By Chris Crass
A nearly all white rally supporting police officer Darren Wilson chant “shoot, shoot, shoot”, in response to a nearly all Black rally chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”. This is America, and this is why the “white community” must be divided, and every person racialized as white who can be saved from the disease, the horror, the cancer of white supremacy, must be brought over to what legendary white anti-racist Anne Braden called, “the Other America” of multiracial social justice democracy.
Whiteness is based on irrational fear and contempt of Blackness that subconsciously rationalizes unthinkable violence, sadistic dehumanization, and self-congratulatory paternalism. Racism is the problem of the white community and all of us who are white have a moral, political, and spiritual responsibility to end it.
To all of my comrades, friends and family who are marching in Ferguson this weekend, thank you. Thank you for continuing to build our movement in these historic times. Thank you for your courage, commitment, and conviction that Black Lives Matter and that we can bring down the violent and vile evil of structural white supremacy. Thank you for speaking our visions of a multiracial democratic society rooted in economic, racial, gender, disability, environmental and social justice. Thank you for carrying forward and nourishing the liberation traditions of our people.
Thank you for following the lead of the youth and young people of Ferguson who have turned the police murder of Michael Brown into a social movement to end structural inequality and violence. Thank you for helping create the kind of world that I want my white son River to grow up in, alongside his friends and family of all colors. Thank you for converging, marching, chanting, singing, taking care of each other, and resisting together. We love you, we fight alongside you, and we will win.
Let the victories of past people’s movements help us dream and fight for more victories today and tomorrow. For an end to white supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy, for democratic anti-racist feminist socialism and collective liberation.
While most–not all, but a huge majority, of whites are blind to the reality of White Privilege, I believe that an almost- as-large majority of whites also WANT and usually try to see people of color as equals. Support for that, however, is sorely lacking, largely due to persistent presentation in all types of media of only negative stereotypes and minimal efforts to balance minority inequities.
We will not be able to really change America until we can prove that a rising tide really DOES raise all boats. The different ethnic and economic groups that make up the REAL U. S. need not be In a one-wins, one-loses war; we could ALL succeed without diminishing others if we all truly understood this.
Can this happen under the current economic reality or do we have to envision alternatives?