Tuesday was the last day of Black History Month or, as Tate Reeves likes to call it, “February.”
Every February, some people question the value of Black History Month.
The recent Scott Adams (Dilbert cartoonist) debacle is a pretty good argument for the designation.
It started with what I first considered an absurd poll question: “Is it OK to be white?”
But as I have thought about it, I’ve come to realize that there is meaning behind the poll question. It’s about who controls the narrative and how that narrative is framed.
I believe what we see with this poll question is an attempt to reframe the debate about race in this country and how decent Americans of all races should respond to it.
Over the past several years, our awareness of state-sanctioned violence targeting Black people has been heightened, thanks largely to the emergence of cell phone videos. As actor Will Smith put it, “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed.”
Movements to call attention to this and demand that we have a national reckoning over it – Black Lives Matter, Woke and to a certain extent “Me, Too” – are too often derided, mocked, distorted and demonized. The movements are perceived not as legitimate calls for justice, but as attacks on white orthodoxy.
How can that be?
I think I know part of the answer.
I don’t often write of the events that led me to prison, but there are times when that experience informs my views.
After each of the three DUIs that took me down the path to prison, I considered myself a victim. I was a victim of bad luck (Hundreds of people drink and drive on a Saturday night. I’m just one of the relatively few who were caught). I was a victim of targeting (dubious probable cause traffic stops, the last for failing to use a turn signal as I entered a turn lane). I was a victim of our guilty-until-proven-innocent judicial system (the conviction rate for DUI is the highest of any crimes).
All of that was self delusion.
The unimpeachable truth was that my BAC was above the legal limit every time. You can’t chalk that up to bad luck, bad policing or bad court systems. I realize now that healing could not have begun without, first, a reckoning, even though it was painful.
I think the same thing applies with how we consider race in this country.
Too many will see videos of police brutality against Black people and dismiss them as outliers. Too many will blame the victim (why didn’t they just comply?). Too many cloud the issue with irrelevancy (black-on-black crime is far more prevalent). Too many will call any effort to hold police accountable as an attack on all the “good cops,” (Back the Blue, damn the circumstances).
If you’re a white reader, you may be thinking, “I’m not guilty of any of that. What’s it got to do with me?”
Here’s what.
Our nation’s power structure is dominated by white people, who still maintain a sizable – if changing – percentage of the population. For the entirety of our nation’s history, things change because white people insist they change. Minority groups can raise issues and appeal to conscience, but in the end, America is what white Americans say it is.
When faced with disturbing facts on the current state of race relations, too many white people either deny the truth or are indifferent to it. Too many become defensive and retreat into victimhood.
“Is it OK to be white?” is a disingenuous reflex response to an appeal to conscience that many of us white folks would rather not confront.
White people aren’t being broadly attacked for their whiteness. They are challenged to be better, to be more humane, more sympathetic.
Too many of us simply won’t tolerate that idea.
Many of us are victims, all right.
We are victims of our own failure to honestly and constructively confront unpleasant truths.
I wish I had confronted my truth after that first DUI. Each time I didn’t, the consequences became more serious, the damage more severe.
I fear that’s what’s happening in our country, too.
I don’t need a poll to tell me that’s not OK.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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