Confession of a Recovering Racist

[On January 29, 2016, I spoke before a gathering of students, staff and faculty at Eastern University, speaking on the topic “White Allies for Racial Justice”. The following is an excerpt from that presentation in which I discuss why I call myself a “recovering racist.”]

Today just happens to be my father’s birthday. Today he turns 89. He lives is a skilled care facility in Minnesota. It just so happens that the year I will turn 89, if I live that long, will 2042. That year 2042 is the year demographers predict that a black or brown or Asian or Native American child will be born, and those folks who identify racially as white will comprise less than 50% of the U.S. population. At the younger age groups that shift has already begun to occur, but in 2042 it is predicted that in the U.S. population as a whole there will be no racial or ethnic group that can claim to be a majority. And most white folks are not prepared for living in a society they are not the dominant group both numerically and culturally; Most folks of color have developed what W.E.B Dubois called a double consciousness; knowing how to code switch so as to be able to operate successfully in a white dominated society. But we who are white folks have very little idea of how to operate in a world where white is the dominant group. We don’t know how to make the shift to living a truly multicultural, multiracial society.

And so while I hope what I have to share is relevant to every one of you here today, I particularly want to speak to those of us here today who identify racially as white, and what this changing demographic is challenging us to be and do.

But I want to begin with a confession: I am a recovering racist. I was born a white male into a white community that is part of a racist society and racist political structure which gave me privileges and access denied to others. I did not know I had these advantages, I didn’t ask for them, but from the day I was born doors were opened to me, opportunities presented to me, resources made available to me simply because I am white that gave me leg up on many others. I worked hard and people said I earned what I had achieved. And I didn’t know the game was been rigged, and because I was white, I had a huge head start.

 I grew up in a community in suburban Minneapolis where most the people looked like me, thought like me and had advantages like me. I didn’t know any better. My parents were moderately progressive folks teaching me to care for others and for the world at large. We attended progressively minded church, where even in the 1960’s, our predominately white congregation had a partnership with a predominantly African American congregation. We were concerned for the suffering of people of color in our city, and beyond. Yet subtlely, almost imperceptibly, through things that were said and unsaid I was taught and socialized into thinking I was just a little bit better, a little further advanced. It was a progressive form of white supremacy, a liberal sort of racism where we were concerned and even willing to help as long as it did not disrupt our safe and comfortable world where we, the whites, still were in control.

I said I was a recovering racist. If any of you have been through a 12 step program or know those who have, you know that when a person completes the 12 steps, he or she never says they are a “recovered” alcoholic, or drug addict or gambler. They say they are “recovering”, because staying straight and healthy and free of addiction, is a daily commitment. 

When I was in my 20's doing youthwork I met a youthworker from Knoxville, TN named Jabo Cox. Jabo had been a heroin addict in his 20's, but got clean, and hadn't used in over 30 years. Yet he confided to me: "Drick, even though I haven't used in 30 years, every morning I wake up and I want to take a hit, and I have to decide not to use." That's what it means to be recovering; it is an ongoing, daily choice to live and think another way.

Like a baby born to a drug addicted mother, I was born into a white culture addicted to the privileges and power of whiteness. And for the first 20 years of my life I didn’t realize how addicted to my privilege I was until I started to  become aware of my own racism, and for the last 40 years I have been working on my addiction.

So I don’t come before you as one who has things all figured out, but one in the ongoing process of recovery from the racism I was born with and born into..

But why do I say this, why do I share my struggles? I suspect that many of the people in this room, particularly those of you who identify as white, like me you are committed to fighting racism. However, if we are ever going to be able to contribute significantly to the fight against racism out there, we need to start by confronting and dealing with the racism in here. We have to confront our own blindness, our own ignorance, and our own fears and prejudices that we rarely speak, but know are there. We have to acknowledge and analyze our comfortable white bubbles that have been constructed all around us, and then burst those bubbles.  I think it’s virtually impossible to grow up white in the United States and not be racist.

William Sloane Coffin said many years ago:  “Racism is America’s original sin,’ and we and our white ancestors are the perpetrators and beneficiaries of that sin. We like to think of how great our nation is, but what we don’t want to admit is that it was built on stolen native lands with slave labor, on the backs of Latino and Asian, poor White laborers in a culture that used and degraded people of color all the while treating them as less than full citizens.  Part of our repentance and our healing is to learn and acknowledge that history, and seek find another way to live that doesn’t perpetuate the racism at the heart of our institutions and our culture.

