My Brother Opened a Good-Faith Conversation About His Discomfort with Black Lives Matter. Here’s How I Responded.

I hope I did okay.

Before we begin, my brother is a good man. He is intelligent, thoughtful, and principled. He’s also lived his entire life in communities that are mostly white and, thus, has never been motivated to think much about racism. Like many white people, he had the luxury of racism not bleeping on his radar. Until recently, that is. So, good on you, Black Lives Matter, for making the following conversation happen.

Politically, he leans conservative, but he is not a fan of Trump. He considers himself socially liberal and fiscally conservative. He is a high school teacher and a quiet, gentle, and caring husband and father. He is also amazingly generous with people he loves. He has TWICE flown across the country to help me move, then flown home, all on his own dime. I love and respect him madly.

This morning he emailed me and three other close family members, sharing a YouTube video (which is really problematic and uninformed, in my view) that he felt did a good job articulating his concerns about the Black Lives Matter movement. He wrote that now when he encounters an African American, he notices them more. He emphasized that he doesn’t “feel more negatively toward them,” only discomfort that they may see him as racist. He thinks “the better approach is for people and society to be color blind to a greater extent.”

He went on to delve into an acknowledgment of his own prejudices: “When I examine my prejudices, I find I judge and have bias toward people based on their appearance; (how they dress, their mannerisms, general appearance). Some of my prejudices may be wrong and immoral but they are very little based on the color of the person’s skin. I need to keep examining my prejudices.” (I appreciate his openness to this — it’s necessary for everyone, in my opinion.)

In responding, my goal was to share with him a more in-depth perspective of the lasting impact of racist practices through US history but to do so in a way that kept the conversation going and kept him open to taking in more and more information.

So in my reply-all response, I said,

“This issue of racism in America is really complex and emotionally laden, and it’s one that can be hard to broach. So I’m really happy that you broached it. It took courage and integrity. You opened a dialogue in an open and good-faithed way, and this is something that we need more of in America. . . .

“As I say in the attached letter, I want to thank you for opening this conversation. I do understand where you’re coming from — I’ve been there myself. But my perspective changed the more I learned about the history of systemic racism in the United States. This letter goes over a little bit of it. But if you’re ever interested in learning more, a good place to start is to watch 13th on Netflix. Another article I read that gave me a really in-depth understanding of the policies and practices that institutionalized racism in America was “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It gave me one doozy of a history lesson. Although it is long and dense and exhausting, I’m happy that I now know the information it provides.”

Then here is what I wrote to him in my letter. And it is long . . .

First of all, I want to thank you for sending this email, sharing this video, and discussing your perspective. I think we can all agree that this is a difficult subject matter, and emotions run high around this topic. Too often we lose the chance to learn and grow through challenging conversations because they devolve into personal attacks. So I want to let you know that I am so impressed by the way you brought up the topic and opened it up for other people’s contributions.

It is natural that the conversations around race relations in the United States that have taken center stage might make you more aware of people of color than you had been before. That’s one of the things that happens: when we talk about racism, sometimes that interferes with how we see individuals. I have to admit I’ve done it too. I’ve spent years reading literature about the experiences of minorities in the United States, and I’ve brought my ruminations into one-on-one interactions in a way that detracted from the person’s individuality. What it’s shown me is that, whether we like it or not, we all have internalized preconceptions about others, and it’s our job to honestly — and uncomfortably — question and dismantle them.

I applaud your desire to live in a colorblind society — I want that too! — and being “colorblind” is a good way to engage with individuals on an interpersonal level. However, on an institutional level (and I go into what I mean by “institutional” below), we’re not there. Further, the widespread call for “colorblindness” ignores these very real aspects of institutional racism that aren’t as easy to see or understand in person-to-person interactions.

Racism Is Not Just Prejudice

It’s important to note that racism is not the same as prejudice. Racism is prejudice plus power. In other words, racism is when institutional policies are put into place that are prejudicial. And it is impossible to understand the impacts of that if we examine current race relations among people without fully considering historical context.

Some people like to talk about individual choices being some kind of zero-sum metric by which to judge others. But we know that the environment in which people are raised have monumental impacts on how people see themselves, build the frameworks by which they assess their environment and make choices, and shape their relationships to others. So to talk about our own and others’ individual choices, to compare them side by side and make judgments, is to take out of the conversation a HUGE contributing factor to that conversation.

Generational Wealth and Property Ownership

One of the most influential factors to whether a person is able to accumulate enough individual wealth so as to live with a sense of personal security and the ability to see more options available and, thus, make better individual choices is generational wealth. And a fundamental requirement of generational wealth is owning property — real estate.

So while slavery was happening, white people in America (not all white people, but most) began accumulating generational wealth. They were able to acquire property (many of them were simply given property by the British and then the US governments), which provided generational stability, and they were able to build upon that to provide opportunities to their children that, on average, incrementally increased over each generation.

Meanwhile, of course, that wasn’t happening for black people in America. Because slavery.

Then slavery ended. YAY! Many black people quickly began working like hell to acquire a piece of property for themselves and their families, and we began seeing black people run for political office and win. WOO-HOO!

