Of course, racism is a more systemic problem than the ingrained prejudices of an individual white person. It’s no accident that white Americans aren’t asked to study black history much beyond a cursory nod to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream” speech once every February. Nor is it an accident that around one in four black men will end up in an American prison,1 or that one in four black Kentuckians has been permanently stripped of the right to vote.2 The United States was founded on racial disparity and designed systems to maintain this disparity via our institutions—our courts, police departments, and prisons, our neighborhoods, schools, and voting booths. In a very real sense, America won’t achieve true change until we change these institutions and systems, but don’t forget that our attitudes are a key part of these systems. The more whites buy into racist thinking, the more invested they are in preserving the systems that advantage whites. We’ve changed systems before—from fair housing to school integration to health care—but then seen the new laws barely enforced and chipped away at and reversed. For legislative change to last, we need to change the way people think.
As a professor, I can have the most influence within the institution of higher education, teaching classes that introduce the history of racial disparity to college students who typically haven’t learned much of it in twelve years of public education. Ideally, those students will become more racially-enlightened citizens who carry their educations forward to do some good in the institutions where they ultimately work. I’ve heard from graduates working as high school teachers and writers and editors. Some, like Robert Lefkowitz, have gone on to rap. J’na Jefferson writes for Vibe. John Gratton has done production work for dozens of hip-hop albums, including Chuck Strangers’s Consumers Park and Joey Badass’s All-Amerikkan Badass. Breanne Needles landed an internship booking shows for the Wu-Tang Clan and went on to work in publishing. Marcus Castro started a clothing line called 2 Familiar, which references an old joke from our hip-hop class. My former students are working as everything from TV cameramen to stand-up comics to cops. We need educated citizens in all those roles. Racism is so ingrained in American culture that it touches every aspect of our lives, so what should a white person do?
Listen to black voices. Study black history. “Education is the apology,” wrote Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson in 1997. “White folks need to study slavery to see that they are in the same trap as the 1800s” when “elite white industrialists raked in the profits [while] shafted white workers were left with the consolation that they were still better than black folks.”3 Seek out black voices and you’ll find one introduces the next. I started with hip-hop, but I didn’t stop there. I first heard the names Huey P. Newton and H. Rap Brown in a Public Enemy song. I first heard of Steve Biko and Soul on Ice from A Tribe Called Quest. I heard the Oakland, California rapper Paris mention Frantz Fanon before I saw my college professors assign his writing. I turned up my headphones and headed for the library. But education that isn’t shared only benefits one learner, so make every effort to share your education with others.
Don’t expect black people to take it upon themselves to educate you. Don’t look to black people to reassure you your statements are inoffensive. Don’t assume that you haven’t said anything offensive just because a black person has not called you out.
Don’t assume your black friends or colleagues want to talk about your studies or your journey toward racial enlightenment, but do reach out to ask how they’re doing when a white nationalist march makes headlines, because, as my friend and colleague Sheena Howard once said, “This shit is traumatic.” Don’t say you can’t believe this is happening in this day and age, because your black friends very likely can.
Speak for yourself. Don’t present yourself as an expert on black thinking, but introduce your white friends and colleagues to the words of black thinkers. “Too long have others spoke for us,”4 wrote John B. Russworm and Samuel E. Cornish in the first issue of Freedom’s Journal in 1827. Nearly 200 years later, the book publishing industry remains nearly entirely white, and black professors make up only around 6% of the full-time university faculty nationwide. Russworm and Cornish saw the danger of such a lack of self-representation: “though there are many in society who exercise toward us benevolent feelings; still (with sorrow we confess it) there are others who make it their business to enlarge upon the least trifle, which tends to discredit any person of color; and pronounce anathema and denounce our whole body for the conduct of this guilty one … Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed unnoticed.”5
That problem hasn’t changed enough since 1827. Even with hip-hop’s cultural dominance, the control over what aspects of black lives get presented in the music can be traced back too often to white record executives.
Don’t get too familiar. Don’t believe that your track record of study or sensitivity allows you to make statements that might be considered racist if they came out of the mouth of a stranger. Don’t make having read books by black authors the new “some of my best friends are black.”
Don’t let having aligned yourself with black causes convince you that you’re better than other whites. Don’t congratulate yourself for being conscious, woke, or informed, or having worked uniquely hard to achieve racial enlightenment. If you’ve had educational opportunities denied to other whites, find ways to share what you’ve learned while remembering to acknowledge your own advantages, even down to the all-important factor of having been born to parents who encouraged, rather than discouraged, your learning. Don’t develop a white savior complex but this go-round the uncivilized natives are other whites. J. D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy criticized poor whites in Kentucky for buying “giant TVs and iPads” rather than saving money, working hard, and pulling themselves out of poverty.6 White Americans have made that same argument for years about black Americans. It was wrong in that cross-racial context and it’s wrong when it’s whites speaking about whites.
Admit your own complicity and work to correct it, but don’t make a show of wallowing in white guilt. Don’t apologize on behalf of generations of racist whites by way of distinguishing yourself from the past or the white masses. Don’t cling to white pride by defending yourself (i.e., listing your antiracist credentials) or defending the white race (i.e., crying Not ALL Whites).
Don’t get defensive. When an eighteen-year-old student asks me why he should have to come to college and be made to feel bad for being white, there’s some power in my being able to admit I used to feel that same way—that I grew up encouraged to reject any talk of the advantages of white skin as an attack against white people. My goal is not to make him feel bad about being white so much as it is to make him think about what it means to be white in context of the history of this country. Since he’s concerned about feelings, I’ll have him read W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, which asks, “How does it feel to be a problem?” or Moustafa Bayoumi, who borrowed Du Bois’s question for its title of his 2009 book How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America. I’ll have him read the words of Mamie Till-Mobley, whose fourteen-year-old son Emmett Till was brutally murdered after he was accused of having whistled in the direction of a white woman. If this student is still stuck on the idea that the real injustice here is the assault on his feelings, he needs to keep reading.
Don’t expect to be congratulated. I stood at a New Jersey protest and vigil in the wake of the white nationalist march on Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the protest organizers—a white woman—kept encouraging cars at the intersection to honk their