One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi…
The clock ticks on, and I am compelled to respond, nevertheless, to the silence of those white folks near to me in this moment of national upheaval and international importance. It is necessary to remind at the first that ‘White’ as a race is a fairly recent historical creation, and not a construct of a priori truth; rather it is a construct of political aim (and success), foisted on the world probably since the preparation and implementation of the Spanish Inquisition, and the subsequent colonizing of the ‘peripheral’ countries with Black and Brown populaces.
On Shame
When confronted with the call—the demand—to say something of racial injustice in a position of whiteness and power, it is common nowadays and for a certain brain to claim “shame.”
While it remains true that shame, or more generally negative reinforcement, is not as effective as positive reinforcement or encouragement, what these White people do, those who claim shame, is willfully ignore their elemental social position, and the relationships therein.
It is, first, by their late entrance to the very conversation and awareness of racial relations that they accentuate their privilege. Second it is their thoughts of “I just don’t talk politics,” or “I’m not in the space to deal with / process what’s going on,” reinforcing their late entrance in the future and revalidating their disconnection from the plight of others previously. Third, they turn always and quickly to themselves, denouncing the tools and methods used to bring them to this vague awareness of injustice, claiming, essentially, that the end does not justify the means. They then propose their own solutions on how better to get themselves to participate, rather than simply beginning the participation or enlisting others to the cause by some same methods. “Maybe less this, more that”, “less shame, more encouragement,” and so on. The position remains preposterous and wasteful of precious time.
These upholders of the preposterous are simply going on about their lives and, as Chomsky says of others, they “not only don't know what's happening…, they don't even know that they don't know.”
They do not know, and primarily cannot conceive of, how the life they live is privileged by virtue of their ignore-ance to the experiences of others (thank you, individualism).
Oh, sure, they occasionally and in passing acknowledge the existence of worldwide and irrefutable situations, such as ‘poverty’, ‘homelessness’, and some unjust wars; but oh do they enjoy keeping those things at arms length, for if subjected to earnest and materialist investigation, things would need to be done in specific areas and particular actors would need to be held to account.
No, they would much rather pontificate than change their own circumstances of comfort and, quite literally, bliss in ignorance. The life around them seems perfectly fine, save for the troublemakers of dissent in some afar land; and so, as easy and cliche as it sounds, why would they bother to upset their own reality just because some other poor soul found themselves in some bad luck or bad temper?
The problem is, it has never been about luck, and all about material choices through history from White male and female actors (or if White is invalid then European, as we are), subjugating and utilizing Black and Brown people to Eurocentric ends and profit, which rightly leads to the temperament of rebellion from the euro-hegemony.
Near the beginning of this in our modern conception, the White master of poor White people saw the growing and enriching world and said loudly unto all White masters, “Since these poor White people, indeed men and women of God, will soon find themselves taken advantage of, they will rise up and, with the power of a Godly man, demand justice for their toil and subjugation. We cannot have this! And so let us tie the poor White man to the Black and Brown half-man. Those three quarters of men. Let us civilize these colored peoples into the economy of White, so that their demands, along with those demands of the poor White people, justified but not heeded, may fall on deaf ears. For what man of God would allow himself be chastised by not-a-man and his cohorts? Furthermore let us ease slightly the burden of the White man by creating a ‘middle-class.’ Here, the poor White may reside below myself, the master, but, obviously, above the sub-humans. This is the global market.”
Here now we have the rich White masters, the enabling though perhaps ignorant middle class, and the lower usable peoples, though not entirely Black and Brown, majorly, for Asia is not immune to the dehumanizing White-scale. Most people you know are of the middle class, but through research and development of this theory, the masters also divided that up into parts: upper middle class, middle class, lower middle class. They had to do this in order to make it conceivable to move marginally within your bracket, while keeping it near to impossible for any working person to class-jump outside of their bracket (though it is certainly more possible to class-jump down rather than up).
