I was born into this body in a certain place and time. Based on what people in my time and place see, they tell me who they think I should be through words and the way they treat me. And one of the things the world sees me as, is White.

In America, White people like me have created a cultural belief that we can “save” Black people by teaching them how to become what is often called "productive members of society."

Underneath this belief (which you can see operating at various levels in schools, non-profits, and government agencies across the country) is the idea that Blackness is some sort of disease to be cured by Whiteness. (Coincidentally, check out the banner images from the Twitter account of the person who got the @risksomething handle before I did!)

But Blackness doesn't exist. 

Blackness, along with Whiteness, is a deliberate invention. Race has no biological foundation. It was made up by ruling-class European Americans who wanted to figure out ways to divide poor European-Americans and poor African-Americans from coming together and rebelling against the ruling class.

The invention of Blackness allowed us to justify African enslavement and retain the loyalty of poor European-Americans. 


Black people only became Black when White people looked at them.

If there is a disease associated with Blackness, it’s in our White eyes and how they perceive Blackness. The ocular disease that we call racism shows up in White people with three powerful symptoms.

1. We have incredible difficulty seeing people of color as their true, complex, individual selves, as opposed to the racial caricatures we are taught. In isolation, this symptom would be treatable. We would simply have to be taught to compensate for our malfunction, like someone with a broken leg learns how to walk with crutches. However, the second symptom of racism is...
   
   
2. Blindness to our own blindness. White people are trained to be unable to see that we bear the disease of racism. Most White people are aware that racism exists, but we desperately want to believe that it’s always somewhere else, instead of in the air we breathe and the thoughts we think. This is what makes racism so hard to treat in White people--we can’t seek treatment if the disease itself prevents us from understanding that we bear the disease (a condition known as anosognosia). Which leads to the third symptom...
   
   
3. Racism convinces us that not only are we not blind when it comes to race, we are in fact race experts. This perspective (believing the opposite of what is true) is, to put it diplomatically, infuriating to everyone else. 

As a White person infected with a full-blown case of racism, I used to operate under the unconscious assumption that I was a sort of “race doctor,” capable of diagnosing and treating people of color’s race problems. I thought that I was an objective, neutral observer of the disease of race.

When I think I’m diagnosing Black people to help treat their Blackness, it's like I'm the target of a reaction video. I believe that I am the doctor, observing the patient, but in fact, I am the patient, unknowingly self-diagnosing. I’m actually making myself a case study for what racism does to White eyes.

So when I say, “Why is this Black person doing/saying that?” 

I’d be better served to ask, “What does my discomfort/judgment/anger at what this Black person is doing show about my disease?”

And when I offer suggestions, such as, “Black people should do X instead of doing Y.”

I’ll make more progress to help Black people by asking myself, “Why is my disease telling me I know what’s best for Black people when I have no idea what it’s like to be Black?”

Of course, there are also Black people who look at White people and have judgments about what we do and say as well. The crucial difference is that when Black people judge me on my Whiteness, they don’t have access to institutional power to keep me out or limit my opportunities. 

Yet collective White judgments about Black people have vast power over the lives of those people--through our systems of legislation, policing, housing, and more. When diseased White eyes look at Trayvon or Eric or Aiyana or Mike in their Blackness and see them as animals and/or criminals, they end up not only dead, but indicted for their own murders while their killers walk free--forgiven and justified by our American institutions.  

So as a White person seeking to be part of the long arc of racial justice in America, I must commit to making sure I'm paying closer attention to my racial "reaction video" than I am to the behavior of people of color. How do I feel in racially-charged situations? How does my disease respond? 

Two thoughts on my personal stake in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. 

Some people ask why I, a person claiming to be fighting for the liberation of all people, would choose the image of a stormtrooper to represent myself. Isn’t a stormtrooper the opposite of the rebel fighter I’m aspiring to become?

Yes and no. The empire I live in was founded by men who assumed that as White, land-owning males, their lives quite literally mattered much more than others. This empire depends on storm troopers to do the day-to-day dirty work of maintaining the supremacy of White, land-owning males. Through strategic application of silence, speech, shaming, slander, and skepticism, masses of stormtroopers ensure the maintenance of power in the hands of imperial lords with minimal effort (or even awareness) by those stormtroopers.

But not all stormtroopers are created equal, and the distinctions between them are significant. Spoiler alert: at different times in my life, I’ve played each of the following roles:

1. The Gleeful Stormtrooper: As Gleeful stormtroopers, we maintain the status quo of power and oppression, knowing full well what we are doing. We don’t deny the violence of the empire...we revel in it, and believe that all is as it should be according to our righteous order of things. From the emperor’s perspective, we gleeful stormtroopers are both an asset and a liability, because we are so extreme in our violence and our devotion that we give credence to the claim that the empire is not actually a benevolent and morally-just system.
   
