By Irami Osei-Frimpong (April 2, 2018)
The number of times I hear some version of, “You can’t expect white people to ever be fair” is astounding. I hear this from white and black people across the education divide. Honestly, the people who are the most smug about this as a truism are white women with lots and lots of degrees.
We’ve normalized treating white people like inveterate, incorrigible idiots. They aren’t. They are just fragile, lazy, and entitled on these issues, and they are supported by a culture that tells them that that’s okay. We can fix this culture.
The nation needs a better class of white people, and we can absolutely take that on as a political project. Not as a black project, as an American project. I’ve been saying for years that we need to commission a study the white family like the Moynihan Report to see how these entitlements are culturally transmitted. America needs to stop letting white people off the hook about what they do to protect the ill gotten comforts of their whiteness.
The KKK and even Trump’s election are just tantrums. We should not have an entire politics organized around the fear of white tantrums. There will be KKK marches and a few lynchings, but fixing white people is America’s job because it’s America’s problem.
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And I’ll add that I think Americans should go about redressing the deficiencies in white culture with at least as much seriousness as the UDC put their project.
