See if this perspective looks familiar:
You didn’t choose the color of your skin. So you shouldn’t have to apologize for it.
And, honestly, it’s insulting to apologize for “privilege” when you worked to get to where you are. You didn’t make excuses. You worked hard to get to where you are — rich or poor — and, likely, would have gotten around as far if you had been a minority. But even if you didn’t — what you did was take the hand you were dealt and play it instead of complaining about it.
Now you’re living in a country with — well, plenty of friends who happen to be minorities, and you tend to get along with them pretty well. Or maybe you are a minority yourself, and everything seems more-or-less fine.
Except for a group of people. The complainers and their comrades. And, honestly, they seem to be looking for a handout — to take away from your life or your dignity, the one you worked hard for with your own blood and sweat.
Yes, you can understand things being a bit more difficult for them. But things are more difficult for everyone, in one way or another. Things are more difficult for you because of your religion, your age, your sex, your tax bracket, your disability, etc. But that does not obligate everyone to personally accommodate you. You were never going to get forward in life if you didn’t take control of your own choices, in spite of those difficulties.
It’s real life. It’s a life that a lot of these liberals don’t understand. They think they’re bleeding hearts or trendy, but honestly their rose-colored glasses and whining ignore the hard fact that the way to succeed is not to go through life with your hand held out, but to move forward and succeed as well as you can. If you want success, you can’t beg for it; you have to have the wherewithal to stand up and take it.
And that’s what so many of these people don’t get. But others, like most blacks. are still are complaining instead of solving the problem. If you think about it, Barack Obama is President of the United States — that’s just one piece of several pieces of solid proof that we are not in the 1960s, as these complaining people pretend to be. And yes, the black prison population is high, and it’s trendy to point out that police officers are arresting black people on the street — but the honest truth is that black people are more likely to kill someone than white people. So the tendency to shoot black people is really, ultimately, black people’s fault. And really, why are they on the street shouting against cops, when this killing really isn’t their OR your problem, because black people do it to each other.
And yet, they are out on the streets trying to get you to feel guilty. How does that make sense? How is that rational? How is that fair?
You did not sign up to be your skin tone or to be born in this culture. You will not apologize for the way you born, and that doesn’t mean that you’re a 1960s racist. It means that, just like every other person, you’re looking out for yourself and helping yourself succeed — which is much more polite to society than the intrusive nature of what Black Lives Matter is doing.
Black people and white people are the same, in your mind. It’s just that each person has to take responsibility for the cards they were dealt and for their own lives. The responsibility for making things better is for each person. And if several black individuals think things are terrible in their communities — instead of marching the streets, maybe they should become police officers. Instead of complaining about poverty, maybe they should work hard and get better jobs. Instead of complaining about bad education, maybe they should take a more active role in their education. Instead of complaining about the criminals in their communities, maybe they should work towards more stable family structures that are less likely to produce criminals. Instead of protesting against police, maybe they should crack down on criminal activity in their own communities. And if they did this, maybe the view of black people would eventually improve.
This is what responsible people do. This is what you do. It has nothing to do with which race is better or worse. It has to do with each group taking responsibility. And the reason black people DON’T succeed as much as they otherwise would is because so many of them don’t take that responsibility. They’re begging for people to cry for them, instead of realizing that the path to improvement is to work on their own success.
You know what I think about all that?
If I’m going to be dead honest, that makes a lot of sense to me. When I was a die-hard Republican, far-right conservative mulling over libertarianism several years ago, I would have agreed with you.
I changed my mind, though, somewhere along the way. And I’ve been trying to think about why.
I’ll start with a confession: I’m racist.
I don’t talk about it that often, but it’s true. I don’t just mean that ironically. I’m black, and I was racist as hell, and it still crops up sometimes. What makes the difference, for me, is admitting it to myself (or when it’s called out and the accusation proves true) and dealing with it. And I usually haven’t realized forms of bigotry I’ve had myself (as a former far-right conservative) until I realized that views I had were getting in the way of facts and friendships and were upheld, surprisingly, by an ignorance that had led to a bigotry or racism. So I worked on changing.
I’ll show you what I mean with a racism I think I finally got somewhat past.
When I was living in Arizona around 15 years ago, there were a lot of undocumented immigrants in Sedona, Arizona, where I lived (that place is beautiful; take a visit sometime), and they happened to be Hispanic. They lived in a trailer park, waiting to be picked up for landscaping or other work. Instead, ready workforce. And I didn’t really care about them, to be honest. They were workers who had come into Arizona to take our jobs, they were illegals, they looked and acted different than me, they…well, I had my share of conversations about how “you know how those they are.” This isn’t to say I didn’t know any Hispanics. My viewpoint wasn’t individual. It was more of a general stereotype. If you were to talk to me then, I would insist it was about undocumented immigrants, not Hispanics, and I’d think that was the truth…but looking back, I have to admit that sometimes I would see Hispanics and automatically assume they fit into a stereotype.