Since billionaires are acutely numbered (about 600 individuals in the United States), most, if not certainly all, of the people you know are within the degrees of middle class. By findable circumstances my family is within the upper echelons of that, and so they are amongst the primary trickle-down beneficiaries of the billionaire/millionaire class’s exploitation of the world’s lowest classes—however indirectly—as well the world order formed through it.
Because of this indirect and plausibly deniable scenario, it is imperative to educate these upper middle class folk to their benefit-by-compliance from the world order as it has been created through the oppression of the Black and Brown citizen. As finding themselves just below that sphere of authority and decision-making, they have a moral obligation, insofar as the Golden Rule can be agreed upon, to use that position (privilege) to societally just ends, where extreme injustices exist already.
When called to do such things, however minimal they are, this privileged class chooses instead to victimize themselves, ostensibly for the reason and acknowledgment that they too are not part of the billionaire/millionaire class of citizenry (here comes the ‘White people suffer, too’ retort). These upper middle class citizens do not see themselves as having advantage (or enough advantage) over people, and so while they fight for the impossible class-jump upward, they leave the middle and lower middle class residents to do their own bidding: they are charged first to make the impossible and arduous climb up the class-hierarchy system, despite the structural prohibitions to their doing so; then, only maybe, will they have the ear of some one decision maker who may dole out justice, if he or she so chooses. A journey rivaling Sisyphus. Pushing, kicking, stomping down the existence of Black and Brown people, nations, and communities, it is certifiably sadistic to call on them also to be austere in a world that loots their bodies, nations, cultures, and resources, to the very bare minimum, and then erases culpability by erasing history itself.
These subjugated peoples have no reason to abide by the organizational rules that explicitly condone the very vulnerability that lets them be taken advantage of in the first, and that they have fought against centuries over, unto this very day. And so, when White, upper middle class folks, a class to which I have been a part, claim victim at the onset of demands for change, they are certainly expressing a will to do or say anything to keep things, at the minimum, just the way they are. They don’t want to move down the class hierarchy chain, so they fight for the chain’s strength (sometimes through not fighting for a single thing at all, or focusing on the non-active ‘education,’ and ‘listening’ that is, for some reason, required for them to see what is going on in front of them).
When these people feel they are being “shamed” into speaking about these structures of oppression and opportunity, it is really an inner shame they find—begging expression—that they hope to quell through continuation of the very ignorance that brings shame with it. It is the shame of acknowledgment without effort or, indeed, without even entering the competition. They find themselves simply placed at the top, or again, in the middle; which is a head start of multitudes beyond the lower classes and subjugated peoples. They know their place in this system, and perhaps they even know of their non-action! But it is certainly not shame that is the problem, it is silence.
On Obligation
The particular obligation I speak on now is one of using voices in high and privileged places to ends that help to free the low and oppressed peoples and places. With social media, these voices can be random and numerous. It just so happens, again through findable circumstances, that five of my family members have great followings on Instagram alone, numbering over 6.25 million followers combined. Due to the reasons for attaining that audience, there is no doubt some overlap, but with our different niches and personalities there is also a lot of truth in that number. Our family is very White presenting, with German, English, Polish, and some smattering other Northern ethnicities mixed in. My parents both, one brother, one niece, and one nephew all have dwarfism, marking a noticeable physical difference that carries its own harsh histories with it. My parents were both successful public speakers on overcoming adversity in their own lives as physically diverse people, inspiring little people like them, and also inspiring those considered “average”.
This message they spoke of has become somewhat of a legend that we no longer necessarily espouse with full-throat. These five of my family, with such large followings, are put into the group online known as Influencers. Though to be an influencer has devolved into simply meaning that you use your account as a business and individualized brand, posting adds and promotions for money or clout, this title can be manifest as an immense power of good, if only the responsibility is undertaken.
Notwithstanding the way in which this following has been gathered, that is, what one would have to do to retain it, it is certainly within possibility to wield this responsibility to ends that both educate and inspire action; if not directly encouraging it then by mere exposure to the current issue. For if Chomsky, above, is right, then the very first step would be to tell others what they do not know by virtue of their social position.
