It is five years since George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, by a white police officer kneeling on his neck and back for over nine minutes, asphyxiating him: he was 46. His dying words “I can’t breathe” affected millions and was taken up in the Black Lives Matter movement.
When George Floyd was murdered I felt impotent; I thought I must do SOMETHING…so I made a small poster out of the spread in the Guardian Weekly and pinned it to the tree outside my house. It showed a photo of George Floyd and it said BLACK LIVES MATTER. I mostly wanted people of colour who passed my house to know I shared some sort of …. what? Outrage? Compassion? Solidarity? Grief? I was glad I’d done it but it made me wonder exactly how and what I was sharing.
At the same time a young couple who lived in a house almost opposite mine put a specially printed poster in their front window which read BLACK LIVES MATTER in a big bold typeface. They were a black couple and I am white: I really wanted somehow to connect with them but I didn’t know how. I couldn’t tell if that was because there was a difference between us of how we each displayed the poster, Black Lives Matter. That set me thinking about what I want to explore here; what is behind the difference between a black person saying Black Lives Matter, and a white person saying Black Lives Matter?
Thandeka is a Unitarian Universalist minister, an American liberal theologian; she focusses on the experience of affective consciousness being central to religion, rather than belief, and her writing critiques some popular approaches to anti-racism work, taking a singular approach to understanding white identity. In Part Two of her paper Whites: Made in America, 2017, published in 2018 by the University of Illinois Press, on behalf of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, she investigates “Three Forms of White Racist Attacks against Whites”: White Privilege: the unequal representation in Government enshrined in the American Constitution, favouring the Southern states: the suppression of the ‘ethnic’ affections of the Northern states’ immigrant populations. In Part One she recounts some of the personal stories which had provoked and informed her studies. This is one.
“Several years ago, a conversation changed the way I think about white racism in America. I was forced to conclude that racism will not go away until whites are recognized as racial victims of white America too. My use of the term “racism” in this personal narrative refers to acts and attitudes that racially demean self and others.
The initial setting for my startling discovery about white racism was Williams College, one of the oldest, most prestigious, and wealthiest colleges in the nation. The year, 1991.
I had been on campus for three months as a new faculty member in the religion department when one of the college librarians invited me to have lunch with her, saying “I have wanted to have lunch with you ever since you arrived on campus.” I wondered why this fifth-generation Smith graduate …………… wanted to dine with me, a lowly assistant professor.
As we sat down in the faculty dining room, she told me what was up: race. “I’ve always wanted to know what it feels like to be black,” she said.
……………….. Her face was open, friendly, and inviting. She seemed genuinely interested and engaged. But there was a problem. Her question assumed that I was the only one at the table who had been raced. She, too, had been raced, but she didn’t seem to know this fact. I wanted her to tell me what it feels like to be white. So I invented a game on the spot and asked her if she would be willing to play the game for a week………. [She willingly agreed.]
The game had only one rule. For the next seven days, whenever she referred to someone she knew in her all-white setting, she would have to use the descriptive term “white” [every single time]. If, for example, she talked about one girlfriend to another, she must say “You know her, she’s the white woman with the blonde hair.” ……….. And if she talked about her husband with a friend, she must say “He is such a fine white man.” Do this for a week, I told her, and then when we next have lunch together, you will understand my answer to your question.
We never had lunch together again.” ‘
After this experience Thandeka started asking her friends and colleagues to recall their earliest experience of an incident that had helped to form their racial identity. What experience led them to say to themselves, ‘So this is what it means to be white;…”
Reading this brought back to me my own experiences of growing up until I was twelve as a white child in Colonial East Africa. In infancy I had identified utterly as black, in the care of Julianna, and, in the childhood I remember with words, I had always felt secure in the care of black servants. My parents would not have seen that their-white-infant had bonded with her black carer, nor that their-white-child depended affectionately on her black child-minders; to my white parents, as their white child, I was the memsahib kidogo and the carers were black servants. This was the early 1950s and my parents did not move in the sort of circles that would have come across Attachment Theory, let alone have understood it.
The first time I actually voiced to myself the discrepancy of being white was in my first term at boarding school, aged 7. I was walking from my dormitory and I passed a boy of exactly my age/size. I was a going to my classroom and he was hoeing a flowerbed. I wore a neat school uniform and he wore a tattered vest and shorts, no shoes. It hit me that we were identical, being children, but that my childhood was utterly different from his; I was white and he was black. I remember feeling shocked that “this is me and that’s him”, and felt very uncomfortable. I felt impotent to deal with my feelings, and didn’t know how to respond to the situation; so I pushed it all down and became used to being the white schoolchild and he a shamba-boy, inured by my norms and that “there is nothing I can do about it”…. I remember how later incidents felt increasingly more shocking; I was getting older and more able to understand the implications of the situations; in particular, the way that I was impotent as a child but powerful by virtue of being white.
I have read that some black people have strong feelings nowadays to say that white people have no right to presume to align themselves with the suffering which the black population endures from racism, nor to protest alongside; I think that’s such a destructive insistence. It seems to me that that distinction actually fulfils the cynical laws that Virginia started imposing in 1670, to set poor whites and poor blacks against each other, they having previously had much in common, to disallow that whites should/could be able to “ feel what they have in common with blacks”. I think that disallowing whites to protest now obout black issues of injustice and hurt denies any way that whites have come to realise and own how they have been raced themselves, in their white society..
This is all so very very complex and we only glimpse it here. Thandeka’s paper, describes the history of the way that “Race work … began in America – at an affective level – as a way to transform the inner emotional lives of whites so that they could NOT see and feel what they had in common with blacks:…….” This affects us all and is hard stuff to own, for both blacks and whites. I feel the way to work to go forward is not by either blacks or whites trying to quantify their respective degrees of suffering, but rather to return to Thandeka’s list of what we have in common :”feelings of loss, fear, and anger and rage at being taken advantage of”. Thandeka goes on to say that, “These affective racial, political and economic conditions that began more than two centuries ago set the stage for the rise of an authoritarian leader like Donald Trump as America’s forty-fifth president to represent a disheartened, disempowered and humiliated white people.”
So I am brought back to my question; what is the difference between black and white people saying Black Lives Matter?