Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

Adult inspirational
"...I can't hide behind the glamour and glitz of football and
fame. The reality is that I'm a Black man in America and I'm going to
be a Black man in America long after I'm out of this league. There is
too much in this country dragging down the poor, women, and kids, and
we can't he hiding behind gated communities, pretending these things
are happening somewhere else."
Michael Bennet, activist and Super Bowl champion, is one of the
well known athletes who could not in good conscience stand for the
national anthem before games in a time when white police officers kept
killing unarmed blacks and totally getting away with it. It was the
coolest thing to happen in professional sports in my life time:
athletes using their fame to bring public attention to injustice in a
way that lesser known folks, such as this reviewer, well, can't. They
got a lot of hate for that. Many people down to and including the
president of the United States wanted athletes to just shut up and
play already. There was a lot of nasty talk about really low key,
dignified gestures. Trump called the athletes sons of bitches
I'm not a watcher of football or any professional organized
sport. But I knew who Bennett is. When I saw that he'd written a
book, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable, I was over the
moon. I made haste to get my hands on it. I devoured each and every
chapter. Someday I hope to meet Bennet and thank him for this candid
and eloquent volume.
Bennett shares candidly with readers his life experiences and
the issues about which he is passionate. In the chapter titled "N--
er" he speaks of his evolving relationship to the word. In his
younger years he accepted it from fellow blacks, but not whites.
Reading Maya Angelou's thoughts on racial slurs made him realize:
"It needs to stop. A lot of people have lost their lives
because of that word, whether we're talking about lynchings or Black
people killing other Black people. It can take a conversation and
turn it into something savage at the drop of a hat. It's a word that
brings the ugliest part of our past into the present..."
Bennett starts his chapter on the Black Lives Matter movement
with a description of the death of Charleena Lyles, a poor black
pregnant mother of four who, after calling the police, fearful that
someone was trying to break into her apartment, was shot to death with
several of her children present. He segues into how the movement is
about "...resisting the 'New Jim Crow,' a social system that has
created a parallel, separate, and unequal America, defined by mass
incarceration, unemloyment, and substandard food and education..." He
lets whites know that awareness of the system should make us very
uncomfortable. Instead of numbing this discomfort or channeling it
into anger at the inconvenient truth tellers, we should join in the
fight to dismantle the injustices that allow us to benefit
undeservedly from our skin color and to realize at a gut level that
Black lives matter every bit as much as ours.
Things That Make White People Uncomfortable is a must read for
all white people. I say that as someone whose genetics would have
made the 1920's eugenics people drool. If we're comfortable with the
status quo we're asleep at the wheel and part of the problem.
On a personal note, I've been out of any kind of comfort zone most of
my life. Not only am I white, but my ancestors owned slaves and, yes,
knew them nonconsensually in the Biblical sense. I channeled my
discomfort into white hot anger to change the situation. For ages
I've refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, even when I chaired
school committee meetings with a tv camera on me, rather than pay lip
service to America rocking liberty and justice for all. I write
opinion pieces for the local paper about white privilege and why we
need to dismantle it, sooner rather than later. And silent bystander
is never a way anyone would describe me.
I will never forget that the night Trayvon Martin was killed my son,
Adam, who was two years younger, did the exact same thing he did,
going out to a store, wearing a hoodie, to buy candy and a drink.
Adam came home with treats to share. Trayvon's mother got the worst
news possible for a parent. I remember thinking "Damnit, she did not
deserve that!" because I was thinking mother to mother, not white to
black. The red hot anger I got in touch with that night fuels a lot
of my work against racism and white privilege.
A great big shout out goes out to Bennett and the other fine writers
who take huge risks to tell the truth.
jules hathaway




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