I’m White & I’m Pissed
I’m sitting here ready to angry cry and I haven’t even started writing. I know the title is massive clickbait, but stay with me here. How is it that in Martin Luther King Jr’s speech The Other America he states… “But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality. It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine, quality, integrated education a reality. And so today we are struggling for something which says we demand genuine equality.” And 50 some odd years later the same exact scenarios and situations are currently the norm.
Please tell me how my black friend, I’ll call her E, calls me crying. She told me that while on the phone with a potential new client he stops the conversation abruptly and tells her that after hearing her voice he could tell she was black. That he was no longer interested in hiring her company. How in 2020 after working her tail off at CVS, saving up to start her own cleaning business (fully insured btw) can something so ugly happen? She went from being someone’s employee to OWNING HER OWN BUSINESS!!! Thank the universe she felt safe enough to talk to me about it because I know it happens daily to so many people who are too embarrassed or hurt to say anything. I met her while checking out at the local CVS where she worked part-time while cleaning homes on the side. She had an amazing smile and after overhearing my convo with another friend she noticed us saying the name of a local woman here in Key West. Immediately E chimed in telling us she knew her too and wanted to give me her number to discuss it. This woman, white and well-off had been super inappropriate in a situation we were in, and having it be a business thing we couldn’t have her a part of it. So after my new friend, E, got off work she called and told us the entire story. E had met a “this woman” at CVS just as she’d met us. She asked E if she did hair and would she come over… E happily agreed, went over that night and it turned ugly quick. This woman had not only talked down to her but then assumed she would reorganize her closet while listening to her complain about life. It was insane, the amount of blatantly racist comments and orders she was “given” while over as a supposedly new friend. E is so sweet and she figured maybe this woman was just tipsy and didn’t realize how rude she was being. Well later that week she had borrowed something super expensive from my new friend and after months refused to give it back or even respond to texts. We got it back for her literally an hour later after she realized that E had friends behind her. E has been a great friend since but I watch her still struggle to be happy. I see her post on Facebook obviously depressed and I will check-in and do my best as a friend but I am still not doing enough. It wasn’t until the murder of Floyd George & the #blm #walkwithus #blacklivesmatter movement that I realized how racist we still are! I have been on lockdown for months here in Key West and would go to the beach look around and MLK Jrs’ words in that speech would just pour out in my head as I saw only white skin on my favorite local beach. Wow, and I haven’t even told you about the toilet bowl-shaped pool they have here in Key West. Yes, you read that right… The City of Key West built this pool for African Americans in 1946 when Key West beaches were segregated. It is in the shape of a toilet bowl. In fact, if you flew over the pool back in those days dark-skinned visitors would resemble feces floating in a toilet bowl. HOW INSANE AND CRUEL!!!! I’ve never been there, I physically get ill every time I even think or talk about it. Take a look for yourself below.
I had no clue. None… at 40 years old born to a lesbian in Chicago raised in a Unitarian Church that this ever happened! How were we not taught this?! I’m so angry and so hurt that I didn’t have the opportunity until recently to finally SEE. No one of any color, religion, sex, sexual orientation … hell, NO ONE DESERVES TO BE TREATED POORLY. Period. This has got to stop and the only way is through truth and being open to hearing the truth! I agree with the great Desmond Tutu a South African Anglican cleric and theologian known for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist. He said “Forgiving is not forgetting; it’s actually remembering — remembering and not using your right to hit back. It’s a second chance for a new beginning. And the remembering part is particularly important. Especially if you don’t want to repeat what happened.”
I don’t have all the answers, especially how to right such horrific wrongs. I do know that I will continue to challenge myself to continue listening. There is a lot of pain involved here and we as white people can be truly caring by being quiet and just listening. I know that when my only child died I didn’t want to be told anything, no one could understand what I’ve been through, but once I found people to just hear me and my pain I was able to start healing. Only this isn’t that simple. I’m able to heal from my daughter dying, time does heal, but it cant heal if it still continues. Racism and inequality still continue today and will until we all work together. So white people please don’t internalize this anger that you’re seeing from the Black Live Matter community redirect it into being patient and listening. It seems so simple and yet is so profound. Listen and respond with caring actions.
I want to close this rant of an article up with two more things. I did not call out my tiny beautiful loving island because I see racism here on a regular basis I don’t. This island is absolutely #onehumanfamily with only a few bad apples. I am so grateful for the love and openness this island has for every difference we have as humans. I used it as an example because even here we have a lot of work to do before things are ok. I DO NOT ever want my Goddess of a friend to have to call me crying because of the color of her beautiful skin ever again.
I am also adding the final words of MLK Jrs’ in his speech “The Other America.”
“Let me say another thing that’s more in the realm of the spirit I guess, that is that if we are to go on in the days ahead and make true brotherhood a reality, it is necessary for us to realize more than ever before, that the destinies of the Negro and the white man are tied together. Now there are still a lot of people who don’t realize this. The racists still don’t realize this. But it is a fact now that Negroes and whites are tied together, and we need each other. The Negro needs the white man to save him from his fear. The white man needs the Negro to save him from his guilt. We are tied together in so many ways, our language, our music, our cultural patterns, our material prosperity, and even our food are an amalgam of black and white.
So there can be no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white groups. There can be no separate white path to power and fulfillment short of social disaster. It does not recognize the need of sharing that power with black aspirations for freedom and justice. We must come to see now that integration is not merely a romantic or esthetic something where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure. Integration must be seen also in political terms where there is shared power, where black men and white men share power together to build a new and great nation.
In a real sense, we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. John Donne placed it years ago in graphic terms, “No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” And he goes on toward the end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I’m Involved in mankind. Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” And so we are all in the same situation: the salvation of the Negro will mean the salvation of the white man. And the destruction of life and of the ongoing progress of the Negro will be the destruction of the ongoing progress of the nation.
Now let me say finally that we have difficulties ahead but I haven’t despaired. Somehow I maintain hope in spite of hope. And I’ve talked about the difficulties and how hard the problems will be as we tackle them. But I want to close by saying this afternoon, that I still have faith in the future. And I still believe that these problems can be solved. And so I will not join anyone who will say that we still can’t develop a coalition of conscience.
I realize and understand the discontent and the agony and the disappointment and even the bitterness of those who feel that whites in America cannot be trusted. And I would be the first to say that there are all too many who are still guided by the racist ethos. And I am still convinced that there are still many white persons of goodwill. And I’m happy to say that I see them every day in the student generation who cherish democratic principles and justice above principle, and who will stick with the cause of justice and the cause of Civil Rights and the cause of peace throughout the days ahead. And so I refuse to despair. I think we’re gonna achieve our freedom because however much America strays away from the ideals of justice, the goal of America is freedom.
Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America. Before the pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful words of the Star-Spangled Banner were written, we were here. For more than two centuries, our forebearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king. They built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to grow and develop.
And I say that if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face, including the so-called white backlash, will surely fail. We’re gonna win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands.
And so I can still sing “We Shall Overcome.” We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward Justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right, “No lie can live forever.” We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right, “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right, “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne — Yet that scaffold sways the future.” With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.
With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discourse of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children, black men, and white men, Jews, and Gentiles, Protestants, and Catholics, will be able to join hands and live together as brothers and sisters, all over this great nation. That will be a great day, that will be a great tomorrow. In the words of the Scripture, to speak symbolically, that will be the day when the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy”