Then I started waiting tables in the nearby city of Flagstaff, Arizona, and worked with some undocumented Hispanic immigrants. They were awesome coworkers. They had families and good friends. Cute kids. Friendly. They were people, trying to do the best they could with what they had. And we had our share of conversations in the break room, me talking fluently, them in their broken English. And as I talked to them, I started to care. At first I just cared about them, but then I began to care about undocumented immigrants more generally. It interfered with my hardcore conservatism…but eventually I began to care about their plight, and then I realized I had been racist. I had seen them as somehow inferior and less important than me. And I didn’t realize that until I was connected to them, worked with them, and became their friend.
Before that, I would have said that them being deported to Mexico was not my problem.
And there’s no really rational way to explain this change. Once it wasn’t my problem, and then I began to care more, and it became my problem. Something I was passionate about, and eventually I was going to be damned if my vote contributed to them losing their livelihood and seeing their family separated and them being forced back into a nightmare of a situation, away from being my friend and coworker in the beautiful mountains and forest of Flagstaff, Arizona. I would fight against it tooth and nail. I cared about people I had not seen as having to do anything with me. And what did it was racism — that whole thought that because someone looked differently than I did and had less status in culture than me, they were unimportant to my life.
And, honestly, the undocumented Hispanic immigrants wanted the support. It’s true you could barrage them for not taking responsibility for their own lives. There’s an argument to be made there, and I made it before I met them. But somewhere along the line, we became close, I simply flipped, and I saw their anger at immigration as something I was angry at, too. When they urged me to care, I suddenly began to feel like I should care, because they were my friends — and how do you not care about whether your friend gets their life ruined and their family torn apart?
Maybe it had to do with depending on them every day I went to work. Recognizing that we were part of a community that had to work together to succeed. Being friends with them and caring about them made the food service go better, resulting in better tips. But more than that, it made for a better work environment, it resulted in deeper friendships, and it gave me a better all-around life that inspired me to look forward to a workday.
But I didn’t have to do that. I could have said their fear of deportation was their problem, and focused on my own life, and let them be my friends or coworkers without looking at the larger issue of possible deportation they constantly faced.
I could have said that I didn’t get ahead based on their help, but solely based on my own wherewithal — my own sense of responsibility. And that they needed to do the same thing.
That option was available to me, too. And if I had done that, I probably still would have seen arguments defending undocumented immigrants as annoying, and resented anyone who urged me to stand up for undocumented immigrants’ rights. But those experience were like a floodlight, showing that they were connected to my goals of making a living for myself, and that reality would have been enshrouded in darkness if I had seen myself as a lone waiter in an every-person-for-themselves environment.
That was a domino effect. When I’ve been prejudiced against a certain group, I eventually got to know them, listened to their concerns, talked to them, debated them, worked with them, etc. until I began to connect with them; they became an important part of how I saw the world and I’ve found, in each case, that they had far more to contribute to my life and society than I thought. It’s how I went from being a hard-core fundamentalist Christian to a hardcore liberal atheist. I kept caring about more and more people and saw how they were connected to me in more and more ways that I hadn’t known about before.
Here’s one thing I realized, too — those undocumented Hispanic immigrants weren’t just fighting for themselves. They were fighting for their families and friends. So it wasn’t enough for them just to make sure they were taken care of as individuals — they had to work to ensure that people heard their concerns so that those they cared about were protected, too. It simply wasn’t something they could do on their own.
And I saw that being neutral wasn’t. Not caring meant they would get treated the same or worse. I cared so much I tried to get other stubborn people to care. And that was when I first started to become a little less conservative, even though I didn’t (and still don’t) know all the correct solutions to what they’re going through. It was a flood of change after that.
It’s how I eventually came to feel about the LGBTQ community, after many experiences and deepening relationships. How I came to feel about atheists, eventually.
When my mother was in a wheelchair for a couple years, I began to feel angry at the way people treated her, as if my mother — full of life — was mentally weak and inferior. It made me care more about how disabled people were treated. Because she couldn’t do it all on her own. There were times when she was on her bed and couldn’t even move.
And I suppose I could have said that she was responsible for her own life — our family could have said that. But the reality was that she needed help — and because of that help, she is now active and works in a gym, and her efforts to continue raising and encouraging us have helped hundreds of thousands of people, by extension.
I remember once, standing in Washington D.C. several years ago with a homeless friend who had grown up on the streets whose mother was a prostitute and who didn’t know who his father was, who had had a hard life all his years, preaching to him about picking himself up by his own bootstraps, and him exploding to me that I didn’t know his life, that people sometimes get broken in all kinds of permanent ways, and crying. And I could have said that he was a victim and to dust himself off and stop crying. But I knew he had been told that many times before, and besides I cared about him, he was my friend, and I knew — from knowing him for a year — that he had great potential inside him. So I began respecting his life, and encouraging him. Eventually he got a job and got off the street. But it took someone to actually recognize his struggle, y’know?
Here’s another story: At my job, I work with a lot of future physicians in a way that allows me to know hundreds of stories regarding how they came to decide to become physicians. And this experience has taught me that many of care about people because of an experience they had or someone close to them had. Maybe they or a loved one was sick, or someone close to them died due to the care they experienced in the hospital. So this medical student is becoming a physician so they can make things better and doing research that will help others heal better. Especially when it comes to the poor and those least able to afford it, in most cases. Again, that’s the inspiration of hundreds of these future physicians I help. And they have the audacity, sometimes, to get others to help them or advocate with them.
