It’s pretty obvious who is benefiting from racism. Several hundred years ago, when the USA was being established, there were many poor white folks who had come over as indentured servants to pay for their passage. These people were enslaved also, with the one redeeming feature that their service was for a definite period of time, and then they would be free. It happened that the indentured servants and the enslaved Africans were making common cause against the ruling class, and of course this would not do. So the ruling class, operating mainly through the churches, promoted the racist ideas that support systemic racism.
This trend has continued to this day, with Black and Brown people exploited for cheap labor and for scapegoats, which serve to displace working class attention from the exploiters at the top to the suffering folks in the underclass.
When I read articles about “what white people can do” i feel that those articles are pitched toward upper middle class and upper class white folks, people who will never read them. In real life, as well as on social media, I notice that many of the white anti-racists are disenfranchised in other ways. We’re disabled, queer, poor, etc. I believe that this is no coincidence. The experience of disenfranchisement allows us to empathize and make common cause with the Black and Brown folks whose skin color adds to whatever other difficulties they’re experiencing.
It’s like the Dalai Lama said: suffering can give rise to compassion, which he defines as awareness of others’ pain together with a will to relieve others’ pain. Someone in a position to make a hiring or financial decision affecting someone else is not likely to have suffered to the same extent as a poor / queer / disabled white person who is more likely to be an ally because we know suffering also— let alone the Black person sitting on the other side of their desk.
There is one thing we can do, and that’s educate each other. We’re supposed to be having those hard conversations with our Bubba cousins. And there’s where I choke. I’m from Louisiana. The males in my family are extremely racist, and proudly so. (Ironically, when I grew up I found out that my branch of the family is passing for white, and we’ve got cousins I never knew of till I grew up and looked them up.) I used to stand up to my Dad’s racist talk when I was just a little squirt, and took many beating for doing so. He especially loved to hit me on the head when I made a point in the discussion, and I now have brain damage from this. As a result, I find it impossible to hold a verbal discussion with someone I disagree with. My mind simply goes blank while my body goes slack as if anticipating a beating from someone much bigger than me. So those tough awkward conversations we’re supposed to be having are many time more so, for me. Online, though, I do fine, so that’s what I do.
It would be great if we could get together in support groups and practice role-playing those tough conversations we’re supposed to be having. But in all my years of involvement with the Left — I’ve been engaged since middle school and I’m over 60 now — all I’ve seen is the thought and word policing that’s due to the Marxist influence on the Left. It turns into a circular firing squad pretty quickly, and people leave because they don’ like being trated like that. Like I say, with comrades like that, who needs Cointelpro. People think Marxism is a science — oh, please. It cannot be falsified, and has a lousy track record for predicting, so it cannot be a science. At best, it has a great critique of capitalism. But the remedies it proposes have never worked.
So what would work? It would be good as you suggest if all of us, the 99%, could get together and figure out what works. Individualistic capitalism has been around for only a few centuries; prior to this, humans have been around for nearly half a million years. We have lived sustainably on this planet for all of that time until the past few centuries. There are some of us — the Indigenous people — who still remember how to do it. There’s the hope.
