Racism is not a moral choice — it’s the foundation of whiteness

The past couple weeks of protests in response to the murder of George Floyd haven’t illuminated anything new. We live in a society that was built on white supremacy, which has always been anti-Black. What is perhaps unique about these protests are the ways in which white Americans seem to be more earnestly trying to practice true allyship; more white people appear to be attending these protests than they did protests in past years. But despite their presumably good intentions, the framework through which many white people are approaching this work is still problematic.

In many white online spaces, racism is being framed as a moral choice. In other words, racism is being portrayed as checking a yes or no box. According to this lens, white communities can be separated into “bad whites” and “good whites,” the latter being people who have publicly denounced racism and thus believe that they are entitled to deem themselves cured of all bigotry.

By appealing to white self-righteousness, this approach dangerously oversimplifies the pervasive nature of white supremacy. It ignores how anti-Blackness has been economically incentivized and politically normalized, and how white people participate in anti-Blackness both purposely and passively. It alleviates white people of a deeper responsibility of analyzing how anti-Blackness has been incentivized for them, and has pervaded everything from where they live, where their children go to school, and where they spend their dollars.

For example, some of the loudest white voices speaking out against police brutality on my social media feed right now are the biggest beneficiaries of a society that profits off of anti-Blackness. These are the same folks whose parents pulled them out of public school for the “safer” private school down the street, who have traveled to foreign countries on mission trips, and live in self-segregated neighborhoods.

What’s more, while speaking out about police brutality against Black people is important, it’s simply the evil tip of the iceberg of racism in America. Black communities are subject to gratuitous violence in many areas of their lives. We live in a carceral state that punishes Black and brown youth through a robust school-to-prison pipeline, surveils communities of color, and incarcerates and kills Black people disproportionately more than any other demographic.

White people need to think more critically about the ways in which they have benefited from the same institutions they claim to protest online. Racism is not a moral choice, but it is maintained through a series of social, political, and economic ones. White communities created the idea of Black criminality so that we could have white comfort. Our need for social and physical “security” often directly translates into harming Black communities by excluding them culturally, eventually leading to Black social death. We can scream “Black Lives Matter,” but our words are disingenuous if we continue to support corporations like Starbucks and Macy’s, which rely on prison labor. We can march for racial justice, but our actions are futile if we continue to send our kids to private schools that exclude youth of color, or live in segregated communities.

The struggle for racial justice is more complex than virtue signaling, and will require white people to make real sacrifices. To start, we can begin by divesting the money we spend on businesses that gentrify, and instead reinvest our dollars into local, Black-owned businesses. We can change our media consumption, which tends to favor white voices over voices of color, by reading books by Black authors. While we may not be able to change where we grew up or went to school, we can at least think critically about how Black exclusion has been utilized for our own white comfort.