   
2. Stormtrooper with Blinders: It’s much better for an emperor to have stormtroopers that do their job without thinking. As oblivious stormtroopers, we do our job of silencing dissent and shaming potential rebels without really being aware of the moral ramifications. For those of us who are stormtroopers with blinders, our actions don’t feel like stormtrooping to us. In fact, we probably find the image of a stormtrooper reprehensible. We say, “I'm not stormtrooping...I’m just doing what I know how to do and what my friends do.” We fall silent when we witness the violence of the empire against lower-caste members, minorities, and subversives. We become red-faced and furious when we perceive a threat to the "law and order" that we benefit from and maintain. If someone sat us down and forced us to examine the deeper impacts of our actions, we might begin to realize that we’re doing things that we aren’t aware of and even find morally repulsive. In that case, we either become Duped stormtroopers (see below) or simply double down on our ignorance out of material and spiritual self-preservation.
   
   
3. The Duped Stormtrooper: I sometimes wonder if I might be the most useful kind of storm trooper for the emperor--a dupe. Am I the stormtrooper who mistakenly thinks that I've achieved self-awareness? As Duped stormtroopers grow into adulthood, we question who we are and go through existential crises and we come out the other side and now believe that we have achieved some level of self-consciousness. Through hard work and willpower, we claim to have won a kind of independence from the empire, and loudly declare ourselves as awakened beings, no longer stormtroopers. We are passionate, devoted, energetic, and emotionally-invested in our work at reforming the empire to be a more just system. 

Yesterday's shutdown of I-93 here in Boston caused many people to come out of silence about #blacklivesmatter. Most of the new voices I heard were furious about protesters stopping up a major highway.

It also caused people who had previously supported Black Lives Matter to say "Look, I support the movement, but this is ridiculous/stupid/unhelpful." 

It was like Black Lives Matter stopped being something cute and ignoreable. Now it was in our faces. 

We are trying to bring down a system of racialized power and oppression that was designed to keep power out of the hands of Black people. This system has worked extremely well. In fact, it's worked so well that to maintain our system of racialized privilege, we only need to keep doing what we're doing. From our highest echelons of power to our lowest castes, we all play our part in maintaining racism.

Do we believe that a system of power like that, that operates almost silently, and quite smoothly on an individual, social, institutional, and systemic level, is going to go quietly? 

No, if we believe that Black Lives Matter AND that we live in a society that doesn't yet adhere to that statement, then we'd better dig in for inconvenience. We're talking about uprooting a 400 year old, healthy, well-rooted tree here. The birds and squirrels are going to have to be inconvenienced.

Did I feel a moral calling to stand up for racial justice last week? Then inconvenience won't sway me from my position today. That's the thing about a moral compass. If it can be swayed by inconvenience, then either I was misreading it or my compass wasn't calibrated correctly in the first place.

Instead of wringing our hands about "Why wasn't (insert action here) done better/perfectly," let's ask ourselves what we can do, individually and collectively, in the places we are, with the identities we have, with the tool we have, to dismantle the tree of racism. And let's dig in for inconvience. 

#shutitdown
#blacklivesmatter

--Abe Lateiner

This holiday season, I ask us to please remember those among us who live amidst crushing 
poverty. Every day, there are underprivileged people among us who are helpless, living under the heavy chains of poverty. It is a shame that in this land of plenty, so many of these poor individuals move about their day under the blanket of debilitating lack of resources. 

When the NYPD Union president basically declares war on anyone who thinks that police brutality is a real issue, we must not allow his poverty to make us turn away. His uniform, badge, and tie must not hide his poor, downtrodden ability to apply complex thinking. This suffering, impoverished man has not been taught to see that in fact, it is possible to rage against police brutality and condemn the murder of police officers. Due to what may be intellectual malnutrition, this man's brain seems incapable of seeing beyond "either/or" thinking. This manifests itself in the belief that everyone is either a supporter of all police at all times or an enemy of all the police at all times. Jesus didn't put us here to allow this kind of poverty to go unattended. Let's ask ourselves, "What can I do to offer this underprivileged man a fair chance to become a well-adjusted member of society?" 

When the mayor of New York asks grieving, furious Americans to give up the right to protest, that mayor is clearly suffering from a heartbreaking lack of ability to bear witness to suffering and rage. As mayor of a city, Bill de Blasio's job is, among other things, to bear witness to the lived experiences of his people. This tone-deaf attempt to shut people up who are protesting their government's tendency to, of all things, shut them up with brutal and often deadly force, reveals a deep poverty in Mayor de Blasio that we should all dig deep to alleviate. Please consider giving what you can to poor Mayor de Blasio!

When White men take to the streets of New York to declare to the world that they "can breathe," thanks to the police, my heart goes out to these poor guys who have revealed their poverty of vision. They have been deprived and underserved, these underprivileged souls. Their training in blindness to privilege and oppression ensures can't see that their message ("Police ensure my safety as a White person!")  perfectly reinforces the narrative of the protesters that they are trying to undermine ("Police ensure the safety of White people!"). Please consider giving what vision you can afford to these unfortunate, downtrodden, folks. This is America, folks! We can help the poor! 