Then white people in the South were, like, “Oh no, no, no, no, no!” This was the birth of the KKK, which was led and protected by white law enforcement officials across the nation. During this time, as we know, lynching rose to epidemic levels, ushering in an era of terrorism against black people that imbued a trauma on their psyches that has endured to this day, in no small part because inhumane violence against black people continues without adequate repercussions for the perpetrators of that violence. But what is less discussed about what happened at this time are the prejudicial policies that were enacted at every level of government (remember, racism = prejudice + power).

The thing about prejudicial policies is that their impacts are felt for years, decades, and, yes, generations. While I’m sure you know that the era of Jim Crow erected many, many insurmountable obstacles for black people trying to vote (and where the policies left gaps, the KKK stepped in to threaten black people’s lives and livelihoods if they dared to show up at a polling site), many people don’t know that these policies also targeted black property owners and made it really easy for the state and banks to take families’ properties away from them.

So once again, as in the era of slavery, as white families continued to accumulate generational wealth, few black families were able to do the same. Black communities lacked the basic foundations on which to build stability for themselves. And if a black community happened to defy the odds and work around the prejudicial policies and cultural terrorism to begin to build wealth, well, white people would step in to destroy it, such as what happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, otherwise known as “Black Wall Street.”

Then the era of Jim Crow ended. YAY! FDR swept in the New Deal. YAY! But again, built into all of these policies were prejudicial practices, such as redlining and lending discrimination, which perpetuated the obstacles black families faced in trying to acquire property and build generational wealth that would open opportunities for their children and grandchildren. (Here’s an article from the Brookings Institution that goes over this a bit more succinctly.)

Property Taxes and Education

One result of the accumulation of all of these prejudicial policies is that, by and large, black students are not receiving the quality of education and care from teachers and administrators that white students are. Because most schools in America are funded by property taxes, and black communities (segregated by decades of redlining) are, on average, much poorer (thanks in part to the barriers to generational wealth), school funding is grotesquely unequal.

This discrepancy places yet more roadblocks in front of black children’s ability to succeed, to see opportunities and believe they can forge a path to pursue those opportunities. The fact that so many black Americans have overcome these myriad and seemingly unending obstacles to build a secure life for themselves and their families is a testament to their intelligence, strength, and resilience.

Institutional Racism Reinforces Unconscious Prejudices

Despite black Americans figuring out ways to navigate institutional obstacle courses to financial security and equity in public services, they continue to be treated unequally in interpersonal interactions. And many times we white people don’t even know we’re doing it.

Here are few examples of the ways that white people’s unexamined prejudices affect people of color in real, material, and sometimes life-threatening ways:

· Black people are less likely to be believed when they are in medical situations and say they are in pain.

· Black women are substantially more likely to die in childbirth.

· Black boys, even as young as ten years old, are viewed as “dangerous.”

· Black girls, starting at age FIVE, are viewed as older and more sexual than white girls of the same age.

· People of color get more job interviews when they “whiten” their names on their résumés.

And the examples go on and on.

The more I learn about people’s unconscious prejudices, built upon social and media narratives told for literally hundreds of years, the more I see them in myself as well. I am able to notice the knee-jerk assumptions that pop into my brain and, instead of just moving past them and allowing them to carry on, I now stop them and question them and work to dismantle them in myself. And it is UNCOMFORTABLE. After all, I don’t want to think of myself as a racist.

But if I don’t take in the information that is available about widespread prejudices and be honest when I see them in myself, maybe I’m not a racist, but I certainly am perpetuating racism.

As long as governmental policies are implementing devastatingly prejudicial practices that set up never-ending obstacles for people of color as they strive for the same exact things we all strive for — financial security, happiness, freedom, helping our families and our communities — “colorblindness” is simply ignoring these policies and allowing institutional racism to continue.

It’s easy for white people to say “we should be colorblind” when these policies don’t negatively impact us. People of color, however, don’t have that luxury. They experience obstacles and subtle prejudices throughout their lives, and it has deep impacts on their psyches — with a diverse range of individual responses. And when they experience blatant prejudice, such as ongoing acts of racial violence without repercussions sufficient to prevent future violence . . . well, that’s downright traumatic. And it’s a trauma that just keeps happening.

All in all, our government and our society DOES treat black people like their lives don’t matter. For me, saying “Black lives matter” is important because it is the first step to undoing these policies and dismantling the unconscious prejudices that arise from these policies’ effects.

***

I’m sure this letter could’ve been better. And I know damn well that it could’ve been worse. But this is what I was able to do while my toddler napped. And I hope it plants seeds. I hope my brother is motivated to keep learning more about the history of racism in America (and the world). I hope he keeps talking with me and sharing what he’s thinking about so we can keep this dialogue open.

And I hope that if you, dear reader, are lucky enough to have someone in your life who reaches out and tries to open a conversation about a topic that is polarizing and usually ends in name-calling and extreme defensiveness, that you find a way to keep the dialogue respectful and to allow them the grace and space to be safely uncomfortable.