They will never do anything right because they don’t want to stop being racist. They just want black people to shut up about it. Educating racists won’t help. I use to think it would because I wasn’t playing with a full deck understanding of the issue. For them racism isn’t a moral issue it’s an economic issue. They don’t see African Americans as humans deserving of love and respect they see them as liabilities rather than assets.
I’ve come to realize that holding a rose colored version of the world I live in will never allow me to touch the reality of racism. It’s never been individual actions of white people or even magazines. It’s always been about how can we pacify the population that we formerly mistreated without losing too much capital. It has never been moral or even ethical for them. This is the problem.
For whatever reason as African Americans we tend to assume that thinking and feeling with our hearts is tantamount to our human survival. They just don’t. We have to get serious about understanding where we are and who we are interacting with. They have run numerous social experiments as well as gruesome medical experiments on other humans. What would make a moral feeling human being do that? Ask the questions that make your reality more real so then we can deal with it.
Civil rights was never a moral revolution it was a political move made by white elites to foster global relations. It may have felt moral and ethical for the African Americans witnessing it but never for the white elites that eventually ceded.
The scary truth we need to confront is that none of the rights given to African Americans were ever given out of benevolence or goodness on the part of the white ruling establishment. While some less powerful whites may have bought the narrative similar to some less powerful African Americans that it was because of some moral awakening. The truth is that it never was. Just because a large handful of us based on our current empathetic way of moving through the world may have hoped to identify a human moral component to these events. The truth is that they never were moral, good or driven by ethics.
We don’t need more education. Education implies right thought will produce right action.
What we’ve seen is that even with numerous African American writers pouring their hearts and minds out on the page. No right action seems to follow. So we are dealing with a population that is unable to put right thoughts into action.
There are two types of approaches to critical race theory. The idealist and the materialist approaches. The idealist believes in education and right thought produces right actions. I use to be an idealist. The materialist approach lays out the facts of history in a pattern that is easily predictable based on the information we already have. The information we have is that educating people about racism rarely produces economic or political change.
