Rosa Parks is dead. The next generation of civil rights heroes must be white people.
This morning, I got an email
about the death of Rosa Parks. “I’m 46,” the man wrote. “It’s
hard for me to imagine that only 50 years ago prejudice was so rampant. I feel
good about the progress that’s been made, but I also know that prejudice is
still alive: stagnant and dormant in some people and ‘in your face’ in
others. As a modern civil people, we must continue to fight prejudice, stand up
against intolerance, and educate our youth about the importance of
acceptance.”
“Where are the heroes of today?”
he continued. “We need another Rosa Parks. We need another Martin Luther King.
We need to do a lot more than what we have been doing.”
What we actually need, I replied
quietly, are more white people who are willing to be civil rights heroes.
We need white people to be as
outraged about racism as people of color are. We need white people to realize
that racism is not a black issue—it’s a white issue. We need white people to
refuse to participate in a system that privileges them over fellow human beings.
We need white people to actively, visibly, and publicly examine their own role
in perpetuating racism in subtle and unconscious ways, acknowledge and own their
part in the problem, verbalize the unearned privileges that accrue to them
simply because of their skin color, and demand those same privileges for people
of color.
Fighting racism isn’t only the
job of people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. The next generation of
civil rights activists in this nation must be white people who realize that
winning this fight will be the result of individual, daily actions on their
part, not grand pronouncements and history month celebrations.
In “The Color of Fear,” a
remarkable film shown during the community dialogue program, Building Bridges, a
young African-American man named Victor puts it this way: “Most of the lethal racism we face isn’t the
KKK burning crosses; it comes from people who experience themselves as decent
folk, moral churchgoers.” “Racism is so deep.” he continues, “that you don’t
think about it. It is insidious. It is in the very air that you breathe. White
people don’t talk about what it is to be white; they talk about the human
experience. Because in the U.S., white is human.”
Some say we should live in a
colorblind world—that we are all human, after all. But if we are unable to see
race, we cannot see racism—and denial is not a strategy. After hearing Victor’s
story in “The Color of Fear,” a white man named David asks, “How can I help
you?” “Help me by understanding yourself and the invisible protection you have
because of your color,” is the reply. There can be no progress on the issue of
racism, Victor explains, “unless you’re willing to be changed by my experience
as much as I’m changed every day by yours.”
As long as we wait for national
heroes to emerge, nothing will change. As long as we relegate the solution to
the very people we’ve oppressed in the first place, nothing will change. Unless
we wake up every morning determined to eliminate racism even when that work is
difficult, nothing will change. Many times, racism has existed around me, but I
didn’t notice—because it didn’t affect me. It’s this subtle racism we must
fight. And to fight it, we must see it, not minimize it.
If Rosa Parks had waited for a
Bi-Partisan Task Force on Unilateral Bus Seating, she’d still be standing on
that bus. Sometimes, we just need to act. But let’s not confuse movement with
action. Being a strong white ally doesn’t mean that we should take over, assume
we know what is best for people of color, or ask them to speak for their people.
Rather, it means that we should find out about people of color by listening to
their stories, teach our children about racism, talk to other white people about
racism, interrupt racist jokes or comments, and stand by people of color—not
just when it’s easy or convenient, but always.
As Nelson Mandela once said: “your smallness will not save the world.” To
end racism, we must make bold strokes and be active anti-racists. We must
acknowledge our unearned privileges, accept our own racism, and own this problem
ourselves, each individual one of us.
The police officer who
fingerprinted Rosa Parks after that fateful bus ride was named Drue Lackey. When
asked to comment on Parks’ death, Lackey simply said that he had no problem with
black people and that he was just doing his job. As long as we “just do our
jobs,” racism will prevail.
