worth funding. Some time ago I attended a mandatory orientation for a community fellowship program to learn more about what it would take to fund some of the things that I do and have been doing for some time now to address pressing public health issues in African American communities. I arrived to the orientation to find out that many of the persons present who were vying for the same fellowship were my African American colleagues, fellow organizers, and community leaders who were also doing remarkable work in the community. The fellowship application process would have pitted us against each other in pursuit of the same pot of money. I walked out refusing to apply to that Fellowship not because I didn’t think I had a chance, but because I knew that if that Foundation really wanted to they could have funded all of us who were “on the ground” and in the neighborhoods already doing the work that the Foundation claimed was its mission. This is just one dynamic of White privilege and Power that you’ll read about in the necessarily controversial book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond The Non-Profit Industrial Complex.
If we are to locate some degree of harmonious co-existence in Baltimore between Black and White communities we must have our own “Greensboro, North Carolina-styled Truth & Reconciliation Commission.” And given that many White people are unable to face or be objective about their place of privilege in society and its residual poison; it’s up to Baltimore’s People of Color to LEAD the effort of defining the nature of reconciliation and determining the best way to get there.
Miguel A. De La Torre makes an important observation in his book Liberating Jonah: Forming An Ethics of Reconciliation. He says, “All too often, discussions about reconciliation originate with the group that the present culture happens to benefit – what can WE do? – and the discussion is manipulated so as to continue benefiting the privileged. He makes the assertion that “any hope for reconciliation must rest with those living on the underside of society.”
A Greensboro or South African-styled Truth Commission for Baltimore (an idea born from Civil Rights Attorney, Sherrilyn Ifill’s remarkable book, On The Courthouse Lawn: Confronting The Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century) would give People of Color the opportunity to officially tell White people the truth in love…for their sake and for ours. I agree with Torre as he echoes the sentiments of James H. Cone, long regarded as the Father of Black Liberation Theology, by saying, “…the disenfranchised can define and forge a reconciliation that can lead to their own liberation and salvation, as well as the salvation and liberation of those who benefit from the present structures of domination.” (This point is expressed in God of the Oppressed and Black Theology & Back Power by Cone.) God continues to be on the side of the oppressed clearing the path for liberation for the world’s People of Color and then God chooses to use the formerly marginalized to lead the oppressors and the privileged to freedom as well – as the final act of a real and substantive racial reconciliation.
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Brother, any type of effort to reconcile with white people would be an immense waste of energy and time. White folk will never genuinely reconcile with Black folk who they recognize – whether consciously or unconsciously – can genetically eradicate them as a "race." The erudite Dr. Francis C. Welsing has bewailed, time and time again, racism, white supremacy is based on white genetic survival – keep in mind that the first law of nature is self-preservation. White folk understand this and are doing what's “necessary” for their "racial" survival. Consequently, any talk or effort taken in the direction of racial reconciliation will fail, and fail greatly. Our efforts have to be focused on creating spaces that are conducive to the removal of this inferiority complex that we have been taught via the educational institutions and society at-large. We have to reconcile our internal maladies before we reconcile externally – particularly, as it relates to other “races.”
Gotta disagree with you, Brother Eric. I appreciate your passion and dedication to our community, but I can't help but hear the counsel of the great theologian and mystic, Howard Thurman, who wrote in his book, Jesus and the Disinherited: "There must always be the confidence that the effect of truthfulness can be realized in the mind of the oppressor as well as the oppressed."
Eric I have to disagree not having a conversation about White privilege or any privilege be it male privilege etc keeps the power structure in place and allows those who are in a privileged position to stay exactly where they are–IN POWER. Having a deep level conversation about race creates an energy that cannot be stopped. When a person recognizes how that they are unconsciously "killing" someone else there is usually a shift in the person–which makes them want to stop and alter their actions. I use the word killing because racism is death. Literally it has psychically, emotionally and spirituality killed people of color for years and it is time to "speak" life to the who are perpetuating racism be it known and unknown.
PS
As for reconciling our internal issues around race, who do you think put those maladies in place?
As someone who 'benefits' from White skin privilege, I very much want to hope that efforts at reconciliation would not be a waste of time. I think there are a lot of White folk who would be shocked to hear what you are saying about "White racial survivor" as a motivator, Eric–and I think that its vital that us White folk be shocked in that sense. It seems to me that the model that Heber is proposing is exactly an attempt to create a space in which White folk can be challenged to answer whether we want to continue to define ourselves by efforts to maintain our "racial survival" (i.e. the dominance of the power structure that Heber talked about), or whether there are nobler goals to strive toward–goals that none of us can achieve as long as folks who look like me gain power and credibility simply by looking like me.
I know very few(if any) white people who are rational towards blacks if the blacks in question are not singing "Mammy" or buck dancing for their amusement. How else would you explain white people's pure hatred of Michael Vick, Obama, Kanye West, Chris Brown, OJ, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee and others who won't bend over for whitey(well, maybe not OJ), but their pure love of Oprah, Tyler Perry,Whoopie, Condeleeza and until recently Tiger Woods.