The Chris Moeller Archives

An anti-racist's creed

In 1985, Miles Davis told Jet Magazine that if he had one hour left to live on the planet, he would spend it choking a white man. “I’d do it nice and slow,” Davis said. Truthful or hyperbole, I like to think that, if Davis followed through with his hypothetical homicide, the white man he chose wouldn’t be Bill Evans. Evans had played piano in Davis’ first great sextet in the late ‘50s and performed on the seminal Kind of Blue album. Davis cared enough about the man to try to help him kick his heroin habit multiple times. Of course, Evans was already dead by 1985.

Where does that leave the rest of us? I give this question a lot of thought these days. This is an extraordinary moment in global history to rise up and remodel white consciousness. It’s demanded of us. We’re needed. We’re late to it. Our black brothers and sisters are putting themselves in the street. Again. Through some miracle, they have pulled us away from our passionate pursuit of escapism and seem to have garnered our attention, even if many of us feel simply inconvenienced. They’re marching. They’re picketing. They’re boycotting. They’re kneeling. They’re teaching. What are we going to pay out to cover our share of the rent?

For Malcolm X, the ideal white soldier was an actual soldier, the pre-Civil War guerrilla fighter John Brown. White America, even liberal America, would have us remember Osawatomie Brown as a religious lunatic, a demented dreamer, a terrorist. That wasn't Brother Malcolm's take...

"We need allies who are going to help us achieve victory, not allies who are going to tell us to be nonviolent. If a white man wants to be your ally, what does he think of John Brown? You know what John Brown did? He went to war. He was a white man who went to war against white people to help free slaves. He wasn’t nonviolent. White people call John Brown a nut. Go read the history, go read what all of them say about John Brown. They’re trying to make it look like he was a nut, a fanatic. They made a movie about it, I saw a movie on the screen one night. Why, I would be afraid to get near John Brown if I go by what other white folks say about him. 

“But they depict him in this image because he was willing to shed blood to free the slaves. And any white man who is ready and willing to shed blood for your freedom—in the sight of other whites, he’s nuts. As long as he wants to come up with some nonviolent action, they go for that, if he’s liberal, a nonviolent liberal, a love-everybody liberal. But when it comes time for making the same kind of contribution for your and my freedom that was necessary for them to make for their own freedom, they back out of the situation… We need white allies in this country, we don’t need those kind who compromise. We don’t need those kind who encourage us to be polite, responsible, you know. We don’t need those kind who give us that kind of advice. We don’t need those kind who tell us how to be patient. No, if we need some white allies, we need the kind that John Brown was, or we don’t need you.” 

What he’s getting at here is the distinction between what author and educator Ibram X. Kendi calls the “assimilationist” and the “anti-racist.” The assimilationist aspires to equality, but it’s going to be on the white majority’s terms. The white canvas serves as the norm. We’re not going to disrupt the fundamental structure. Indeed we must always affirm it. Act proper, they say to black people, not the fool. Lift yourself up. Your culture needs you to assimilate into one that is not your own to prove that you are worthy. This has been an evolution in racist thought. Booker T. Washington was an assimilationist. He championed uplift. He engaged valiantly in the struggle during a time of Jim Crow terror, but he promoted behavior and the development of educational institutions that mirrored a white ideal. Better behavior among blacks, he believed, could erase racism. W.E.B. DuBois came after. He was an assimilationist that became an anti-racist with the benefit of living to see the failures of attempted assimilation. He lived long enough to march on Washington with Dr. King in 1963. The anti-racist believes that the onus is on the oppressor. Being black doesn’t require one to be super-white. The white oppressor built the racist institutions, the economic system that enslaves, and the military force that polices the streets and imprisons, protecting the de facto imbalance that comforts the white power structure and afflicts the black underclass.

Off on an unusual tangent, assimilationists, who tend to dwell in the middle- and upper-class, hated the early-mid-century radio and television depictions of the comedy team, Amos and Andy, who were first white men portraying black men on the radio, but later the comedic characters were portrayed by black actors on TV. Amos and Andy did not uplift. They were buffoons, uneducated hustlers. But poor blacks made the show a popular one in both media formats. They were grateful for media images that revealed black people to possess the same human foibles that were being depicted for and by other ethnic groups. Being black doesn’t mean you don’t also get to be human. Black people, in reality, are a collection of groups differentiated, according to Kendi, by gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, skin color, profession, and nationality. Getting treated as an individual is actually the finest example of white privilege in the U.S.

Here are other examples I’ve come to recognize recently by investing just a modicum of time and effort, torn from today’s headlines-- carrying guns in a public place, that’s white privilege; the Second Amendment in general; the presumption of innocence; unqualified respect for having served in the nation’s armed forces; getting to define for yourself what it is you are protesting instead of being told by someone else what your motivation is. This is on us. This is shit for us to deal with as white people. Slave labor built this empire. The police state, which we empower, arm, and legislate, preserves the fundamental disorder.

What is racism? I was asked this question in the comments thread of one of the blog entries years ago. One of my readers was angry about something I had written, and I came up with an inadequate answer. With the help of Kendi’s book “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” I think I have a better and more educated answer to offer now: If you believe that all people are created equal and are truly of equal biology beneath the skin, then you must acknowledge that all inequities that exist in the culture—in the economic system, in the political system, in the criminal justice system, of opportunity, are the products of racism. That is the anti-racist position. If you do not believe that, that is racism. There’s no other explanation for these stark discrepancies that exist except to believe that some races are inferior to others.

Can blacks be racist? White reactionaries often tell us that they can, and you know something? I believe those reactionaries are correct-- but not in the way they intend to convey. Members of an oppressed race cannot be racist towards their oppressor because racism is part and parcel of the controlling institutions. Racism is systemic and the oppressor controls the system. But… the reality is that, in a racist society, because racism is a disease, many blacks come to internalize themselves that they are inferior. Like so many whites, they also buy into the pervasive lie that they are less than worthy, that their culture is less than worthy, that their heritage and their customs are less than worthy. That’s the racism many black people live with within themselves because it’s been ingrained in them. We have a responsibility then, and not an easy one. Our mission is to educate ourselves, to liberate ourselves, to self-critique, to open our minds to help change, collectively, what is the pathological reality of a racist America.

posted by CM @ 10:30 PM