Brief Report Back Atlanta NextDoor 11/24/2020

 

After sharing our current challenges and successes confronting racism and/or on our journey to increasing our anti-racism effectiveness – which continue to be seldom for those of us who are white due to our covid limiting interactions along with our white privilege ease of navigating what is open outside – we have ThanksTaking on the table,/screen and gun violence. 

We discussed white fear, including our personal fears and societal fears. Among all the deep reasons white people continue to fear Black people, the following stood out: 1) white people are afraid we will lose our privileges brought to us, bestowed on us by white privilege and supremacy; 2) white people are afraid Black and brown people will rise up and treat white people like whites have been treating Black and brown people for hundreds of years; 3) white people believe and hold on tight to the racist stereotypes, prejudices, bigotries we have been force-fed since birth.

And lastly (for today): everything white people can believe while holding onto fear of Black and brown people, prevents us from examining the myths and the truths of how we got what we have. White people are then left with the naked truths that no, there is not a level playing field, no white people did not become rich through hard work and pulling oneself up by the boot straps, and no white people did not come here to escape prosecution and build a country based on religious freedom, democracy, justice for all. White people would have to face the fact that every fuckin thing we have, we have because our society was set up to benefit white skinned people at the expense of darker skinned people.

We talked about the “haves” and the “have nots” and although there are poor white people and rich Black people, percentage wise, a larger percent of the white population has wealth while a larger percent of the Black and brown populations fall below the poverty line – for a beginning of dissecting what have and have nots means in our society and city. White people always have their whiteness, Black and brown people always have their skin color no matter how much or how little money anyone has. White people are not poor because of their skin color, and Black people are not wealthy because of white privilege and supremacy.

And then gun violence – how even though white people have managed to hoard massive wealth and privilege, and we have every law enforcement agency at our disposal from city, county, state police to military, private security who are already murdering Black and brown people – we STLL don’t feel “safe” or feel that our things are “secure" so then we arm ourselves. “Thou shall not kill” goes out the window and “Thou shall not kill……unless we’re protecting stuff, property we’ve accumulated” takes its place.

White code speak: “peaceful” protest; “given where we are”; “suspicious” man; “gentrification”.

As we have a Day of Mourning coming up, or the ThanksTaking celebration the conversation turned to the true history of whites taking over this country and the genocide of Indigenous peoples, from the very beginning – and the crazy-making lies and myths that hide the truth of genocide, slavery, rape and violence.

And the “Black bible”or “slave”read or given to enslaved and ‘freed’Black people, verses the white bible for white people.