Confessions of a Recovering Arsehole

Note: this is embarrassing and very difficult to share. I’m writing it in hopes that I can help turn the lights on for someone else.

It’s also a very white perspective. Please tell me if I’ve got it wrong. I’m listening.

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When I was a sophomore in high school, I made a girl cry. We were in debate class and she tried to explain to me her experience of life as an African American teenager growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas. I can’t remember what exactly my position was, probably against affirmative action or some other similar issue. She tried to explain to me what poverty was like for black people. I didn’t see any reason why poverty would be different for black people than for white people. She didn’t cry because I held fast to my position, she cried because I didn’t listen.

Later, when I was in college, one of my black friends would spend a long time trying to explain to me the experience of black men, the criminalization of black men, what it was like for people to be afraid of you. All I could do was defend my own fear of black men late at night. I also viewed this friend as privileged because he played lacrosse and didn’t seem particularly poor (I’m an idiot, I know). I didn’t listen.

I didn’t even connect the dots when another friend was thrown in the back of a cop car for car maintenance while black. It was late, he had to be at work early. A few of us were living together in a house in downtown Little Rock. It was late at night but he had to be at work super early and his battery was flat, our other housemate said he could swap it with hers. There was a knock at the door. It was a cop, asking if my friend really lived where he said he did. The neighbours had called the cops on him. That wasn’t enough to make me listen.

A decade later, several years ago, I woke up one morning and realised that this whole time, I hadn’t been listening. I wish I could tell you what changed me, but I don’t know. This realisation came as a shock. I never thought of myself as racist, but it was clear that I was absolutely part of the problem.

If a friend comes to you bleeding, explaining what has happened and why it hurts, and you tell them why their experience of pain is irrelevant, the cruelty is obvious. I wish I understood why I couldn’t see it before. I wish I understood why I could look at suffering, how I could intellectually understand the data, the daily reality for black people, without my heart breaking for their struggle. Without feeling the call to support, to listen, to defend, to grieve with them. Without understanding that the absolute minimum I should do as a decent human being is to listen and validate their stories of struggle. If I understood better what happened in me, maybe I could help switch on the lights for other people.

The bad news is that it took me 15 years to realise that I wasn’t listening. The good news is that once I realised, it took literally days to start to really comprehend the scale of the injustices playing out every single day in the US. Once I realised that I wasn’t listening, it was easy to listen. The tricky part wasn’t the listening, it was that first part, to realise that I wasn’t really listening at all to the lived experience of black people in the United States.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that joke with the fish, where one fish says to the other fish, “How’s the water?”… and the other fish says, “What water?” I learned about the water, and something changed in my heart. Suddenly I realise we’re all swimming in it, and the empathy that I lacked before switched on. And now, here we are, and my response to the rioters is not dismay or judgement, but deep sympathetic anger.

Day after day after day of struggle in a country that 75% denies that these injustices are even occurring, and 25% doesn’t care enough to fix them when they are acknowledged. Day after day of seeing unarmed black people killed y police officers. The burden of white people’s perceptions all the time. Gentrification. Health outcomes. The job market. And of course, the prison industrial complex monstrosity that, as Liza Jessie Peterson said in Thirteenth, “eats black and Latino people for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

Day after day. Every day. The rage we are seeing today seems to me to be a natural response to state violence. I of course do not actually condone the violence, but I do not judge their rage.

I do not pretend to know what it is like to be black in the United States. And my heart sinks when I think about those conversations from my younger days. These good people took the time to explain to me, hoping that I would care, and I absolutely didn’t. How do they keep going? How do they not lose hope? Do they continue to have the energy to explain to ignorant white people the many ways in which the system is rigged? If it helps, I’m sure these conversations were a prerequisite to my wake up call, but 15 years for it to kick in is inexcusable and depressing.

But, if an asshole like Newt Gingrich can get it, maybe anyone can get it. In 2016, he said:

“It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years, to get a sense of this: If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.”

This is the same realisation I came to.

I think my own personal journey as an ally has a long way to go, but I believe that really listening is the first step. I am growing in confidence that I am heading in the right direction with this idea, because it seems to reflect what MLK tried to tell us over 50 years ago:

Let me say as I’ve always said, and I will always continue to say, that riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. … But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again.

• MLK, The Other America (Stanford, 1967)

MLK tried, with patience and love, to articulate the struggle of black America, to get ‘white society’ to care about human suffering, while operating in a horribly oppressive system.

