In these Twilight Zone times of Rachel Dolezal, Chris Crass looks back on his own history of identifying with the Black radical tradition, and his role as a white man supporting anti-racism work.
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“You better watch out, you might become Black,” he said.
“No,” I said to my far-right racist Grandpa while debating affirmative action, “look into my eyes, I’m already Black.”
I said this twenty years ago, and in no way did I actually think I was Black, but politically my Grandpa was equating anti-racism with Blackness, and trying to throw me off my game. I wanted, and did, throw him off his by saying yes to Blackness as an emancipatory project. I wanted to affirm Blackness as powerful and positive against racism, express my solidarity and connection as a white kid to the implications of creating a world where #BlackLivesMatter.
My grandpa could see that I was studying and identifying with the Black radical tradition, and at that time—in my early 20s—I was set out to destroy “white society” (i.e. white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, but at that point it did sound like I hated nearly everything about white society), I was reading Race Traitor: Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity, Malcolm X, and went through a phase of hating white people as a category, and developed a strong connection with liberation struggles in communities of color, particularly the Black freedom struggle.
And there were times when it was hard, feeling alienated, angry and marginal in white communities, feeling hyper self-conscious in majority people of color spaces, images of white people committing atrocities against people of color living in my body and haunting me. I wasn’t comfortable in my skin, and while I loved my family and where I was from, I also felt like something was changing me and I longed for affirmation and even kinship with people of color.
I began to feel safer, more politically aligned in people of color spaces, in my Ethnic Studies classes, and wanted to distance myself from other white people – because I didn’t want to be associated with “white people”, and because other white people forced me to look at myself and face my demons (like Luke Skywalker seeing himself as Darth Vader in the cave).
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But that phase I was in is one that most white people coming into anti-racist consciousness go through. The next phase is coming to understand yourself as a racialized white person, with all the implications, but also all the possibilities for being an agent of transformation within white society, aligned with and alongside people of color for collective liberation.
White people taking Black identity and claiming it as their own is theft.
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For me, it means coming to understand part of my role as supporting other white people to understand the horrors of structural racist inequality, the buried legacies of communities of color in motion for justice, as well as navigating the guilt, shame, hate of other whites, hyper self-conscious awkwardness in multiracial spaces. It also means understanding the importance of cultivating anger towards injustice, love for the humanity, dignity, and liberation of all people, and courage to healthy and effective anti-racist activists, organizers, and leaders in the world.
What we need is what civil rights movement leaders were calling for in the 60’s, Freedom Schools in white suburbs, towns, and rural areas to help free white young people’s minds from white supremacy and help develop their understanding, skills, and practice of being in multiracial liberation movement in a way that affirms everyone’s humanity and cultivates liberation culture – rather then white youth appropriating Black culture in their hunger to fill the void left by white supremacist white culture.
Black racial identity comes out of and is rooted in historical experiences and racialized material conditions in society. White people choosing to be in solidarity with, to feel a deep connection with, Black experience, Black community, and Black liberation struggle is what we want.
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White people taking Black identity and claiming it as their own is theft, is a continuation of colonization, of taking Black identity away for the people who have experienced the historical and material conditions of Blackness in a white supremacist society and reducing it a commodity to consume. For a white person to take on Black identity and then take positions of leadership and influence in the Black community that could have and should have been Black people, is theft through deception.
Furthermore, in this time of Black Liberation movement on the move, with Black women’s leadership front and center, we must be mindful of all the ways that empire will work to demobilize and undermine the movement, generate confusion and distraction, get us fighting amongst ourselves, and push us to substitute petty and personal individual advancements over collective and structural gains. We need to support each other to keep our eyes on the prize.
We need courageous people working for racial justice, of all backgrounds, who can go through the journey of loving themselves for who they are, and show up in powerful ways for structural justice and equality for all.
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Also read: To the White Anti-Racists Who Are Nervous About Stepping Up Against Racism
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism
“…Freedom Schools in white suburbs, towns and rural areas to help free white young people’s minds from white supremacy…”
Do you have any idea how Orwellian that sounds? “Freedom Schools”? Is that like “re-education camps”?
Indoctrination, however well-intended is still indoctrination.