Hey, White People! (From not-racist to anti-racist) Dec. 20, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray
We are cursed to live in interesting times, aren’t we? We have managed, and I hope that our democratic institutions have managed to survive four years of what will certainly be remembered as the worst president in American history who seemed to be working to end American history with unprecedented favors for Russia and the enemies of democracy. What is possibly even more horrifying is that this phenomenally incompetent and dangerous president would have been re-elected had a pandemic not shown up early in the 2020 election year.
He came too close to winning as it was, and while there were many factors including, both some hard work in mobilizing the black vote in Georgia, thank you Stacy Abrams, and the choice of a woman of color as a running mate, but, as my friend, Steve Beltz pointed out to me, without his disastrous failure of leadership in the pandemic, Trump would likely have won a second term. Steve, if you have any more grand insights, please don’t call again, I’m trying to reduce stress in my life.
The Covid-19 virus has claimed more than 300,000 American lives now and a few months ago, some experts were saying that it might be another two years before we could develop a working vaccine, which meant we might be facing a death toll of somewhere between two and five million people before this virus went away. We really must pause to both wonder and express gratitude for the fact that scientists have accomplished miracles. The previous record for developing a vaccine was four years, most take more than 8. The coronavirus has been around in several forms for many years but no human vaccine for any iteration of it had ever been successfully developed.
But last week, with no government money or involvement, scientists at Pfizer got emergency authorization to start distributing their vaccine. And this week, a second vaccine from Moderna, one that does not require such super cold storage and transportation, that will allow us to more easily vaccinate Americans in rural areas and people in poor countries, was also approved.
I want to take a moment to introduce you to one of the lead scientists at Moderna who has brought this vaccine into the world. This 34-year-old, diminutive, beautiful scientist, Kizzmekia Corbett has not only been a leader in the research and development, she has also stepped out to speak to the unequal distribution of healthcare in this pandemic that has led to a disproportionate number of deaths in the black community.
I think it is important to highlight Kizzmekia and other black scientists involved in these vaccine projects to help to overcome the distrust and entirely reasonable fear that many black people have about being vaccinated but you know, even more, I want us to talk about her because she will still come as something of a surprise to way too many white Americans, not just the Proud Boys, and the QAnon, crowds, but the liberal allies of civil rights who still, at some level, think of the unjust plight of black people in America as forming a kind of liberal white man’s burden.
Even white progressives who too often think of themselves as saviors of their black and brown sisters and brothers, suffer from unconscious racism that continues to perpetuate myths of racial inferiority so that some real education still needs to take place among my tribe.
What we need is not just a lot of woke white people who can claim to be “not racist” but we need white people who become well enough informed, to become seriously “anti-racist.” We’ve tried black history month, the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, and even postage stamps with heroes of the civil rights movment on them but there are stubborn sterotypes that resist subtle correction.
Kizzmekia grew up poor but she had a shot at a couple of good scholarships that gave her a way out of her humble beginnings, a testament to why we should have tuition free colleges because without her PhD in science, we might have lost another million lives waiting for another vaccine. This is no exaggeration.
When Anthony Fauci was asked about black involvement in the development of vaccines, without hesitation, he started talking about Kizzmekia but the media hasn’t said much because her’s is not, in our white minds, the face of reliable science.
Four years ago, when the biographical movie, Hidden Figures was released, telling the stories of three black, female mathematicians who worked at NASA, who literally made it possible for us to put astronauts in space in 1963, was the first hint I ever had of this story. Loved the movie but I was disturbed by the fact that the movie had to teach me of the existence of these three brilliant women who had become, virtual, human computers against all of the racial apartheid that was America in the 1950’s and 60’s.
I was born in 1956. I remember the Mercury space flights. I grew up with the news reports and Life Magazine pictures from NASA, from the moon, from John Glenn to the space shuttle. No one ever told me anything about these black women who were the geniuses that made it all possible . . . again, because they did not fit the narrative.
