Back at the end of March,
had reached out to me to have a conversation about white/Black relations in the US. I happily agreed and we chatted for over an hour about various race-related issues.Now that some time has passed, I keep ruminating on two different topics I felt like I failed to articulate myself well or correctly on - “over-policing” of poor Black neighborhoods and if the only true option is for Black and white people to live segregated lives (which is already happening).
I think for me, I didn’t grow up living in the types of communities that Taleeb Starkes talks about in Black Lies Matter and as an adult, I have absolutely zero proximity to Blacks living in poverty. Perhaps if I lived in a Black majority city, it would be easier to find the sort of forgotten neighborhoods where the Black poor reside.
In fact, I’ve thought about this a lot in relation to (white) leftist politics where you have a bunch of well off, college educated white people demanding we enact policies they claim would help the poor even though they have no relationship to poor people and often times openly despise them.
I am, in part, not a leftist for a few reasons; I don’t see it as my job to be invested in the downtrodden or help the defenseless. Simply, I don’t consider it my moral duty to fight for “marginalized” people (such as they exist). This is also hardened by the fact that I literally have no relationships or interactions with these people in my day to day - at my last job, my immediate co-workers were white and heterosexual. In my department, all but three, were white women (I knew for a fact that several of them weren’t college educated). And to my knowledge, none of them were leftist.
In my main extracurricular - the arts - almost everyone I’ve met thus far has been college educated and tends to be more liberal/identity politics focused. The demographic of people who enjoy the arts tends to be older, white people but it’s safe to assume a certain level of liberalism considering the types of art that is produced where I live.
For Identity Activists, their sense of morality is enough to bolster whatever their political ideas are. It’s about making themselves feel good/prolific/powerful, and Black people participate in that in spades. It’s just that Black people rely heavily on Black political organizing history to galvanize their ideas and substantiate their orientation.
It just feels really gross to get up in arms about people and situations you’re not familiar with, have no connection to but also possess no real desire to change. In the Revolution Z episode I linked to above, the host talks about how (white) leftists don’t think they can win, so they’re just trying to gather power/prestige for themselves.
All of this pertains to my weird answer when Walt asked me about cops policing crime ridden Black communities because I don’t actually care and I don’t think the upper middle class Black Identity Activists do either. They think it’s racist for Black people to be stopped by police but often don’t talk about poor Black communities except to say that there’s nothing to see here and people should move on.
Let’s say for argument’s sake that I was devestated specifically about the plight of poor Black people. Where would I go and what would I do? I already know that for many Black Identity Activists, this is a non-issue. And if Black people aren’t invested, it makes sense to assume that other identity activists wouldn’t be either since they take their cues from Black people on what they should care about as it pertains to Black people specifically. (Also, other identity activists are concerns about their identity’s “needs”).
I, of course, could try to be more like Bertrand Cooper (a biracial man who did actually grow up in a crack house) who talks a lot about poverty and class stratification within the Black community. I don’t follow his career exactly, but know that he’s been a guest on This Is Revolution, a Black Marxist podcast, multiple times going over this subject.
Where, and who, are my political allies who are also invested in Black on Black crime, the poor educational outcomes of poor Black people, and how associating Blackness with poverty in a country that seems to hate both poor and Black people makes anti-poverty iniatives hard to do?
In general, I find white liberals racist, loathe white cultural hegemony and honestly wouldn’t want to organize with those same white saviors around what to me seems a very sensitive subject. So that would necessitate I move; either to attend grad school or to a city with a higher Black population where working to help poor Black people would be work ideally done by other Blacks and/or more feasible due to population density.
Which leads me to the next part, where Walt openly wondered if there was a solution to Black and white race relations and after thinking about it - I don’t think so. I forgot my answer on the podcast, which is indicative of how disconnected my answer probably was to how I actually feel.
But no. I don’t think there’s ever going to be an end to how Black people feel about America and how desperately white people want Blacks to get over it. White liberals control all our institutions, and only support Black people who believe as they do. So this means that any alternative viewpoint is ignored by whites, and decried by Blacks as racist. And on and on it goes.
Walt was resistent to this idea that white people call out Black Identity Activists, feeling that Blacks should police themselves. But Black liberals, often high on their own self importance, reject non-identity politics in totality. Basically all Black Identity Activists find Black conservatives to be Uncle Toms or race traitors who gain the support of whites by condemning Black people. And anyone who endures racist violence from white conservatives “deserved it” for abandoning Black people.
There’s a strong hivemind here that I don’t think Walt, or other white people are aware of. It’s extremely difficult to penetrate Black Identity Politics when Black people see it as a part of being Black and part of the Black political legacy to believe in these things. A lot of Black people reject a class understanding of the world, preferring to view the entire global population through a racial lens, which prompts up a binary of oppressed vs oppressor.
I found a Black female bookstagrammer who doesn’t read books by white authors but prefers “the global majority” which means the world is divided up into whites and non-whites for her and that somehow it is her goal to uplift Asian, Middle Eastern, Native, Black (diaspora) and so on populations on her page.
It is, essentially, very common for Black people to have a politic that’s about them feeling good, powerful and Pro-Black. Which is how you get Pro-Palestine Black liberals who use #Sudan #Haiti on their social media while having never actually spoken about either of these countries, given context for why I should be interested or what the connection is between Palestine and Sudan.
I realized that Black Identity Politics doesn’t have anything to do with anything; it’s just about feeling good as a Black person, (kind of) pushing against white hegemony and moral superiority over not just whites but other Black people as well.
Honestly, if white liberals did prop up and buy into Black race politics, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place, which is why I have begun to think of identity politics as a co-creation between white and Black academics. I think white conservatives should be profiling Black thinkers who reject identity politics, and giving them a platform instead of forcing them to mostly languish in isolation online.
Also, my own political formation is still in the works. I’ve always been more interested in animals than people and found that Black Identity Activists don’t care about the environment or animals at all. But I find environmentalism to be full of the sorts of white liberals I loathe - and I left a local environmental organization due to white racism. I regularly lament that abscence of Black people from animal rights discussions, with a vast majority of the writings about animals to have been done by white people. And when Black people do appear, it’s to talk about race/DEI/Black history/advocacy work that is not relevant to me.
It would be so refreshing to see Black people in the environmental and animal rights space, not as a racialized person, but as a human dedicated to the preservation of the planet and its biodiversity.
I’ve been struggling to figure out what to do in this place. I don’t actually care about the vast majority of things I read on here - they just fascinate me in a morbid kind of way. Though, it has helped me understand why and what I dislike about both Black and white politics so much, and my disdain for white hegemony that I’m forced to live under (that Black elites happily support).
But what I think I’ll do is this - focus on animals, their rights and the environment writ large!
We’ll just see how that goes!