Anti-racism activists such as Ewuare Osayande  and Mark Charles contend that the truth about the history racism in the US is a truth that has been largely denied by our education system and hidden from most of us. That history contains some hard truths we have yet to come to terms with. That truth of history and the reality of our present are painful to face.  That’s why so many of us White and even some persons of color run away from it, rather than face it. Dealing with our addiction to racism begins with acknowledging and grappling with the truth of who we are and where we came from historically and personally. Only then can we truly enter into our recovery.

A Letter to My Black Friends

One is guilty, but all are responsible (to paraphrase Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel). I awoke Thursday morning to the news of the tragic deaths of the nine people of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC. Their only “crime” according to Dylann Roof, their killer, was that they were black. As a white person who does not share Roof’s racist views, I would like to believe that his action was a random act of violence at the hands of a troubled and deranged young man; that way I could go on feeling sad but free of any responsibility. Yet I know it is not that simple.

The tragic events of Wednesday night are only the most recent example of how tenuous life is for those who are black in this country. Going back nearly 400 years when African slaves were first brought to North America and the hundreds of years of torture and humiliation they endured, through the Jim Crow era and the lynchings, through the time of  bombs, dogs and hoses of Bull Connor’s Birmingham to the unnecessary deaths of Trayvon, Michael, Eric, Tamir, Freddie and so many unnamed more at the hands of police brutality, to the recent tragedy in Charleston, the safety, security and mere livelihood of black people in America has been fragile and tenuous. I know that intellectually, but I have no idea what it is like to live in an environment where at any moment – even in a church at a Bible study – you could be gunned down; I can’t even imagine.

At its root the word “compassion” means “to suffer with” and to the extent I am able, I suffer with those who knew the victims personally or indirectly, and I suffer with those who experience these murders as a reflection of their own grief and suffering. Yet as a white person I can only approximate that suffering in a small way. Even if I were to change my skin color like John Howard Griffin (author of Black Like Me), or seek to pass as a black person like Rachel Dolezal, I cannot know what it is like to have the color of one’s skin be the sole characteristic that some use to judge whether or not your life has value. Black lives do matter not more than others, but as much as others. That is not a given in this country – that much I have come to understand, and to my limited ability to empathize I suffer with you.

However, responsibility goes beyond feeling sad and expressing compassion; it calls for continued action. I have sought to be a person who speaks, writes, teaches and marches for racial justice in all its forms, and I commit myself again today to that calling. While Dylann Roof may have acted on his own, the attitudes that moved him to do what he did came from a culture that at best tolerates and at worst promotes racism. He may have learned to hate from his family, from a group of friends, or from the numerous White Supremacist organizations on the Internet; it does not matter. As long as such attitudes are given credence, our work is not done. Moreover Roof, like all of us,  lives in an American culture that routinely discriminates in education, employment, housing, criminal justice and so many more areas, even as it uses the language of inclusion and equality. As a person of faith and conscience, I will continue to work for the realization of a society where the color of one’s skin is not a target for others’ hate.

The 5^th century Greek poet Aeschylus wrote: “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, becomes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” By “awful grace of God” he meant “filled with awe.” That is to say that understanding the grace of God lies beyond our full comprehension. I can only hope that this terrible tragedy and the ongoing struggle of what it means to be black in America can be changed as we move to address the racism in our society. Through that ongoing work and struggle, I pray we may grow in Wisdom and experience the Grace of God in ways that moves us forward toward the vision of the Beloved Community for which we long.

May my prayers, my thoughts, my compassion, my actions convey in some small way the comfort of God in this sad and terrible time.

MLK D.A.R.E – Why I Will Be Marching On Monday

On Monday, January 19 POWER, the interfaith social justice organization of which I am a part, along with several other social justice and labor organizations have organized a march called MLK Day of Action, Resistance and Empowerment. The march will focus on racial justice in three areas: education, employment and criminal justice. We will be demanding a fair and full funding formula for public education and local control of our school board (which has been under partial state control since 2001); we will be demanding a raise in the minimum wage to $15/hour and the right to form unions; and we will be calling for an independent citizens review board to work with the police and an end to “stop and frisk” tactics used by police. We are expecting at least 10,000 people from across the metropolitan area to participate. I intend to be one of them, and those of you who live near or in the city, I urge you to be there too.