If the privileged person in this position abdicates their moral responsibility to enlist their influenced following to the just causes of our world, what earthly and useful thing are they influencing on behalf of anyway?
Though the answer seems roundly to come back: Capital, it remains one uncharted area by these privileged few, and so it remains pertinent to remind them of their obligation to the subjected Other, through whose plight they certainly benefit.
On Virtue and Signals
The phrase “virtue-signaling” is being used more and more often by those seeking to delineate and off-put the moral responsibilities they are continuously reminded of, but that may be inconvenient in varying degrees and for various reasons.
It more effectively signals the speaker’s pessimism. This is so by their inherent suspicion that no one could possibly seek justice for a total stranger except for ulterior reasons and through nefarious motivations that are imagined to be held in secret. Beyond the fact that this is generally untrue, and that people generally tend to be good to one another (opposing Lord of the Flies, there is the real-life story of a group of Polynesian boys becoming marooned on a deserted island where they remained, survived, and thrived for over 15 months, creating a communal community with shared responsibilities and rewards), this claim begs the question of which virtues are being signaled—emptily or not.
In the case of today and this issue, it is anti-racism (and if that is the virtue I signal, so be it). White folks, and especially the middle and upper middle classes as mentioned above, have a huge amount of active work to do in order that our racially scaffolded society may be deconstructed and then built justly anew. This work consists in, as we said, first coming to realize your position; then using said position to the extremities of its usefulness in the waking up of others; then in active organization amongst immediate peers to the end of deconstruction of the White Comfort world—that is, to make oneself uncomfortable in confrontation of self and family—in foro conscientiae. After this immediate circle of awareness is established, that is, one that is no longer complacently non-racist, it is possible to make strides toward the anti-racist dismantlement of our racist structures with actions countable by One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi… and not in the abstraction of too-big-to-fail problems, so often pacifying the would-be do-gooder.
This is indeed one major hurdle for white people; rather than upsetting the image of their comfortable world by acknowledging racism and its actors, and thus solutions, they begin revolting, making the claim that racism and the like will always exist, and so, we should not dream so mightily as to exhaust this natural spring of hate and bigotry.
While those feelings are a true tendency, it is obvious why we cannot let that position stand. First, because there are certifiable things to be done to pacify the plight. And it is not partially that we should do so; it is not a “freer” Black American that we must strive for but free Black Americans in equality and totality. If we are cognizant of the scale on which this freedom is measured in the first place, of slave-freer-free, then we are cognizant of the fact that partial freedom is no freedom whatever. This type of thinking is as Malcolm X described it would be if a knife were plunged ten inches into your back and then pulled out six inches. You would not thank the person for their charity, instead you would be within rights to scream all the louder for its full expulsion.
The national protests going on right now, merely to ratify that Black Lives Matter, and deserve fundamental rights, namely those laid out by the 1st and 4th Amendments, are the screams for those remaining four inches to be pulled from their backs. With these protests, there are coming sincerely revolutionary demands and progresses, like the Defund The Police programme, which can be acted on as surely as we can count the minutes in a day.
No patience exists today for the platitudinous putting off of tangible, achievable change. We may now count One, when we use our white voices to lobby for change, and Two, supporting the representation of Black Americans in our government, and Three, using our hands to physically make this new and better world happen. Abstraction and pontification are no longer enough, and indeed no longer necessary. The funds are here, the moment is here, the People are here, and the alternative at our door is further concentration of that which we hope to overthrow, and which Black Americans have been trying to overthrow for centuries. It is not a country built for them, though it was built by them. As White middle class citizens we are either in and amongst this fight, or we are in justification of its continuation. It is that moment for choosing sides. So, as White people we must use our voice toward building a better world for all, now, with all of the tools, privilege, and might at our disposal.
As James Baldwin searingly questioned: “You always told me it takes time. It has taken my father's time, my mother's time. My uncle's time. My brother's and my sister's time. My niece's and my nephew's time.… How much time do you [white Americans] want for your “progress”?