Juneteenth Memory Remembrance: Life Is Complicated.
I wrote about this memory, first as a condensed, tweet thread last Juneteenth.
I worked part time for a black business owner, as I attended Brown Institute for radio in Minneapolis from 1983–84.
Initially, I was one of only two workers. Both of us were white.
And why was that? Race in America is complicated.
Later it was myself and two black workers, one of them worked directly with Bill on reupholstering.
Then one of the black employees was working with me after the upholsterer left. The remaining worker had been in the Navy. We became quick friends, being the same age; he even invited me to come with him to a party Prince was putting on.
My last coworker was a 4th generation Latino Minnesotan; a great guy, too.
Finally, after 10 months it was just the boss and me.
Then one day…
“Bill” stood in front of me…
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He had arrived here via the The Great Migration from 1950s Alabama.
He ran his own, small upholstery shop for 30 years by 1984, in a mostly white area of south Minneapolis. He and his wife had no children as far as I know.
Always a serious man, he was not a big talker, but we had become friends, like the old and the young sometimes do in a small business environment. Call it a mentor/mentee relationship. He showed me how to beautifully refinish the wood on high quality sofas. He would charge clients from all over the Twin Cities $1500 for the whole reupholster and refinishing work.
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As he began talking… I saw a tear in the corner of his eye.
I cannot remember exactly how he phrased his next sentence, but I knew it could be interpreted by others in a racist way. He had not been able to keep a black employee for more than a couple months.
Did Bill say, why is this occurring? Is it a specific problem like his management style, or black men in general? Or something else he is missing?
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Here were two different generations; Bill was likely as old as MLK would have been, in his mid 50s. I was a twenty-two year old white kid.
One black, born in the South under Jim Crow, the other, white, born in the north. Though I had encountered racist attitudes, and had some diverse friendships, I was still largely ignorant, at that time, of all the subtle layers of our racist infrastructure.
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The term “uplift-suasion” comes to mind at this point because Bill was a believer in its value from what I could tell. Maybe too much of a believer from the standpoint of Ibram Kendi’s work.
Of course, he knew making it in a white world was not made easy in any way, even in the north. But everyone processes their environment differently. Him being in a mostly white environment for 30 years, and under the influence of its media to some extent at least, may have leaned towards a more strict or white-cultured version of the uplift-suasion mentality.
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Pull up your pants, tie your shoes, trim your afro, etc. were some of the simplistic reactions used by the uplift-suasion cohort in the 80s. “Blacks who are the most presentable, educated, and compliant will do best, and keep out of trouble” is their motto*. A philosophy formed adjacent to slavery.
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Bill was not of it*, but he was likely conflicted. He was not going to say most black men are lazy. Bill was not. Yet he was upset that none of his black employees stayed more than a couple of months.
It Must Be Laziness, Yes, But Whose?
I asked myself the following questions as a way to figure out the reality, and maybe Bill asked himself similar ones. What is going on, are most black men lazy today? Did welfare corrupt them? Are they just irresponsible, and incorrigible because their fathers are absent? Are they gang members? In trouble with the law? Everyone must realize that such comments, and notions of black men have sloshed around for centuries. Why is that?
I did not believe any of those racial tropes and social slurs. However, I personally had few convincing go-to answers, or statistics to build a solid case in 1984. Maybe some of them merely resented me working there? Possibly Bill was harder on them than me, and they saw it?
Do the centuries prove out the racist tropes? First, consider whether a slave could be lazy? If I was a slave, I would be lazy whenever I could! That said, slaves were never allowed to be lazy.
And clearly a huge percentage of them could not have been lazy; slaves made our “free” country possible. Slaves created nearly all our wealth in our first 80 years as a nation! How is that for horribly and sadistically ironic?
Maybe it was whites that were, and the most lazy? I have made a good case for it in my book. Who stole, and got nearly “free” the land we now squat on? Killing to confiscate land was tolerated by whites until we had all we wanted. I call that rioting and looting of the worst form, would you not as well?
When you think on it a bit, you realize whites are the double standard bearers of the rankest form. Slavery and removal of first nation peoples may be old history, but it is the foundation for our misremembering of racism, and our racist policies that still inflict injustices today.
It is horrendous, the extent to which inaccurate perceptions of black lives have been continually fostered to this day. The reality is blacks have never been pampered, or given too much welfare. It is whites that have had welfare consistently layered upon us.
Many whites got less than others from the government, but always more in some way than 99.98% of blacks with ancestry in the U.S. of over a century. Furthermore, anytime whites in the lower 80 to 90% got pulled down economically, it was because they did not stand up with blacks to crush the power of wealthier whites. Again, too lazy to fight on the winning side.
The Social Dilemmas Of White Making.
The genesis of almost every social problem is the fault of white society. There is no point in our history where blacks have gotten more than whites in government aid. The racist tropes about welfare queens, and such are utterly pathetic when compared to crony capitalist theft of our economy.
Our promoting of those racist lies deserves a history book head thumping. If you took into account the last 400 years of treatment blacks have received, blacks deserve at least 400 years of being “lazy” like whites!
But no, we want blacks to be put on a farcical ahistorical, fake merit-based starting line that whites never were on with white privilege heaped on our laps. Juneteenth is not a day to continue “white” lies.
We must imbue the idea of national responsibility. Personal responsibility for too long has been an abused, racist term. Have any of you whiteys personally been responsible for stopping anything racist? Just what I thought…
We failed our society. We still fail. We are failures.