This march is an extension of the many actions that have occurred over the past couple months since the decisions to not indict in the highly publicized  Ferguson and Staten Island cases. However, this march also marks the coming together of several organizations that have been working for a much longer time on their own campaigns and that recognize we share the same struggle for equity and fairness for all, just in different arenas. Further it recognizes that there is an ongoing process of dehumanization against poor people and people of color occurring in this country, and that the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner were not isolated events, but symptomatic of a deep and pernicious ongoing process of injustice. Furthermore the march recognizes the deep divides between the privileged and the oppressed, the haves and the have-nots. As the “Call to Conscience” statement written for the march states:

“Philadelphia is more divided along race, class and gender lines than at any time in recent memory. We are two cities, one of privilege and wealth, the other of poverty, police brutality, low and poverty wages, collapsed schools and collapsing neighborhoods.”

The march also recognizes that the memory of Dr. King itself has itself been sanitized, in that we remember him only as a great servant of oppressed people. However, as the recent movie "Selma" so clearly depicts, Dr. King was also  a modern day prophet whose words not only challenged the powers of his time, but speak to the powers of our era as well. As the “Call to Conscience” also says:

“It is time to break the silence about what Dr. King called the triple evils: racism, poverty and militarism. These forms of violence, indeed terror, exist in a vicious cycle, deteriorating hope, progress and opportunity, as a result of humankind's depravity toward its own.”

I am among those who are privileged racially, educationally and economically for whom this society “works” in terms of more than providing for my basic needs. However, over 40 years ago I first gained a glimpse of racial injustice as I walked the segregated streets of Durham, NC where I was attending college. Since that time I have sought to apply my mind, my heart and most importantly my body in working for the beloved community about which Dr. King spoke so eloquently. Though I am continually reminded I can choose NOT to care and be involved, over those 40+ years it no longer feels or seems like a choice I could ever make. I have developed friendships and heard stories of people who have suffered under the racial inequities that our society’s institutions propagate. These stories and relationships have worked their way into my soul such that I see their liberation as part of my own.

However altruistic and noble this may sound, there is a more selfish reason I am going. At a recent anti-racism training sponsored by POWER, I learned about a Zulu greeting that in English means “I see you.” And the response that is given is “Then I am here.” In the context of the workshop, this greeting was used to illustrate that some people in our society are not seen, that their needs and desires are invisible when it comes public policies regarding education, health care, employment, criminal justice, housing and the like. However, as I have reflected on that phrase, I have taken it also to mean something very personal for myself.

Over the years I have attended many trainings on anti-racism and have involved myself in organizations headed by people of color working on reconciliation and justice issues. However, because I look like the middle class, white male that I am, many times I have been challenged by people of color for my lack of empathy and understanding, and criticized for actions and decisions that people who look like me have done. In my mind I understand why this is so. Despite the election of a Black president, and the modest advances by people of color in corporate and public institutions, our society is still largely dominated and run by White guys like me. Furthermore, often the women and people of color who do get to those positions of power must play by the White man’s rules in order to get there. For instance, many, including me, have been critical of Pres. Obama for not speaking about more forcefully and consistently on racial issues, but could he have gotten to where he is, if he had? Conventional wisdom would suggest not.

So I get it – White guys who look like me and the institutions they run, are responsible for the inequities that exist – not solely, but largely. But I am not one of “those guys”. I am an ally and in every way I can think of I try to be an ally in solidarity with those who struggle against injustice. So, in a very selfish way, I am marching Monday, because I want to be “seen” as an ally and not a perpetrator of injustice.

Author Parker Palmer, recently said in an interview on a podcast  I heard that the most radical thing we can do is to show up with everything and as everything that we are. That is what I intend to do. I am deeply aware of my racist tendencies and behavior patterns, and the privileges I enjoy, and the fact that I am ignorant of other things I do that perpetrate the racism I abhor. I am all those things, and as that person I am going to show up and march with others Black, White, Latino, Asian and Native American and by our presence seek to be and work for the beloved community for which we all long.

If you are able, I hope you will join me.

The God of Interruption - An Advent Meditation in the Light of Ferguson

For me, the period of time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s is usually a kind of personal sacred time. Each year I begin this five week season by making a list of all the people, events and things in the past year for which I am thankful. Then I go thru Advent with a sense of yearning, anticipation and renewed hope for a better world. Advent then culminates with the celebration of Christmas with its mixed focus on the birth of Jesus, the coming together of family, and the sharing of presents. Then a week later we welcome a new year and I write down hopes for the year to come. I began this practice nearly 40 years ago when I was in college  and it has served as sort of liminal time where I move from one year to the next, from being fatigued and doubting to having a renewed hope and focus for the future.

