White Privilege: what is the role of the white liberal

I think it is imperative that well intentioned white liberals in the path of attempting to understand and participate in prospering a greater manner of equality and justice in the evolving social reality of people of color that it is a prerequisite to start from a place of foundational structural ignorance.  There is a base of knowledge that no matter what I personally witness, no what I read, no matter who I speak with, no matter who enters my family, no matter the racial identity of my children, no matter who my friends are, the white skin my genetics afford me provide a separation from understanding the basic reality of any manner of the systematic struggles of people of color I would attempt to participate in addressing as an ally.  I think that mental step back acknowledges the precipice of white privilege I stand on.  For many people in a white privileged position that same ignorance of what alternative derivations of a racial reality encompass on a lifelong basis precludes them from understanding the depths to which white privilege exists and how it affects our country and the globe.  That is one of the biggest problems with the Republican Party. 

I think the role of an ally after listening before speaking in most public forums is to be vocal in certain private ones.  I have heard the most racism in my life in all white environments, where I knew the shit being said would not be said if there were a person of color present.  Some of it overt, some of it an insinuation or a comment that hurt me and I was torn between pointing that shit out or letting it be.  I think the greatest role of the white liberal ally is to speak in the alcoves of the problem where people of color are absent by the nature of the cowardice of the actors of overt and more subtle racist, sexist, and homophobic intolerance in these almost purely white environments.  The passive allowance of such comments to keep people comfortable is a huge part of the problem.  Personally I find it to be primarily a generational issue more prevalent in older whites.  Those moments when I have called people out on shit, I know that was my time to speak. 

When I go to poetry readings; that is typically not my time to speak on race or attempt to assist the ‘cause’.  I may write on a global level or a macro level, but rarely on a personal level, because I don’t know and I never will know.  I have thoughts but the ignorance I carry by the nature of my privilege in a European colonized America that terrorized and enslaved people of color to create massive amounts of wealth precludes me from getting a place at that table to speak.  As a white man I feel like white men get everything handed to us in this damn world.  Look at Congress, you have a sea of primarily white men dictating the laws on women’s reproductive rights and on basically pretending white privilege and its cascading effects on our educational, economic, healthcare, domestic security, infrastructure, and social systems don’t exist or if they do exist they downplay them. 

Why because at the root every human knows racism is bullshit birthed out the fear of having someone else who they do not identify with be in power.  So people have traditionally picked others who look and pray like they do to be in charge.  This is a vastly inefficient form of governance and explains most of humanity’s problems.  The evolved path is to a level of human empathy that transcends our physical reality for a spiritual one that transcends religion, government, gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity for a common interconnected humanity as a part of the universe daring to capture what we are as beings, not the petty crap we argue over for the short time in these bodies. 

White people have been fucking over black people for centuries.  When you have shit like the murder of Michael Brown, the quicker flinch in the reaction of the white cop probably comes from some buried sentiment in the white consciousness that in a scenario where the only obvious differential variable a police officer evaluates is race; that white cop’s fear surfaces and factors into his crime. 

There is an underbelly of fear that affects American politics that somewhere white people in government encourage racist systems to perpetuate because they feel guilty about the history of slavery and black equality might surface prospering a manner of recompense paid by the ancestors for the sins of the progenitors. 

That sin is felt in the nature of bearing such white privilege.  It is born in the cascade of the foundation felt in the way even a white-face transported into America in 2015 has a layered benefit a multi-generational black American is not afforded.  That disparity is as a white liberal where I sense the palpable macro-level fear in America which prevents much of the intimacy of having an honest discussion on race and the systematic changes still required in modern times to address the nature of what humanity has created weakening ourselves by embracing that level of human empathy to transcend our physical reality for a spiritual one that recognizes what we truly are.