A welcome letter to white antiracists

Outraged by the tragic, senseless, criminal, and on-camera murder of George Floyd by four policemen, (and thanks to the indefatigable work, risk and sacrifices of black and brown activists in and around the #blacklivesmatter movement over the past decade) millions of white Americans are waking up to the impact, scale, and human cost of racism in America.

White people are marching and writing things and declaring antiracist commitments in a way that I’ve never seen before in my lifetime. Its inspiring and moving and long overdue.

We have the potential to create something meaningful, and for that, I am hopeful.

So, this “welcome letter” is for you new antiracist white folks.

I am an antiracist white person of privilege. I have maintained a long time commitment to working with black and brown and LBGTQIA+ and jewish and feminist (and frankly, very few white, male, straight, cis) folks to end racism. I speak up less than I used to 20 years ago, and while I’d like to to say that it’s because I’ve learned to stay quiet and amplify black and brown voices, the truth that even after having doing this for 20 years I’m still a coward.

In fact, over the past 20 years my main experience of myself as an antiracist is that I’m not only that I’m a coward, but that I’m an ineffective coward.

Confronting my own racism; not to mention my role, my responsibility and my complicity in the system of racism and white supremacy continues to upset and stupefy me.

Compared to my performance in my career for example, my antiracism work and thinking are a mess: I’m an inconsistent, fearful, insecure, and unreliable antiracist and I’ve consistently fallen short of all of my (admitted grandiose) antiracism goals and objectives for the past 20 years.

Despite this, sadly, I’m objectively almost certainly doing more than 99.9% of other white Americans to dismantle racism white supremacy.

I’m not bragging. It’s actually pathetic. It’s a embarrassingly low bar for white folks. If you’re not sickened and dismayed by how ineffective white people are at dealing with and dismantling racism white supremacy, you’re not paying attention. We have to find ways to be better, and do better, and participate without resorting to the easy tools of whiteness: domination, command, independence, bluster, entitlement, presumption, and performative virtue signaling (all of which are already showing up in this letter. Yes, yes, thanks for sharing, little voice in my head that tells me not to ever say anything about racism, ever. Yes, I shouldn’t be doing this. Yes, thank you. Bless your your little white heart.).

White people don’t have a culture of helping each other deal with one another’s racism. We pretend it doesn’t exist. We collude with each other to avoid the topic. We gaslight and distract each other. It’s got to stop. We’ve got to stop. I’ve got to stop.

I could use some help with this, so welcome!

We need to create something better. I’m not saying I know how. But if something I write helps you, or it helps one of you to help some other white antiracist along, maybe that will be one less person of color that we wear out with our white fragility and endless demands for their emotional and intellectual labor on an unpaid basis.

In my experience as a white person, speaking out against the systems of racism and white supremacy and committing to live as an antiracist can be hopeful, exciting, fulfilling and transformational; it can also be frightening, stressful, painful, isolating, and intimidating.

White antiracism work requires a willingness to confront our own inevitable and entrenched racism. It requires work, humility, perseverance, resilience, listening and reflection.

I have frequently, over the last 20 years, become discouraged, fragile, scared, lonely, embarrassed or lost. I’ve fucked up and I’ve failed. If you stick with this, you will too.

Please stick with it, though. We need you. Nobody gets to wait until they’re perfect if they are committed to engage in antiracism work. Come as you are.

There’s lots of resources out there that weren’t available when I started. As we go along, I’ll try and post you some stuff I’ve found helpful from myself and from other people.

It’s hard to have a conversation, alone.

In the end, antiracism work is the most satisfying and important thing I’ve ever done.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that supporting the liberation of other people, is paradoxically the only route available for us to liberate ourselves as a white person from the system of racism.

Let’s help make the world a better place and liberate our minds from what we’ve done to ourselves.

We are all interdependent.

In Solidarity,

Jamey Harvey