However, this year my Thanksgiving to New Year’s sacred time has taken on a different feel. Two days before Thanksgiving the decision was announced that Officer Darrin Wilson would not be indicted in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. A week later a similar announcement was made regarding the officers responsible for choking and killing Eric Garner. Almost immediately demonstrations erupted around the country. Die-ins were held in select shopping malls on Black Friday. In cities from east to west groups of young people marched with hands held high signs saying “Don’t Shoot,” “I Can’t Breathe” and “Black Lives Matter.” Here in Philadelphia there have been marches that interrupted the city’s Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, a die-ins at major intersections during rush hour and following a Philadelphia Eagles game, a service of the Seven Last Words of Black people, and numerous marches throughout the city. Even larger gatherings have occurred in New York and Washington bringing attention to this issue on both a local and national scale.

While I have not participated in any of these marches or demonstrations, I have watched them closely and have been a part of numerous conversations both formal and informal. In these conversations there have been a wide range of emotions expressed from anger to guilt to confusion. Many of my white friends have wondered where and how and whether they should fit in the demonstrations. Others have wondered where the demonstrations will lead and what if any changes will come about because of them.  Some media commentators have focused on the few instances of violence and have questioned whether demonstrators  are “hurting their cause" by interrupting normal activities and generally causing disruption. To be sure in many ways at this point the demonstrations appear to more about expressing anger and frustration at police brutality and more generally a unjust criminal justice system, than calling for concrete specific change.

However, as I have studied the history of social movements, and particularly the Civil Rights Movement, what appears in hindsight to have been a clear, focused effort toward social change was at the time it occurred often chaotic, controversial and confusing. For that reason, I share the demonstrators’ anger and frustration, and at the same time I have hope that emotion can be channeled into concrete action for positive social change. However, if history teaches us anything, that process will be haphazard, confusing, frustrating and filled with stops and starts. Thus it will require clear leadership and perseverance over a long haul.

Coincidentally as I have been going thru my "sacred time," the demonstrations have given me a renewed appreciation for the disruptive nature of the birth of Jesus in his time. The Christmas story we hear usually focuses on a mother, father and a child born in a barn accompanied by angels and wise men. However a part of the story often overlooked is the social chaos that ensued because of his birth. According to the gospel of Matthew, when King Herod realized a child-king was being born in his midst, he ordered mass infanticide in hopes of killing his would-be adversary;  the people of the land were terrorized. As a counterpoint to Herod’s action in Luke’s Gospel when Mary learns of her pregnancy, she sings a song which in part said:

God has brought down rulers from their thrones 
but has lifted up the humble.
 God has filled the hungry with good things, 
but sent the rich away empty.

Then when the infant Jesus was presented in the temple a few days after his birth, the prophetess Anna and the prophet Simeon proclaimed the child was the harbinger of a new age..

The birth of Jesus, while at one level benign and blessed, at the same time set in motion a process of significant change. Contrary to the image of a silent blessed night, the birth of Jesus was accompanied by violence, chaos and fear, as well as hope for a better day. At the heart of the Christian story is a God who enters history for the purpose of interrupting and disrupting the status quo in order to bring hope and justice to hurting and oppressed people.

Angela Glover Blackwell, the CEO of Policy Link, an organization dedicated to promoting equitable and sustainable economic development in low income communities, grew up in St. Louis and recently spoke about the events in Ferguson over the past few weeks. Like Black people in nearby Ferguson, Glover as a child remembered being treated as a second class citizen because of her skin color. Reflecting on recent events in light of Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, she suggested that the demonstrations are a sign that people have hope. When people have hope and their expectations are not met, they get angry and act out. Thus, while recent events may appear on the surface to be chaotic and at times even violent, Blackwell believes they are a sign that people want better and are willing to speak up and work for it.

In the same way, the birth of Jesus was a sign of hope for his time and for ages to come. Perhaps in interrupting and disrupting our normally festive Christmas season, these demonstrations remind us that God is again breaking in to move us to work for a society where race and class are no longer the determining factor as to who is treated fairly and humanely, and who is not. They are a sign that people of faith and conscience, working together can and must fight to create a world where the lion and the lamb can lay down together and where the young black man and the white police officer can achieve reconciliation at a table of mutual respect, common concern and equitable justice.

