A Tale of would-be "Allies"

This weekend has been particularly tough on black folks and I will be the first to admit that I might need to talk to a therapist after accidentally viewing the video depicting the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In case you’re wondering why Minneapolis is currently on fire, it is because that 10-minute video illustrates very clearly that a group of police officers slowly suffocated the life out of an unarmed, handcuffed black man.

Almost at the same time on the other side of the country, a self-proclaimed “liberal” white woman feigned distress as she called the cops on another black after he asked her to put her dog on a leash in central park.

I just want to pause right here to underline the severity of her crime in light of the George Floyd murder and the countless others that were not as well documented:

This woman was not in any harm. She was wrong for not having her dog on a leash. But after being confronted, she called the police and signaled to them and to this black man, both with the affected tone of distress in her voice and with her insisting that an “African-American Man” was aggressing her, that she knew the black man would come into harms way at the hands of the police as a direct result of her lies.

Her political leaning? Liberal.

Now, I’m certainly not the first to write about the seeming cognitive dissonance of certain white liberals, but I do want to personalize it a bit.

I pursued a master’s degree in public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University where I was one of four black persons out of a class of about 75.

I loved my time at Princeton for the most part, but those ivory halls were fraught with racial divisiveness that, to this day, remain unmatched in both my professional and academic careers.

Tensions were so bad that many of us brown and black folk sought counseling and even tried to engage the institution to alleviate some of the issues.

To wit, the other three black folks and I decided to use a class (502 - the psychology of public policy) as a forum to discuss the aforementioned divisiveness. We thought this to be completely appropriate because “unconscious biases” was the topic of discussion in the class at the time, and this group of future policy makers and politicians should better understand the critical intersection of race and policy as future arbiters of American public policy.

The class was coincidentally broken up into four sections and so we each decided to split ourselves up so that each section would have at least one of us. We then used the subject matter to turn to real life issues, specifically, the concept of racism and the extent to which those of us in the room would check our own unconscious (racial) biases to ensure that minorities are at the very least, not adversely affected by liberal policy making.

Crickets.

I even went so far as to admit that I was trying to overcome my own prejudices as a way to endear others to the conversation.

Even the crickets were silent at this point.

I want to be very clear here. I don’t think my classmates are racists. And to be fair, we had some real allies in our group. However, I have never felt more pain in an academic setting than I felt that day. My peers . . . future powerhouses in their respective specialties, could not even begin to have a conversation about race, much less about the way their future decisions might negatively affect people who look like me. What’s worse - they didn’t want to.

I will never forget their silence. I will never forget their unwillingness to engage.

They, the self-proclaimed liberals, could not empathize with us, their classmates. And if they couldn’t empathize with us, how could they even dream of empathizing with poor black and brown folk who, historically, systemically get the short end of the policy stick?

The short answer is . . . they can’t.

Today, my message is simple. If you can’t have the conversation - you’re just as bad as Amy.

Be better . . . our lives depend on it.

. . . The Trendy One

For more on this topic, please visit the latest episode of “The family we choose” podcast!