#19 - Talking to your Black acquaintances about #BLM when you don't have any Black friends
Maybe don't?
White people have, evidently, been texting and messaging their Black friends and acquaintances to let them know how sorry they are about racism and how much they themselves are going to do better.
It’s happened to us — a white friend of mine has texted Alex to let him know how sorry she is about what’s happening and to reaffirm her solidarity at this moment, AND offer him the possibility of baked goods or money.
It weirded both Alex and I out. It was kind of a moment where we wondered if this friend thought we were broke. It placed additional stress on Alex, who, yes, is dealing with a lot right now, who now needed to figure out how to nicely let her down.
(We love her and we know her heart was in the right place. We know there wasn’t an ounce of negative intention there. It’s important to state this because my beef isn’t with her at all — please, if you’re reading this, know that I am not mad at you and neither is Alex. My beef is with the people who told her doing this constituted some kind of action.)
Where did this strange idea that white allies need to personally reach out to their Black friends and acquaintances in times of social upheaval come from?
There’s a lot of it going around on social media from various Black activists and influencers, asking white people to check in on their Black friends, because they are “not okay right now.”
@mireillecharper on Twitter has this advice, which was probably the impetus for the offer we got for racism cake.
This of course has led to a flurry of corrections from other Black social media personalities and activists, who have informed the public that there’s a right way and a wrong way to reach out to your Black friends and acquaintances.
Gloria Atanmo, a blogger and business coach, argues that we (non-Black people) should stay away from asking simplistic questions like “how are you,” because the answer is (obviously) “not okay.” And she provides templates for white liberals who’d like to reach out to their Black friends but don’t know how to do so in the moment.
Here’s one template for reaching out that Atanmo offers.
Here’s another.
This is obviously a deeply awkward message to receive if you’re, you know, a normal person, who communicates in normal ways. (“Just know my allyship is a verb”? Come on.) The messages in these templates are trying to not be awkward, with their constant disclaimers and re-centering the attention and focus away from the sender and to the recipient — and in doing so, just become about a billion times more awkward.
This is not how normal people communicate, this is how social justice bloggers communicate. Of course, there are clearly Black people for whom these kinds of gestures are deeply appreciated, but the idea that every Black person would benefit from such an extension of feelings upon them is deeply strange.
The offers for money, the unannounced cashapping and venmoing of sums from non-Black people to their Black friends and acquaintances are another level to this madness.
It happened to Abraham*, who is Black, who reached out to me on Twitter to tell me that a white friend DMed him $100 out of the blue, with a simple heart emoji as a caption. This was a friend who had never spoken to him about race before.
“I laughed. I thought it was awkward and offensive. But also funny. I did not respond and don’t intend to,” Abraham told me.
The intended effect of these small cash transfers are to mimic the greater phenomenon of reparations, I’d guess. But reparations are a call for a nation to heal the harm done to a people — it’s a collectivized response to systemic racism — it’s not accomplished by ad hoc PayPal transactions.
(It’s true that the average white person’s wealth is much higher than the average Black person, due to centuries of dispossession and racist policies and outright theft of wages. Does that mean that an individual white person has a moral obligation to offer money to their Black friends?
I’d argue no, especially if both individuals are middle class, or of roughly equal economic status.)
Look, I think it’s vitally important that white people are waking up to the realities of what it means to be Black in America — I think it’s vitally important that they realize their own privilege, and how they’ve had experiences in this world that don’t match those of racialized minorities in this country.
I just wish they’d do it in less awkward ways.
I wish the white person who held up the sign at the protest my friend Lyta Gold went to, the one that said “I don’t understand, but I stand,” had just thrown a fucking rock instead. (Would have done more good than centering herself, over and over again.)
I wish white people (and non-Black people) realize that it’s not about them. The movement about Black lives is not about white people realizing they’re white, it’s about Black people, and learning how to value Black life. I recognize that some Black people appreciate you having these conversations with them, but a lot of Black people I know, including my own partner, don’t appreciate being non-consensually involved in your journey towards enlightenment.
Most of all, I wish people would stop personalizing this movement. Yes, it’s important to come to a realization that the beliefs you once had — about liberal white supremacy — are actually destructive and disturbing and harmful, but it’s not about you, personally. It really isn’t. It’s about changing our system so that it learns to value Black life, and the lives of poor people. It’s about weakening the vice-grip that capitalism has on the American way of life; capitalism which was borne out of the trade of Black bodies; capitalism that continuously marginalizes Black people into second-class citizenship; capitalism that destroys poor communities and pits the working class against each other.
When you learn an actual politics, when you learn to replace your self-loathing white guilt with a vision for a better world, suddenly, your need to apologize for your non-Blackness all the time disappears. You graduate into something like proto-comradeship; you’re finally able to see yourself as a human being, not just a white person, and importantly, you’re able to see other Black people as people, just like you.
Join us in humanity.
Stop apologizing personally to your Black friends and acquaintances for your privilege.
*Abraham is not his real name: names have been changed to protect his white friend, whose fragility might not survive the knowledge that this gesture was unwanted and unneeded.