These stories have been so suppressed that it isn’t just white people who don’t know about them, black people have been starved for their own stories just like we have.
I remember hearing Chris Rock talking about taking a course in Black History thinking it would be an easy A for him, since he is, after all, black. But he discovered that other than a few stories about Martin Luther King, Jr. and a mention of George Washington Carver, that black children’s education in the cultural and scientific contributions of blacks was almost as bad as that of whites.
We have seen black people in entertainment and sports. It is true enough that certain groups of people excel in certain areas and black performers and athletes have certainly earned a place in our awareness but, you have to admit, they were held back and hidden as long as possible but what they do, they do in public. Black scientists, researchers, writers, teachers . . . they are still not being talked about and that helps to support the myth of black intellectual inferiority.
For years I have encouraged white people to read novels by the late Toni Morrison, who I believe captured black culture and experience better than anyone. The Nobel prize winner was also one of my listeners . . . a fact which has nothing at all to do with this sermon but if Toni Morrison had been a listener of yours, I bet you would find a way to work it into conversation as well. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get it onto my resume for decade now. Her death, last year, was a real blow. Some folks that that Ta-Nahisi Coats would take up her mantel but I have a new fan crush.
I am slowly and painfully reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book that talks about race in America as a Caste, like the caste system we know of in the history of India. I say that I am slowly and painfully reading it because she is telling me so many things that I didn’t know and, I have to admit, some of it I didn’t want to know.
Did you know that the architects of the Nazi holocaust, in their early days in power, met and studied books about the racial apartheid in the USA? Did you know there were white scientists at Harvard and other prominent universities that wrote about the racial inferiority of blacks and helped to put in place the laws we had in the early 20th century that kept white people from marrying people of color? Did you know there were aspects of America’s legal Jim Crowe and racist laws that the Nazis though just went too far? Hitler wrote personal notes to some American scientists, telling them how much he appreciated their work.
People where I am from in rural Kentucky, often curled their lips at the Civil Rights movement and would say things like, “I never owned a slave, what does this have to do with me?” I wasn’t smart enough to say it then, but I wish that I could go back in time and ask, “Did you ever drink from a whites only water fountain?” “Did you ever sit in the whites only waiting room at a train station?” “Did you ever go to a segregated school, or a de-facto segregated church, or did you ever live in a neighborhood where blacks were legally prevented from living?”
Sure, slavery ended officially 180 years ago but, as Wilkerson carefully narrates, that was not the end of the caste system in America.
The end of the war gave birth to Jim Crow laws, the KKK, lynchings, and a more deeply entrenched racism that has defied school and workplace integration. Even now we see repeal of the Voter Rights legislation giving southern states permission to make it increasingly difficult for black and brown people to vote. Trump shamelessly demanded that votes from largely black communities in Detroit and Atlanta be discarded last month, not because they were not legitimate votes but simply because they were votes cast by black people and our racist president does not believe that a black man or woman has a right to vote against him.
For most of my adult life, the racial cast system in America has been enforced in subtle ways but Trump has a habit of saying the quiet parts out loud, from his “S-hole” countries comments to his suggestion that even American born women of color in the congress “be sent back to where they are from.” He is not a subtle racist and so many people like that about him that, I fear, without the ravages of the pandemic, we would have had him in the White House for another 4 years.
The very concept of race is basically an American invention. There were no white people in Europe. There were Germans, and French, English and Italians, but they were not white until they came to America. The Irish suffered from a lot of anti-Catholic discrimination when they first came here, but because they were white, they assimilated very quickly.
Wilkerson recounts a conversation she had with a Nigerian born playwright, who told her, “You know there are no black people in Africa.” Which sounds like non-sense on the face of it, the sub-Saharan continent is almost nothing but black people. But the woman explained, there “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan,
Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves.”
There were no white people in Europe and no black people in Africa, until they come here. This is our caste system. It is an invention to protect the white privilege that maintains the differences in wealth, income, status, employment, and education that white people enjoy for no morally defensible reason.
