If you are a person who would check the box next to the word “White” for your ethnicity on an application or census form, I have a question for you. How many books have you read or listened to that detail the life of a person of color? I feel some shame at the fact that only recently have I started exploring that blindspot in more detail. Back in November, I finished Richard Wright’s Black Boy. I almost couldn’t stop listening to it. Memoirs are often fascinating, but in this one, Richard describes in great detail his outer and inner life from early childhood to adulthood in the early 1900s. His growing up in a strict household with an ailing mother, hunger, and poverty, all the way through into his teenage and young adult life. As he got older, he described having more contact with white people in the south, and how he had to navigate and learn how not to get killed. I know that I will probably never understand what it’s like to have that fear every time I go out into the world. That I might look at someone wrong or say something they think is inappropriate, or really not be doing anything at all, just trying to live a good life, and end up beaten or killed without much consideration. The way he was treated was just horrendous.
It’s so incredibly frustrating to hear people question the basic spirit of the black lives matter movement, without trying to understand or take into consideration the hundreds of years of oppression, degradation, beatings, and killings these people endured at the hands of someone who might have looked just like me. I didn’t create that world and I would like to think I haven’t directly contributed to it in my lifetime, but I also don’t feel like I’ve done much to mend those deep wounds if that’s even possible. For most of my life, I’ve claimed to be a-political and was awoken to the reality that it’s a very convenient and privileged position for a straight white man to take because he doesn’t have a lot of things that he needs to fight for or against compared with others. All doors are open, there are no limits, and there’s no legacy of not being treated like a human being. If you are someone like me, do yourself a favor and read and listen to these voices and learn about this history.
“What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady? Seemingly so woven into the texture of things. What kind of life was possible under that hate. How had this hate come to be?”
“I hungered for books. New ways of looking and seeing. It wasn’t a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.”
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