There are all sorts of ways to make reparation work at the local and individual level. You can hire black folk at your office and pay them slightly better than you would ordinarily pay them. You can pay the black person who cuts your grass double what you might ordinarily pay. Or you can give a deserving black student in your neighborhood, or one you run across in the course of your work, scholarship help. In fact, your religious or civic institution can commit a tenth of its resources to educating black youth.
It may be best to think of reparation as a secular tithe, a proportion of money and other resources set aside for causes that are worthy of support. You can, as an individual or as a small group, set up an I.R.A., an Individual Reparations Account. There are thousands upon thousands of black kids whose parents cannot afford to send them to summer camp or to pay fees for a sports team, or to buy instruments to play if they attend one of the ever-shrinking number of schools that has a band. Their parents cannot pay for tutors for math or science or English or whatever subject their kids need help with. An I.R.A. would work just fine.
You can also pay a black tax, just as black folk do. The black tax refers to the cost and penalty of being black in America—of having to work twice as hard for half of what whites get by less strenuous means. You can help defray the black tax by offering black tax incentives: if a black accountant is doing a good job for you, assume a surcharge and pay her more. If a black lawyer performs good service, then compensate him even more for his labor.
You can also treat some black folk to a few of the signs of appreciation you offer to military veterans. For instance, at football games, there ought to be a “civil rights veterans” night to recognize the valor, honor, and sacrifice of those who made this country great—living legends like Andrew Young, Diane Nash, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
As part of an I.R.A. you can also pay for massages for working class folk. You can choose five black children to sponsor on an annual trip to the local zoo. You can begin a film club for black children to attend movie theaters in more affluent areas where they might also enjoy a trip to the museum. Or you can pay for the textbooks of ten black college students each year. The point is to be creative in transferring a bit of your resources, even if in modest amounts, to deserving and often struggling descendants of the folk who gave this country its great wealth and whose offspring rescued its reputation for democracy.
Beloved, you must also educate yourselves about black life and culture. Racial literacy is as necessary as it is undervalued.
What should you read? I always start with James Baldwin, the most ruthlessly honest analyst of white innocence yet to pick up a pen. Baldwin was a boy preacher, and though he outgrew the rituals and theology that hemmed in the very souls religion meant to free, he never left the pulpit. His words drip with the searing eloquence of an evangelist of race determined to get to the brutal bottom of America’s original sin. Baldwin married the gospel fervor of Jonathan Edwards to the literary style of Henry James, most notably in The Fire Next Time.
Beloved, you should read books about slavery that prove it was far more varied and complicated than once believed, including Ira Berlin’s incisive history of slavery before cotton became king in Many Thousands Gone; Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom, which explores the fate of enslaved women; and books like Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage, which probes the relationships between black and white women. The novels The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, about a black family that owned enslaved blacks in the antebellum south, and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, about a newly freed slave who hops aboard a slave ship, give color and texture to slavery. Toni Morrison’s epic novel Beloved lyrically probes the aftereffects of enslavement on the minds and souls of black folk. Her Playing in the Dark is a slim classic that brilliantly probes the white literary imagination and how it silences and distorts the dark agency from which it derives its meaning.
Slavery was ensconced in politics, intertwined with the economy, and thus you need to know impressive works like Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet, Manisha Sinha’s The Counterrevolution of Slavery, Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, and Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. Vincent Brown’s The Reaper’s Garden offers a haunting glimpse into what enslaved, and enslaving, people in the Atlantic world made of death. Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering does for the Civil War what Brown does for slavery. The Civil War was, centrally, the infernal contest of white regions over black flesh and its future in America, which you’ll discover when you tackle James McPherson’s fiercely elegant Battle Cry of Freedom. You should read about what went on after the Civil War, especially classics like W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America and Eric Foner’s Reconstruction. And you should ride the epic sweep of black migration along with Isabel Wilkerson in her achingly brilliant The Warmth of Other Suns.