When the governor of Massachusetts admonishes protesters for being "disruptive," I close my eyes and shed a tear for this impoverished, suffering soul who could be successful member of society if we could only help him to see his potential! Tragically, this man carries the weight of an impoverished sense of history. Let us pray for this poor person who cannot imagine how disruption could possibly work towards justice. Deval, we won't give up on you. We believe in you and I hope readers will consider donating their basic understanding of history!

Many White people have a deep, unnamed fear that the successful struggle for Black liberation will result in the "tables flipping," creating a country in which White people are treated as second-class citizens by a powerful Black majority. We should all commit to digging deep and giving all we can to alleviate the grinding poverty of experience that lies underneath this fear. Most White people suffer from a lack of Black friends, with no resources to draw on when it comes to actually knowing what it's like to be Black in America beyond the idiocy of popular media. 

This poverty allows us to maintain a vision of Black America as a monolithic, single-minded entity bent on taking power back from Whites for the sole purpose of revenge. I am happy to report that J. Cole has already given White people the following charitable donation to minister to our poverty. Please, let's match his donation by educating ourselves and others as to the deep sense of love that is the bedrock of liberation struggle. Maybe we can even band together to create a National Association for the (Mental/Social/Spiritual/Creative/Empathetic) Advancement of White People which can help us organize to lift us out of the poverty so many of us live in. 

Let's listen, and be thankful for the spirit of giving to the poor during this holiday season. 
#blacklivesmatter     

For 400 years now Black people in this country have fought to organize and be recognized as first-class citizens. At every turn, many politically-mainstream Whites have responded to such movements with furious denial of the existence of racial inequality.

Yet open up any mainstream K-12 American history textbook, and all the major movements towards Black liberation are held up as courageous expressions of humanity which have advanced the American experiment.

You think MLK was roundly celebrated and praised by White people when he was alive? You think all the White peoples' lips trembled in admiration of Rosa Parks' courage while she was riding in the front of "their" bus?

So if you're spending time fuming about those pesky ‪#‎blacklivesmatter‬ actions and how much overtime pay it's costing, please also spend some time planning what you'll say to your grandchildren when they ask you what you did during the civil rights movement back in the early 21st century.

Is the One Ring at the center of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy is just a metaphor for Whiteness?

Bear with me here, folks.

*The One Ring was created by Sauron to concentrate and maintain his power over all of Middle Earth. The concepts of "White" and "Black" were created by the early American elite in order to maintain their power and wealth by discouraging poor African-Americans and European-Americans from uniting in opposition to the ruling class.

*The power of the One Ring is, among other things, that it offers invisibility to the wearer. But this comes with a price: the Ring also slowly corrupts the bearer, leading the person to isolation and misery (as we see in the character of Gollum). The bearer slowly turns into a narcissistic, angry, loner, bent on accumulating power at the expense of their relationships. As bearers of Whiteness in America, we get to move through our lives without our race drawing attention to us. We are assumed to be "normal" Americans. Our actual diverse ethnic backgrounds (German, Irish, Italian, Polish, etc.) are largely unnoticed, while dark-skinned people are almost always seen as outsiders, exotic, dangerous, and "ethnic." Thus White people are able to move around much more easily in America. BUT...there is a price to the safety of Whiteness. To accept the comforting "normalcy" of Whiteness is to disconnect oneself from our humanity. The flip side of seeing Whiteness as "normal" is seeing Blackness as the "other," the undesired, the ugly, the dangerous. The safety of Whiteness requires the creation of Blackness as something to which we can be opposed. The result? White Americans are often socially isolated, even in our "own" communities. We're so used to separation that we forget how to be close, even with those we would call our racial kin.

*People are drawn to the One Ring because it seems to offer limitless power to be wielded. But in fact, the Ring itself ends up wielding the bearer, using their physical incarnation to do its will. The seduction of Whiteness is powerful...it offers the bearer preferred treatment in almost every realm of American society--if we are seen as bearing Whiteness, we're more likely to be seen as smart, objective, wise, moral, innocent, pure, and deserving. But the price we pay for this preferred treatment is that we become foot soldiers in the war against Blackness; by cashing in on our Whiteness (even unintentionally), we ensure that Black people remain second-class citizens. Thus we become, as the bearers of Whiteness, instruments in the maintenance of power.

*Part of Sauron himself is contained in the One Ring. When it is destroyed, Sauron is destroyed as well, and this is what frees all of Middle Earth from tyranny. White Americans have so bought into the made-up construct of Whiteness that we take it for granted. If we could expose the myth of Whiteness for what it is, it would shake our identities to the core, while offering us a chance for liberation along with all the people that Whiteness currently subjugates in the service of its maintenance.

‪#‎blacklivesmatter‬
‪#‎OneRingtoRuleThemAll‬
‪#‎wemadeittomountdoom‬
‪#‎throwitinthedamnfiresofmordoralready‬
‪#‎wearebetterthanthis‬