White People, We Need to Implicate Ourselves in Racism Directly.

Look Inward and Not Outward

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How is it that racism yields anti-Black outcomes in the form of racial disparities, but white people still do not see their part in perpetuating racism? We still see racism as something outside of ourselves. We see it as a system perpetuated by bad people over there but not by us because we're "one of the good ones," as Layla Saad describes.

White people (of all ethnicities), it's time to be honest; it's been time. It’s time to stop playing games; It's time to address our internalized anti-Black sentiment, and it's time to start implicating ourselves in racism.

I don’t know about you, but I continue to witness white people who refuse to see racism as a poison they’ve swallowed and a toxin that is decaying them from the inside-out. Just yesterday, I received a text and a few D.M.'s from white people who were pointing the finger at other white people and racial group's anti-Blackness. White people, we're never ameliorating racist outcomes if we refuse to acknowledge our internalized anti-Blackness and complicity with racism. Our fierce attachment to 'white innocence' inevitably perpetuates anti-Blackness because it allows it to be an overt problem caused by “bad whites.” To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., who made it abundantly clear, America's most dangerous person is not the apparent white supremacist. It's the nice white person who believes they can transcend terrestrial problems like racism, namely white liberals.

One of the most common questions in antiracism work— which I heard again during a seminar hosted by Black feminist educator Lutze Segu—is this: "How do I talk to [insert name] about their racism?" I usually respond with, "the same way you'd want them to talk to you about yours." White people with minimal and no sustained antiracism practice typically ask those questions. And they're also asked by those who don’t directly see themselves as part of the problem. Still, how can we expect to talk to others about their racism when we haven’t, or worse yet, refuse to address our own?

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