Beloved, take in as much as you can about the modern civil rights movement, glimpsed in stellar works like Aldon Morris’ Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer’s Voices of Freedom, the book based on Hampton’s monumental documentary television series Eyes on the Prize, which you should make every effort to see. Or you can make your way through Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, in Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge—or the single-volume summary America in the King Years—and David Garrow’s exhaustive and illuminating study of King, Bearing the Cross, or Diane McWhorter’s riveting account of the movement’s impact on white families in Birmingham, including her own, in Carry Me Home. Gilbert King’s heartbreaking Devil in the Grove shines a light on Jim Crow as he probes the case of four young black men accused of raping a 17-year-old white girl in Florida and the valiant defense they got from future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. You should also read Barbara Ransby’s moving portrait of the great organizer and activist, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement; Kay Mills’ engrossing study of freedom fighter Fannie Lou Hamer, This Little Light of Mine; and In Struggle, Clayborne Carson’s compelling study of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Grapple with the black freedom struggle, too, especially the impact of black nationalism’s most influential leader, Malcolm X, explored in Manning Marable’s magnum opus Malcolm X. Peniel Joseph’s seminal Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour invites us to understand the rich sweep of the black power movement, as does his penetrating study of the movement’s most iconic leader, Stokely Carmichael, in his biography Stokely. To understand how the issue of police brutality inspired social revolution in the seventies, please read Black against Empire, a comprehensive study of the history and politics of the Black Panthers by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, Jr. The struggle of black working class folk is captured in Robin Kelley’s landmark Race Rebels. The effort to embrace the intersections of gender, class, sexuality, and feminist politics is portrayed in a series of pioneering books, including Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Barbara Smith’s The Truth That Never Hurts, bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman?, Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Critical Race Theory and, along with co-author Andrea Ritchie, Say Her Name, and Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought.
Beloved, these are just a few books to get you started. Of course the classics must not be neglected, from Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, groundbreaking essays that limn the color line at the turn of the twentieth century, to Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, which wrestles with the perennial black problem of not being seen by the white world. Ellison’s collected essays are masterpieces of elegance and erudition. And you should pay attention to the personal and political essays of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka; June Jordan; Zora Neale Hurston (and her great novel rejecting racial uplift narratives, Their Eyes Were Watching God); and the essays of Alice Walker, along with The Color Purple, her captivating
novel about the struggles of black women for room to breathe and love in the south in the 1930s. Great black autobiographies offer a peek into the struggles of some of our most important figures, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, from The Autobiography of Malcolm X to Angela Davis: An Autobiography, and from Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.
Beloved, you should read as much as you can about race and black identity in the media too. Read gifted black voices like Jamilah Lemieux, Ta-Nehisi Coates, William Jelani Cobb, Jamelle Bouie, Eve Ewing, Clint Smith, Wesley Lowery, Damon Young, Vann Newkirk, Mychal Denzel Smith, Bakari Kitwana, Rembert Browne, Wesley Morris, Nicole Hannah-Jones, and Keisha Blain. The miracle of social media permits greater accessibility than in the past to brilliant thinkers and scholars like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Mark Anthony Neal; Marc Lamont Hill; James Braxton Peterson; Salamishah Tillet; Stacey Patton; Kiese Laymon; Melissa Harris-Perry; Treva Lindsey; Obery Hendricks, Jr.; Farah Griffin; Brittney Cooper; Stacy Floyd-Thomas; Elizabeth Hinton; Alondra Nelson; Thadious Davis; Tracy Denean Sharpley-Whiting; Keri Day; Eboni Marshall Turman; Lawrence Bobo; Leah Wright Rigueur; Marcylinena Morgan; Nell Painter; and thousands more.
Beloved, you must not only read about black life, but you must school your white brothers and sisters, your cousins and uncles, your loved ones and friends, and all who will listen to you, about the white elephant in the room—white privilege. Share with them what you learn about us, but share as well what you learn about yourself, about how whiteness works. You see, my friends, there is only so much I can say to white folk, only so much they can hear from me or anyone who isn’t white. They may not be as defensive with you, so you must be an ambassador of truth to your own tribes, just like the writers Peggy McIntosh, Tim Wise, David Roediger, Mab Segrest, Theodore Allen, and Joe Feagin.
It is your obligation, beloved, to school yourselves, and other white folk, too, about the seductive, mythical, neutrality of whiteness, the belief that you are somehow American without a racial identity, without racial baggage. “While it is dangerous to say that all whites have equal access to wealth and education,” one of my white students writes, “the fact of the matter is that white people will not be followed in a store, frisked on a New York sidewalk, or shot by police at the same rate as black people. Whites must understand that they benefit from white privilege in order to realize how white privilege creates the space for black oppression.”
You see what my student did there, beloved? He linked white privilege and black oppression, not directly, mind you, but in a way that suggests that white privilege creates opportunities for black oppression to take hold. If white folk refuse to name white privilege for what it is, then it is more likely that you will ignore how black inequality, black suffering, exists all around you. Those of you who know better than that must tell other white people what you know. As one of my students says, “if one stays silent” then one is “actually helping racial injustice persist.” Beloved, racism and bigotry are ugly, uncomfortable issues to grapple with. But if you don’t address them, you reinforce the privilege of not having to face up to the truth.
Beloved, your participation in protests, rallies, local community meetings, and the like makes a huge difference. When we gather to express grief, outrage, and dissent, your presence sends the signal that this is not “just a black thing.” It is, instead, an American thing. Your white bodies don’t just desegregate the images that communicate social concern. Your presence also puts your bodies and reputations on the line by identifying you with folk you are not supposed to have much in common with. Your presence adds greater moral weight to the gathering. It shouldn’t have to be that way, but for now, it is.
