Calling All White People, Part 28: Halfway isn’t the way to justice and equity

Calling All White People, Part 28

(A periodic attempt to mobilize white people for something other than supporting just other melanin-deficient folks and maintaining a status quo of a nation geared toward whiteness as the baseline and the norm)

By An Average White Guy

TODAY’S EPISODE: We always give white racist patriarchs room to maneuver  

[To find other installments of “Calling All White People,” click here]

I have a wooden chair in my house with a loose leg that I repaired using probably half a roll of basic silver duct tape—yes, it’s secure and usable again and it was a quick and easy fix, but it’s ugly and hardly presents a welcoming seat for visitors. I have more than one room where I mostly painted the walls and then failed to finish off the details. I have ceiling damage in one room that I couldn’t afford to repair, so now a floral-patterned fabric hangs in a billowy manner in that window space like some sort of valance-like treatment to hide the damage.

I could call all of those measures and many more in my home, on my property and in my life half-assed. But that wouldn’t be fair. They did the job more than halfway.

Still, they kind of suck.

And you know what sucks more? What we do with any kind of social progress in the United States. Because rarely do we do the job in even a half-assed way. Quarter-assed would be too much credit. Too often, we start the work or get some momentum going, and then just walk away and assume that what we did will hold—worse, we assume that it will somehow flourish and grow without any effort on our parts.

And when you continue to see the word “we” as this piece continues—and you will, many more times—I mean “We the white people.”

So, we decide slavery is bad and we abolish it. Then we keep our eyes on the former slaveholders for a few years and walk away. And then here comes the Jim Crow era and laws that held Black people down every bit as firmly as slaver-drivers with whips. Oh, and we never did confront the rampant racism in the North that pushed Black people to the margins, either. By the way, we also didn’t get rid of slavery—we just said you could only be enslaved as punishment for a crime (so it should be no wonder why white people are 64% of the U.S. population yet only 39% of the prison population).

Oh, look, now we have the Civil Rights Era. Voting Rights Act. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. This time we’ve finally arrived. We’ve reset the game. …No, we didn’t. Yes, gains were made and some wrongs were righted and some programs came into being that gave Black people some help, but no one addressed the core problem that almost every American institution was controlled by white people and incentivized to continue putting white people in first, second and third place. Honorable mentions only for the people of color, especially the Black and Native American/Indigenous ones. And then when the 1980s rolled around shortly thereafter, we turned away our eyes as the crack cocaine epidemic became not a clarion call to provide counseling, medical care and economic reform but instead an excuse to incarcerate even more Black people simply for having addictions that we helped create to begin with.

Women got some control over their own bodies with Roe vs. Wade and then we acted like it could never be reversed, and plodded along, most of us (women included)  tucking our heads down and looking at our feet as state after state found ever-more-creative ways of limiting access to abortions. And then we ended up with the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief Donald Trump who has now tilted the Supreme Court to a very, very right-wing slant and installed Brett Kavanaugh with a very obvious mission to help bring down women’s rights even more (there are other agendas, too, but that’s the first I think). Oh, and by the way, we the white people put Trump in office. Even if we didn’t vote for him (and a lot of us did, including 53% of white women voters in full support of white patriarchy and white supremacy), most of us propelled Trump to office by assuming he couldn’t win, treating him like entertainment (or a joke) or voting for third party candidates instead of Hillary Clinton (or refusing to vote at all because Bernie Sanders didn’t get the Democratic nod).

We elected a Black president in Barack Obama and gave him two terms and declared ourselves a “post-racial” nation, ignoring how white supremacist violence increased and also being unwilling to name Republican resistance to his policies and practices as the blatant racism that it was. And we got the Tea Party and a move so far to the right in the Republican party that even Ronald Reagan might have been appalled. And then we assumed (wrongly, in case you haven’t noticed yet) that the far-rightward shift would be the death of the GOP—instead, they are going strong and sending decades of progress in this country (such as it was) backwards at a breakneck pace.

I could go on, but I already have, and I think it’s enough.

We start the work, but we don’t finish it.

We give marginalized groups a little something extra, but never enough.

We say we want to create a balanced and fair world, but we aren’t willing to give anything up ourselves.

We point to how evil the oppressors are, but we don’t actually resist them. Instead, we take the “high road” and give them platforms to spread their hateful thoughts, under the guise of “listening to all views.” We see them coming with guns blazing and doing all kinds of shady shit, and we bring along butter knives and boxing gloves to the fight.

We white people who often think ourselves so progressive and fair and open minded too often give white male patriarchs (as do a quite sizable population of white women who don’t want to lose what privilege and power they can get by proximity to them) all the room in the world to maneuver, scheme and undo whatever gains are made to advance racial equity, religious freedom, worker’s rights, women’s rights and more.

There is no halfway in the fight against injustice. There is no end. Can we (reminder: we white people) for God’s sake stop half-assing social change, trying to have our cake and eat it too and assuming that the death of all the old people will end their legacies of hate? Their children and yes, even we “progressives,” all carry that same corruption. As with cancer, you’re never truly “cancer free.” There is always the chance (even the likelihood) tumors will return one day—particularly when we stop paying attention or put on those rose-colored glasses and gorge ourselves on optimistic bullshit.

We need to stop thinking that the current state of rising uber-conservatism, fascism, Nazism, misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, homophobia, gun violence and all the rest “isn’t the real America.” It is. And that’s the problem. We keep believing a better America was hidden under a pile of garbage. It isn’t. We have a pile of garbage we need to burn so that we can create an entirely different America. If you want justice and equity to reign, that has to be the goal. Nothing less. No compromise. No halfway.


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1 thought on “Calling All White People, Part 28: Halfway isn’t the way to justice and equity”

  1. Absolutely true and so “stupid” is not it ? Thank you for bringing white women to the forefront here as enablers. It was this melanin deficient cohort that actually turned the dice in favor of Trump’s election !

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