What It Feels Like to be an Oxymoron

“He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction” – Kris Kristofferson “The Pilgrim”

Recently, I came across an open letter written by Asian-American Activist Kil Ja Kim entitled “The White Anti-Racist is an Oxymoron.” I encourage you to read it for yourself (link here ), but here is a short summary. She begins with the observation that “whiteness is a structure of domination” which is “at the heart of the U.S. social, economic and political system.” It is important to note that Kim writes this letter specifically for those whites who see themselves as actively working to dismantle that white supremacist system. Yet as she points out white people are those who benefit from the system and for whom and by whom the system was created. Even as white anti-racists work to dismantle the system, they are benefiting by it.

Whites cannot be but what and who they are. Kim is particularly bothered by whites who try to use their anti-racist stance as a badge of honor and who try to emulate people of color in their dress, hairstyles, speech and lifestyle. They try to take on some sort of “marginalized” social position not realizing that for whites such a position is largely a matter of choice, whereas for people of color there is no choice; marginalization is the position the white supremacist system has placed them in.

From my perspective Kim’s most damning statement is that “white activism, especially white anti-racism, is predicated on an economy of gratitude,” by which she means that anti-racist whites expect people of color to be grateful for them having joined the liberation cause. She points out that while people of color may be thankful for their white allies, those same people of color are often made to feel inferior for needing “help” in the first place. She concludes by challenging whites to do their own work, and to “figure out ways in which whiteness needs to die as a social structure and as an identity in which [whites] organize [their] anti-racist work.”

I plead guilty to having thought or done everything Kim mentions in her letter, and more. Most, if not all, that she says is true for most whites involved in anti-racist work. I have come to realize that I cannot not be racist. Like a fetus in the womb of a drug addicted woman, I was born addicted to racist privilege. This is not to say that my parents or any one in my extended family was a member of the KKK or a white supremacist group. On the contrary, my family has generally been liberally minded and inclusive when it comes to matters of race. However, the privilege we enjoy living in this society simply because we are white (See Peggy McIntosh’s classic essay on white privilege), the financial wealth we inherit because it could be passed down, the access to education, employment, cultural opportunities and more – these are all things that come to us as whites  simply because we are white. The society around us, the media we watch, the education we receive, the history we read and much more has explicitly and implicitly contended that the white way of life is the norm while at the same time has demeaned or  ignored the contributions of  people of color in those same arenas. So, yes for these reasons and many more, I am a racist.

I also consider myself an anti-racist ally; therein lies the contradiction. In my teaching, writing and work for gun violence prevention and educational justice I seek to name, challenge and dismantle structures of privilege and oppression (often two sides of the same coin). In my consumer choices, my investments, my friendships, and work relationships, I seek to be a voice and advocate for equity and justice. I have tried to do these things always maintaining relationships of accountability with friends of color who can and will set me straight. In spite of my best efforts I have spoken, acted, and thought in ways that betray my attachment to whiteness and my racism. Moreover, I take for granted many things that come to me simply because I am white. I try to be aware of such things, but I know I mess up much more than I wish.

I will also admit to participating in what Kim calls the “economy of gratitude.” In the past I have expected people of color to be thankful that I am ‘on their side.” However, I no longer think that way. I now realize that it is in the long term interest of white people, as well as people of color, that the structures of white power and privilege be dismantled. White anti-racist speaker, Tim Wise says it this way: “I fight racism because racism is a sickness in my community, and it damages me” (White Like Me, p. 182).  The laws and structures that degrade and dehumanize people of color in other ways dehumanize whites. The racism embedded in white society distorts and disables whites from living in the world as it is, even as it oppresses and alienates people of color.

I no longer expect people of color to appreciate me. In fact if I am honest I will admit that I need people of color to challenge me and hold me accountable, and make me feel uncomfortable from time to time. Kim ends her essay saying that people of color have got their work to do and whites have their work to do. Whites’ work is to figure out how dismantle whiteness and build identity on something other than the power and privilege that comes from simply being white. That system, while it is still in place, is a dying system, and keeps whites from living in meaningful relationships across differences of race and culture. It keeps whites from seeing themselves clearly for who they are. It keeps them from seeing the huge mistakes and crimes that their ancestors have perpetrated through history. It keeps them from embracing the present and future diversity in our country. It causes them  to fear those who are not like them. It cripples them, it cripples me, in so many ways.


So I accept that I am an oxymoron, a walking contradiction. At the same time I aspire to be a living paradox, an apparent contradiction that seeks a deeper truth and reality of what it means to be human. So for the time being, I will accept feeling out of place in the world – not at home in the company of whites who take their privilege for granted, while simultaneously accepting that people of color have an understandable and justifiable distrust of white anti-racists  like myself. Not always a comfortable feeling, but I think and hope it is the right way to try and live out my convictions for racial justice.