My friends, I know that there is a valiant, even volatile, history of white participation in black struggles for freedom. And some of your mothers and fathers, and your grandmothers and grandfathers, too, got their feelings hurt when black folk told them their help was no longer needed. This was the case in the sixties when black folk were coming into our own and younger black folk in more radical organizations wanted to feel their own power, take further charge of their own destinies. Surely you know that white participation doesn’t mean white takeover.
You must grapple with how your participation isn’t just to aid black and brown folk, though that is indeed admirable. It is also to fulfill your sense of destiny. One of your great prophets, Jim Wallis, the founder and leader of the Washington, D.C.–based Christian community called Sojourners, hammered this home recently. Wallis quotes black theologian James Cone who “talks about ‘repentance for white people as dying to whiteness.’ I want to say white Christians have been separated from God by the idolatry of whiteness. So we’re not in this to help somebody else. We’re in this for our own souls.”
Wallis’ point underscores a vital need, my friends, the need to close the distance between the white self and the black other. In fact, viewing black folk—or brown folk, or gay folk, or poor folk—as the other is the problem. This country has just lived through the first black presidency in our nation’s history. Whether one liked or loathed Barack Obama’s politics, there is no denying that he is one of the most profound, impressive, gifted, and inspiring Americans this nation has seen in quite some time. And yet there was a relentless attempt to make him the “other.” The collective effort to deprive Obama of his legitimacy, of his citizenship, of his humanity, scarred the body politic and did great damage to our efforts to move this country beyond its heinous racial history.
In your own lives, at your own jobs, in your own communities—and in your own minds—you must see and root out and oppose how black folk are routinely made the cultural other. You must resist the impulse to see black schoolchildren as the educational other. You must fight the inclination to dismiss black coworkers as the other because of their hairstyles, their dress, their speech, their demeanors. You must constantly ask yourselves how you are thinking of, and responding to, the black folk you encounter in ordinary venues. When you are interviewing black folk for jobs, for fellowships, for positions in your service, are you seeing them as incapable of learning and adapting just as white folk do? The dismissal of black and brown folk in this manner, often unconsciously, scars them with missed opportunity and denied humanity.
Not knowing black folk intimately exacerbates the distance between the white self and the black other. One solution is new black friends. It is distressing that so few of you have more than a token black friend, maybe two. Every open-minded white person should set out immediately to find and make friends with black folk who share their interests. It’s not as hard as it seems. Black folk come in every variety of belief, ideology, and politics, just as any other American does, and the vast majority of us are morally upright.
Honestly, the fact that you do not know real, ordinary, splendid black folk is astonishing. The more black folk you know, the less likely you are to stereotype us. The less you stereotype us, the less likely you are to fear us. The less you fear us, the less likely you are to want to hurt us, or to accept our hurt as the price of your safekeeping. The safer you feel, the safer we’ll be.
Beloved, hopefully your new friends will make it easier for you to speak up against the injustice that black folk face. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that we would have to repent not only for the “evil words and deeds of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.” We need to hear your voices ring out against our suffering loud and clear.
When a black or brown youth is railroaded in a court system for possessing a negligible amount of marijuana, it makes a difference if a sea of white witnesses floods the airways, or cyberspace, or community halls, or prosecutors’ offices, or congressional staff with e-mails, letters, speeches, and commentary about the injustice of such acts. If white folk take to social media and testify to how they got away with the very minor offenses that ca
use black and brown folk trouble—that cause our kids to be sent to jail or prison—it might move the needle of awareness and set change in motion. If honest white voices speak up about how your own children are not expelled at the same rates as black and brown kids for the same offenses, it will put pressure on local school boards to reconsider their unjust policies and practices.
When there are traumatic public events that the world can see, we need clear white voices of resistance that the world can hear.
Beloved, your voices are crucial because the doubt of black humanity, the skepticism of black intelligence, and the denial of the worth of black bodies linger in our cultural unconscious and shadow our national politics. If you challenge white ignorance, or indifference, to the plight of people of color, it will lend our cause needed legitimacy.
One of the issues about which you might speak, especially in your own circles, is the distinction between the immigrant and black American experiences. Of course those experiences overlap; we often forget that black folk who hail from the Caribbean or from Africa come to America seeking opportunity like any other immigrants. I have in mind the argument that black folk should do like the European immigrants who came to America and worked hard to become successful. The best response to such a baseless comparison is a direct one: whiteness matters. My friends, in the short term, and in the long run, too, being Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish hasn’t been as large a deficit to achievement as color has been for black folk. It is true that the barriers of language, ethnicity, and culture are big ones, but they don’t make the same difference that being black makes.
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