A More Perfect Reunion by Calvin Baker

Author:Calvin Baker [BAKER, CALVIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

You can’t police the American psychic interior, however, whatever skin is wrapped around it. What you can do is use institutional levers to heal the wound at scale. How many of the companies hiring race consultants, to cite one area of society, have equal hiring, mentoring, and promotion practices (not goals)? Is diversity a token effort in the form of a few visible hires, working on “diverse” projects (too often a form of marginalization), or something everyone in the global marketplace is expected to master? There exists a massive body of literature about what works and what does not in fostering a more integrated workplace, educational environment, or neighborhood. Sitting around talking, as in any endeavor, may help define goals, but it is powerless to execute them.

Without concrete action the audience leaves this theater, night after night, generation after generation, with the false comfort of being categorized as white in an apartheid state while telling themselves they are moral and good, or simply realists, but doing little to further tangible goals of equality.

In business as in politics, what has been added to the comfort of whiteness, after the civil rights movement was shot in its sleep, is the vanity of demonstrating one’s bona fides as a supporter of racial justice. This performance is culturally inculcated. By demonstrating awareness or wokeness, one is demonstrating a badge of belonging, that you are a member of a group that cares about such things and went to a school or read a book or were raised in a milieu that taught you genteel behaviors and buzzwords. Yet any change to the existing structure is perceived as a threat because the system has also taught that blackness represents a unique threat, so you repeat your jargon from safe within the institutions and geography of whiteness. Integration threatens any self that takes whiteness as its most salient identity (without knowing it) across political lines, because it addresses the material, not the symbolic.

Talk, however, does have a role to play in solving the problem. At its best, it is meant to awaken our consciousness as a precursor to action. Such action is what J. Edgar Hoover feared (like generations of people invested in maintaining the status quo before and after) when he issued the directive to “prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant Black Nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a ‘messiah’.… Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and [Nation of Islam leader] Elijah Muhammed [sic] all aspire to this position.… King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence).”5 The Panthers had witnessed what power does to truth and reached the same conclusion Hoover did, responding to the racial state in its own language.

When the Chicago police killed twenty-one-year-old Fred Hampton, this is what they were protecting against. Whites are so fearful of the call for real justice that their fear provokes not merely histrionic behavior but also well-thought-out acts of violence.

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