Portside

To have a chance at a just future, let’s find ways to push back against the raging tides of racism that have driven too much of our nation’s history and are now re-emerging in stridently blatant forms.

For those who say people kill not gun, I would say what really kills is white privilege, not guns. We are living in a time, where a black kid could be shot by the police for holding a toy gun and young Muslims can be sent to life in prison for daring to think of a gun. At the same time, white folks are actually, buying and carrying, machine, and assault weapons, threatening and intimidating neighbors, teachers, friends and classmates under the watch eyes of our law enforcements, as in the latest shooting at Parkland High School in Florida.

And people of color (and white accomplices) who call out such racism must do so without erasing our stories, identities, and existence.

Privilege always stands in contrast to how others are treated, and it’s true in this case, too: White men who resort to mass violence are consistently characterized primarily as isolated “lone wolves” — in no way connected to one another — while the most problematic aspects of being white in America are given a pass that nobody else receives.

When she was 30, Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realize that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does. In college, she read James Baldwin, giving the sense of meeting someone who knew her better, than she had herself. This came as a shock, not necessarily because he said I was sick. It was because he kept calling me that thing: “white American”.

I often wonder whether even those who acknowledge the phenomenon of white privilege and work assiduously to obviate its impact on, specifically, black lives, know how widespread is its impact and how enmeshed it is in the very framework of life in this country.

Today I mourn with the families and community of the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Charleston, S.C. I mourn for the living and the dead. I mourn for Black life. But simultaneously, I rage. I rage against the executions, beatings, dispersals, and assassinations of Black people everywhere. I am calling out the current manifestation of Black genocide, racial cleansing, and white terrorism happening in the U.S.

As an anti-racist white feminist, I wonder if it is enough to be an “ally” in this present and “newest” moment of racist/militarist/carceral violence. Or, is there something more to do? I am thinking hard about this “newness,” which is also very old. White anti-racist feminists can take the lead from our Black and Brown sisters and embrace an abolitionist stance towards chattel slavery and its racist and misogynist remains.