What To Do? Read

It’s not a sin to be ignorant. Nobody can be informed and knowledgeable about everything.

But it is wrong to be ignorant and to act on that ignorance and to assume that your opinions, resting on a solid foundation of ignorance, are as valid as, say, someone who is informed and knowledgeable about the topic at hand.

Of course I’m talking about race.

If you’re White and you grew up and went to school in America, you are more likely than not to know very little about race, slavery, the role of slavery in the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the accumulation of policy and practice that got us to where a White police officer could kneel on the neck of a Black man with people watching and not let up until the Black man was dead. So you might think that the murdering police officer is an anomaly and you will wonder how he could murder someone in broad daylight. And you get riled when people say that racism is systemic, that the whole police department in which this officer worked, was rotten, because you want to believe that it was just this one terrible person. All of this is a lot easier to deal with if you can think that.

But that’s ignorance talking.

Being ignorant carries the enormous risk of not knowing what you don’t know. Say, you’ve never been an immigrant, never met an immigrant, never read a book about immigration, but you see immigrants on TV and you splice in your own life experience to what you see on TV and you think, dang! I’d get it together a lot faster than that guy is. And you feel pretty satisfied with that notion but the reason for your satisfaction is that you skipped over 10,000 pages of history to create someone in your own image. That’s basically why some White people are so confounded by the murdering cop – it’s because they’re projecting themselves on his actions and it just doesn’t compute for them.

So the not knowing what you don’t know is a big problem right now if you have any interest at all in understanding what is going on with race in the United States.

Some White people recognize their own lack of knowledge and ask a Black person what to do. So the Black person is then put in the position of finding the one incredible book, the single illuminating movie, the powerful conversation, the interracial study group, the perfect donation, that will consolidate the 10,000 pages of history into a vaccine that will make their White friend not racist.

It doesn’t work that way. First of all, it’s not a Black person’s job to fill the vast lacunae in your education left by school systems that refused to address America’s horrifying and mournful racial history. Second, there isn’t an easy cost-effective anti-racist vaccine out there.

There is just you and how much you want to finally know what you don’t know.

I’m no expert. But this is what I did – I went to the public library, found the Black History section, and just started reading. I started with the Slave Narratives and then I read Frederick Douglass. From there I read several books – fiction and nonfiction – about slavery and day to day plantation life. I read a thick book on the regional variations of the economics of slavery, read about the uniquely terrifying life of enslaved women, and read about the coffles of enslaved people ripped from their families in the coastal and upper south and marched to the Deep South. I read about the descendant of White slave owners finding the descendants of people who had been enslaved on his ancestor’s plantation. I read about the new Jim Crow, the American criminal justice system, and, right now, I am reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

A lot of what I’ve read the past many years has made me sick. Much of it is too mammoth to understand. So there is much more to my independent learning. My education is not complete. I’ve not been vaccinated against racism. But I am also not ignorant. Not any more.