Black Lives Matter! When white people say they do!

   Help me to understand why white people are kneeling and remembering dead Black people we never knew; yet we don’t know any Black people to speak to within our own communities?

How is that possible?

We live separated segregated lives. Black lives are a figment of our superior (little white-lie) imagination.

We rely upon systems of ritualized public human sacrifice and degradation of Black and Native people to evolve our white (race) reality. Our rules-of-law (just for us) systems are founded upon their criminalization through enslavement, extermination, dehumanization, brutalization, suppression, and removal. Now …

“What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a n in the first place. Because I am not a n. I’m a man. If I’m not the n here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether or not it is able to ask that question.” — James Baldwin

But we never thought about it this way before.…

If Black Lives Matter, then we’ll need courage and our (white) skin in the game.

“Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger in the minds and hearts of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.” — James Baldwin, “Letter to My Nephew”

If we are committed to act, then we must consider:

If race is a social-construct, then why do educated and credentialed people continue to embed and transmit white superiority through our structurally race-ist systems and institutions: financial services, legislatures, courts, media, universities, schools, etc.?

How do we see and feel our white race and identity?

How are we all complicit in transmitting and transferring our (white) race and privilege as an unspoken and assumed right of domination and power?

How do we recognize our impoverished relations repressed in poverty so that we middle-and upper-class privileged people may (affordably) live at their expense?

When we are white beneath our masks … using our first amendment rights … standing in the streets holding signs denouncing our police’s brutality, we can choose to accept or deny responsibility for our inherited brutal legacy. Our white skin requires our racism … and is enforced by our diligently protective police who we simultaneously abhor.

We are secure in knowing that despite the signs we are carrying, and the chants we are shouting … that the power of our ubiquitous whiteness beneath our masks will still bring our police to us in our 911 call for help! … without brutality or recrimination because … they are our relations, our friends, and our neighbors. They is us; and we made them.

If we are truly honest with ourselves, then we acknowledge that race-ism in America is our unadulterated right and ability to be exceptionally white with all the privileges associated with our comfortably numb and self-righteous fragility.

We have established our exceptionalism through our white right to be young and foolish with the knowledge that our families and our neighbors will give us a do-over when we post on social media — lock-and-loaded inebriated statements about “hunting c” and “killing n.”

When we call 911 for help! and unleash a massive (expensive?) man-hunt, there’s no brutalization, death, or injury as we come safely into custody.

At some point, we will have to face another unblinking truth … we who are white … we are the race that was constructed through our systems, institutions, habits, and beliefs … yet …who are we beneath our (secret) white-identity?

Black Lives Matter when white people say they do … because white lives matter more…

If we are anti-race-ist, then how shall we reconcile … our white children holding signs and shouting slogans simultaneously with our cannibalization of Black and Native children and their families … living their expendable lives that make our socially-constructed white lives normal/human?

There is no justice. There never was.

Systems of white superiority work as intended. They evolve. Black Lives Matter when white people say they do. Superior whiteness is powerful … intentional … massive … inter-connected … and deeply embedded.

We can’t fix, what ain’t broke.

Want change? Four quarters is still a dollar … and racial equity is (re)evolutionary white supremacy.

Black (dead) Lives Matter … white people say they do.

CL Dukes is a former member of the Buckland Selectboard.