I am amazed that more than 50 years after his assassination, we can continue to fail to hear, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary, that there is a persistent crisis of profound racial injustice in the United States. How is it possible, with so much evidence, for someone like White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien to deny that institutional racism exists within the police forces of the United States. It’s utterly delusional.

At the same time, I know that I once shared this view.

Sam Harris studied belief change, and talks a lot about how identity shapes our beliefs. We tend to hold on to beliefs irrationally and in the face of confounding evidence if they are closely linked to our identity. I don’t know what it was about my core belief system or my identity that blinded me to reality. I suspect something about identifying not only as a conservative but also identifying with freedom and the American dream made it easier for me to cling to my view, my America, my perspective, while totally ignoring the injustices happening in that other America.

Another possibility is that white people struggle to see the water because the water was made to serve them. As the beneficiary of the system, perhaps I was unwilling to look at the ugly truth. The truth is that the United States is a country that was built on the backs of black people. The truth is that White America has benefited from the suffering of black people, and from the consequent denial and invalidation of that suffering. This reality does not mesh well with my former conservative identity and the idea of the American dream.

I think it’s telling that a lot of people do not understand the violence erupting across the United States right now. A lot of people feel the need to talk extensively about the looters versus the rioters versus the peaceful protesters, and it seems like a glaring neon sign that white America has not really thought about the experience of black people in the United States. Violence is wrong, but it is also a totally natural response to violence. In an interview in 1970s, Angela Davis said:

I mean, that’s why when someone asks me about violence, I just…. I just find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person asking that question has no idea what black people have gone through… what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.

• Angela Davis, The Black Power Mixtape

Of course, Angela Davis described her experience growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, where a bomb killed four of the girls in her neighbourhood. Today, some would argue, the violence is gone. But of course, it is not gone, it is different, and in many ways worse. I have heard some activists refer to cops killing black men as ‘the new lynching.’ We acknowledge that lynching was used to terrorise black communities and keep black people in line. Your lifetime odds as a black man in America today of getting killed by a cop are 1:1000. I did some napkin math: your odds of getting lynched as a black person were roughly 1:2500 in the early 20th century. (But white people also get killed by cops! White people also got lynched, but nobody thinks that is evidence that lynching was not directed at black people. The white people who were targeted were often supporters of black people, which seems to have echos in the police brutality over the last week).

The violence is not gone, it is different. The police force was literally established in part as a slave patrol, to catch badly behaved and escaped slaves. After slavery was outlawed, white America flipped out about losing its means of production, and replaced slaves with prisoners, arresting black people for spurious crimes and put them to work. Nixon started the war on drugs to target black people in order to get reelected (sound familiar?).

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’’

• John Erlichmann, adviser to Nixon

Nixon pursued ‘The Southern Strategy’ and the criminalization of black people intensified. The Southern Strategy was turned to and adapted again in the 1980s and 1990s. Criminalization of black people intensified. Mass incarceration kicked off in earnest, and the United States now has the largest incarcerated population in the world, with almost 25% of the worlds prison population.

Most of these people are black. 97% of the people sitting in prison plea bargained instead of going to trial because it is too expensive and you are punished by the system for fighting your case. They are in prison so that Reagan or Nixon or Clinton or Bush could get elected and be seen as ‘the law and order’ candidate. They are in prison and generations of black families are growing up without their fathers — 1 in 9 black children have had a parent behind bars.

The prison industrial complex is big business, so now criminalising and jailing black people is not just politically advantageous, but also lucrative. The cash for kids scandal showed us that the justice system is part of the problem, too, and that corrupt judges are willing to put black bodies in prison for a quick buck.

Violence against black people in America has not gone away, it has changed. We as a nation have not been working to eliminate racial injustice for the last 50 years. Rather, we have been working to legitimise racial injustice, to push it down beneath a veneer of plausibility, so that it is easier to deny.

And now, we jump at the opportunity to criminalise black protesters. Donald Trump again returns to the Southern Strategy as the law and order candidate, returning to Nixon’s rhetoric. But it’s our fault, white America. Politicians will continue to use the Southern Strategy as long as it continues to work. Today, “tough on black people and the radical left” works as well in the north as it does in the south. It’s been over 50 years since the Southern Strategy kicked off. If we are so keen to criminalise black people, what is happening to race relations in America?

I don’t know what the answer is, but I think that the first step is listening. Understanding and really, truly hearing the lived experiences of black people in the United States. If more people are really listening, it will get harder to ignore.

Black America is trying to tell us something. We need to listen.