No, they don’t HAVE to do this. They don’t have to be physicians. I suppose an alternate philosophy is that if someone’s sick, they’re sick — tough luck if they have to die on the street. You take care of your own health, right? Why can’t someone else take care of their own, as well?
You can have that philosophy. I did, once. But…there are just too many connections I’m seeing between people, and too many people I connect to, since those days as a waiter, or pushing my mother in her wheelchair…for me to think we’re just islands like that.
There’s another way of thinking that seems to make more sense. It sees connections between the pain struggling people experience and the physicians who helped them, that shows them how they can be a physician to help others. And helping others through the eyes of their own pain enables them to help others better; for example, the person who cares for drug addicts because his own fiance — who he loved deeply — died from a heroin overdose is likely to have far better bedside manner than the person who is clocking in and clocking out and doesn’t really care.
I mean, I can see this in my own experience in a hospital. For example, when I was seventeen, I sprained my neck in a self-defense class injury. Here I am, more than a decade later, and the pain still flames up like hell sometimes because the physician I went to for it looked at it for about six seconds, in a rush, said it was a lighter sprain than it was, and left. If he had spent more time, I likely would not have this lifelong annoyance.
Now, I can either have the attitude other people who have similarly sprained necks should struggle as much as I did or worse for the rest of their lives, to build character (because, after all, it’s no one’s problem but theirs). But if medicine worked that way, how much would healthcare really improve?
Or I can have the attitude that I don’t want other people to struggle as I did, and say physicians should look for ways that they can be more thorough in a diagnosis so that someone else doesn’t have as bad of an experience, and has a better life.
Which strategy is better? It seems that if medicine worked with that first strategy, it would eventually make the field of medicine worse and worse. If they worked with the second strategy, people might have more and more positive experiences after getting sprained necks.
It’s the difference between, “I went through a hard time, so you should go through as bad or worse.”
And, “I went through a hard time, so I’ll work to make yours better.”
It seems clear to me that following one consistently will make society worse, and following the other probably make it better.
Here’s the other thing — for me to know about those connections, I had to listen to people who were often not listened to. Yes, I try to represent the opinions of other people every once in a while. But there’s also a lot of value in listening to people who are silenced. I tend to listen to the people who are seen as the victims in society, the second-class citizens, because 9/10, they are contributing members of society. And we would realize how they are contributing members of society and highlight those contributions if we actually listened to them. I’ve found this time and time and time again.
But we can only listen to them if they speak. Like, I can’t speak completely for an undocumented Hispanic immigrant. I can talk about trends, etc. — but I have to give them the mike and let them speak, and to do that, I have to fight against “victim” labels that are often extremely determined to shut them up. I have found, time and time again, that getting to know these individuals, listening, and understanding can show me how I’m connected to them in ways I never thought of before, and help me join with them to make life better.
I speak up as an atheist and as a black man not just to hear myself talk, and not to represent the views of ALL atheists or ALL black men, but because I’m giving a report on what it’s like to be in my position in society that will, I hope, help us in showing how we’re connected — giving us a better blueprint of how to make society better. And I do the same thing for other people. Like, for example, when I was a pro-life atheist. What changed my mind, besides the facts, was actually going on YouTube and watching several videos of women talking about what it was like to have an abortion, and what having an abortion allowed them to do. This opened up a whole world for me that I wouldn’t have seen if I had done what conservatives had told me to do — dismiss the experience the woman had as captive, completely, to a narrative of what the woman was supposedly supposed to do.
But that story is best told by her. My story, as someone who was part of a collection of voices that once silenced such woman, is that this person that many people think is inferior is not, based on my experience — to shift my own conversation and focus in society to help her.
And like I’ve said, I’ve done it in several areas. And it’s not all altruistic. It’s selfish as hell — I want to create a better world for myself and others in my position, and that often means highlighting the ways the people who are connected to me operate so I can work with them to do that. Doing that requires hearing their voices, and honestly expressing the parts of who I am that seem (in my experience) to be a possible asset to the community that people try to silence — such as, for example, being black or being atheist.
You don’t have to listen. But I think that changing the way we look at blackness and look at atheism with concrete experiences can open up concrete ways in which we can improve society. This kind of thing can help us as a society become less bigoted in all kinds of ways.
It’s messy. I’m not talking about following people blindly. I’m talking about studies and data, in addition to concrete experiences. And the studies and date seem clear — there does seem to be racism in this country.
You can live your life in the dark of how this marginalization affects you, and insist on others doing so, too. Or you can decide to join with others and choose to see those marginalized parts of us as part of society. That’s how I try to get past racism, anyway. Not through guilt, but relationships and caring and learning and listening, especially to parts of people that seem most silenced. And who you are intersects with one of those parts — speaking up and telling us what you’re going through, so we can help you back and, together, make the world a better place for all of us.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. I have a Patreon, if you want to help me do what I do.
And now, this:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKj6PxBCdpM[/youtube]