A century ago, when it was still illegal for white people to marry blacks or Asians, the definition of who was white and who wasn’t was legally described in our racial segregation laws. Most states insisted that one drop of Negro blood made a person black but when you get down to 1/16th or 1/32nd it takes more than just looking. The laws then would question association. If a person who looked white but associated, socialized with people of color, then they were assigned to the lower caste.
It was interesting to me several years ago when we were introduced to Barack Obama that he was instantly identified as being black. He had a black father and a white mother, but he spent very little time with his father and his white mother was an anthropologist from Kansas. He did get to move from Kansas to Hawaii to grow up with his maternal grandparents. . . which at least placed him in a more racially diverse setting but in what way was Barack more black than white? To some degree, I’m sure, it was assumed by those around him. Obama looks black. At some point, Obama chose to identify as black.
Similarly, Kamala Harris is has a black father and an Asian mother and people from both ethnic groups loudly claim her, but at some point she chose to attend a traditionally black college and, if I am reading the tea leaves right, she has pretty consistently identified as being black.
Last January I was sitting at the dinner table with my old seminary friends in their home in Birmingham. They have not always cheered my left leaning politics but as a black family, they were sick of Donald Trump and talked about which black woman we would like to see at the top of the Democratic ticket. We liked Stacy Abrams but when Kamala’s name came up and it was mentioned that she is married to a white Jewism man, you could see some doubt creeping in. Only in America would a white man and two black friends seriously engage in a conversation about someone asking, “Well, just how black is she?”
There are two people in my family. Me and my Korean born daughter, but no one ever sat around trying to decide just how white I am. Because no one questions the dominant race.
I find it slightly entertaining when people buy a genetic test and announce what percentage of their heritage is from Norway or Russia or India. People, 100,000 years ago, humans started to migrate out of Africa. Where are you from? You are from Africa. Do you walk upright and have an opposable thumb? You are from Africa. Some of you left more recently than others but so far as genetics is concerned, race does not even exist. It is much ado about melatonin.
Scientifically, genetically, anthropologically, race doesn’t really exist. However, socially, it does exist, and it exists as a form of toxic sickness that America is only starting to wake up from. Racism is real.
Looked at over a 50 year span of time, unemployment figures go up and down, but, consistently, black unemployment remains twice what white unemployment is. A black man is five times more likely to be incarcerated for the same crime as a white man. A black man is 8 times more likely to be shot by the police when being arrested than a white man.
The numbers in this chart are dated but the contrast is still real. White and Asian families tend to have 10 to 12 times the accumulated wealth of black and Hispanic families. And, as a side note, without tuition free colleges, this gap will only get worse.
You might say that Kizzmekia Corbett was one of the lucky ones because she got scholarships that allowed her to pursue her education in science but slow down a second. Who is the lucky one here? When the paltry 50 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine that Trump ordered have been used to inoculate health care workers and nursing home residents, a theological, fat, senior citizen, fighting type 2 diabetes will be standing in line for the Moderna vaccine. So, I’m luckier Kizzmekia. I’m lucky that Kizzmekia got to go to college for a long time, become a scientist and at the ripe old age of 34, she gets to create the vaccine that will likely save my life and the life of a whole lot of old white guys just like me.
White people are so afraid of losing privilege, status, preferential treatment. They typically have no idea who racism hurts them too, that it confines them in a prison of fear and immorality, that it deprives our culture of great scientists, inventors, statesmen, writers, as well as musicians, actors, and athletes.
There is no end the caste system until we raise the employment rate, wages, and wealth in minority families and end it we must. We can either tax the rich or we can eat the rich, but you know that it has to be one or the other. In sum we need to realize, even before we get started, that we are already lucky that most black people are only asking for justice rather than revenge, even though revenge may be what we deserve.
Justice is about 400 years late for our black brothers and sisters. Any further delay is unacceptable.