The Shinola Fan Hit By Feces Of Falsehoods.
My black employer of 35 years ago was right to be confused, and conflicted by our voluminous amounts of propagandist bullshit and shinola. White society has always lied about and played down its transgressions against other races.
Whites have harmed, lied, harmed, lied, harmed… And still say lies about, and perpetrate harms against, black Americans. We have never taken much responsibility for any of it.
The Irish are said to have had a similar experience to blacks in America. Being half Irish, O’Connell was my mom’s name, I object to such superficially ignorant comparisons. Once off the boat, many of us got on freely, we learned English, stopped wearing leprechaun outfits, and hid our heaviest drinkers, so a few less babies out of wedlock. Then we blended right in… because of our f’ing whiteness!
Therefore it is clear, we have undereducated, or denied a proper education to both white and black American children about how we have continually imprisoned black lives. Even upstanding blacks are made to live imprisoned. Many have been murdered for merely being successful.
Personal responsibility, welfare queens, or pull up your pants all hold no quarter to the abuses whites have loaded on black Americans. Such racist tropes are sick, fatal, and inaccurate misdirection.
Initially, whites did not “work that hard” to make this a “great” nation, we killed, and deported its original inhabitants. Then imported, and enslaved others merely due to the color of their skin.
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Are we still those people? Too many of us.
Do those old transgressions still matter? I believe so.
Is racism gone when whites say it is gone? Assuredly not.
Are the huge racial disparities due to receiving welfare, not acting like whites, or lack of personal responsibility? We seem to think so.
Is crime worse in black communities because of black culture? Many whites, even some blacks think so.
Is the fact that cops in the U.S. kill black men at much higher percentages than whites not a problem because blacks shoot blacks more often? Seems many want it to be so.
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Followers of the mist filled, and myth willed, “colorblind” society like to blame most of the societal hardships blacks experience on blacks themselves. It is the process of deflecting, debasing, and disenfranchising.
Uplift-Suasion Snake Oil Still Slithers.
If more blacks just did the uplift-suasion thing professor Kendi wrote about, black lives would improve? Dr. Kendi saw this idea as a 100 plus year copout by whites and blacks that are not demanding a completely antiracist society.
Additionally, Jim Crow was so effective in keeping blacks from uplift-suasion because Jim Crow was an insidious structure with a racist “recycling” system.
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It was often very hard for black men to find work.
Loitering was illegal; many were often jailed for it.
Fines were also given out. But black men could not pay the fines because they had no job.
They got sentenced to work camps, a.k.a. peonage, and fined more while there.
That meant they stayed in those camps. In earlier versions, many never got out, they were worked to death in those concentration camps.
Just as slavery morphed into Jim Crow; today we have morphed into a rigged, crony capitalistic, made up merit system.
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This foundation of racist structures has built-in flaws to insure blacks cannot gain ground in the aggregate in any substantial way, even today. It is not about big time entertainers, prominent politicians, and sports professionals. I am talking the other 99.99% of black Americans.
Example: Less educated whites are paid as much today than more highly educated blacks.
Legal Eagle Has Not Landed At An Antiracist Airport.
Such disparities are also found in our broken legal system. Justice from whites still equals injustice for blacks.
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Three times as many blacks are killed during traffic stops by cops than whites.
Blacks are incarcerated longer than whites for the same crimes. Maybe one reason why more black fathers are absent? Huh.
Whites use, buy, and sell illegal drugs as much, if not more than blacks, but MORE blacks are jailed, and imprisoned for drugs! Huh.
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Whites have never had this much trouble in the aggregate doing, being, getting, or having anything. That is why white privilege covers all white people in some way, shape, or form. We benefit, or have benefited, and do not know it.
Blacks have been totally screwed by our system, and their statistics completely skewed by our mostly unchecked white privilege.
The Invisibility Of White Responsibility.
Whites have a TENTH the personal responsibility blacks do. If not true, there would be almost no such disparities.
But our responsibility is buried in the sand with our lily white heads.
Bill had an understanding of how the scales were disproportionately weighted against black men. However, it may have seemed to him things had gotten so much better since his time in the South that he could not see the deep systemic grip racist policies still had on society in the aggregate, and how whiteness was still obscenely overvalued, in the north and the south.
Most white people ignore, cannot see, or play down the signs of racism in society, and some black Americans also do. That is due to our habit of focusing on the veneer of change, American Exceptionalism, and losing track of, or hiding, the core racist structures, built over centuries, and continually weighed down by purposely developed transitional links:
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Like slavery, to peonage, and Jim Crow, near total segregation, killing blacks to stop their voting… To redlining, which meant school segregation in the north, also highways were built over black communities that are put in closer proximity to hazardous waste, power plant and refinery pollution… Then “small” government, which is another states’s rights scam (meaning fewer welfare programs deployed in the ghettos that whites created, and for southern black communities)… More recently, the drug war, mass incarceration, stop and frisk…. Systemic? Obviously, very much.
Let Us Conclude This.
While life is complicated, we can change this dynamic –– check out my Democracy Dies: Unless… article. More importantly, white people must remember it is mainly our responsibility to make those changes.
Letting change happen over time, a.k.a. incrementalism, will never be enough, especially in the area of our racist societal patterns and government policies. So let’s get to the real hard work!
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by Richard The Chwalek.
The above elaborated essay was first published on Medium.
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First published as a tweet stream, June 19, 2020, on my White Privilege Is Real Twitter: @WhitePrivIsReal.
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