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A few weeks ago, Bellows Falls High School student, Grace Garyas, delivered a well prepared and thoughtful request to her school board that a Black Lives Matter flag fly beneath the Vermont flag on the school flagpole. Though the board tabled her proposal until it developed a policy to govern such matters, there was opposition expressed by some white members of the board and audience. These were especially striking for being framed by some as All lives matter and Were all equal, and that the nearby American flag rendered the Black Lives Matter flag unnecessary because the stars and stripes already spoke to liberty and justice for all.

I dont know if these remarks were coded racist statements, politically correct for polite society, or simply the dangerously ignorant comments of people who like so many of us white folks are blind to both our racial supremacy and skin privilege, as well as the past and present daily experiences of violence, subjugation, and discrimination suffered by POC (people of color) folks living in a white society. Whatever they were, insisting that were all equal and that all lives matter in America is as true as the claim that Trump won the 2020 election.

These are the statements of willfully oblivious people who, like myself, never had to prepare our sons on how to behave should they encounter a white cop; or had to cope with losing members of their families to murder and imprisonment as a social norm; or suffer and perhaps die from inferior medical care because a white doctor believed that Black bodies are biologically and physiologically inferior to white bodies; or were redlined from purchasing a desired home; or experienced daily insults and racial epithets, in school, work, and just walking down the street.

Like myself, this absence of personal experience is compounded by the whitewashed version of American history we were taught in school where the 246 years of horrific slavery whipping, branding, hanging, raping, separating children from parents was treated as an aberrant moment only deserving of passing mention in the chapter on the Civil War in the standard high school text. Or ignored that the U.S. Constitution was shaped to accommodate the interests of slave-owners; or that the involuntary labor of Black people is the foundation of our nations wealth that they have never been compensated for or benefited from; or when slavery ended, it was followed by the nightmare of the Jim Crow era featuring terroristic violence (white Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black citizens from the end of the Civil War to 1950), contract labor (slavery by another name), Black Codes disenfranchising otherwise eligible Black voters and otherwise thwarting the expression of equal Black citizenship;. or the race riots and mass murders in towns like the prosperous Black Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, and the only successful coup in the history of the United States, perpetrated by whites in the Black-run town of Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898.

We are color blind to the horror that continues into the present moment with the war on drugs and stop and search campaigns resulting in a Black incarceration rate five times higher than whites. Or that todays Black median income is about half that of white Americans, the same as it was in 1950. And that Black Americans are 3 times more likely than white Americans to be killed during a police encounter.

All lives Matter? Were all equal?

White supremacy and skin privilege are basic to what our nation is all about. It is the original member of our civilizations long emergency tripartite, as seemingly impervious to resolution as the climate catastrophe, and as plainly evil as fascism, its two associates.

Yes, its good that some of us march and protest, and express our outrage with the latest white cop murder of a Black citizen. But then we return home where, other than planting a Black Lives Matter sign in our lawn, we suffer white amnesia as we resume a life of white privilege that exists at the expense of the same Black folks whose oppression we otherwise episodically act out against with the best intentions.

While I believe it serves no useful purpose to try to convert those who harbor racist viewpoints, we nevertheless must always stand up against and speak truth to white supremacy, both overt and coded. Like attending and speaking up at the next meeting of the Bellows Falls School Board, Monday, April 25, 6:30 p.m. in the BFUHS Family Engagement Room, to support Graces proposed Black Lives Matter flag.

But we do this in a way that, while rejecting the expressions of white supremacy, does not renounce the person voicing them. As challenging as this may be, it is important that we never lose sight of the fact that, despite our differences, we share a common humanity with our white brothers and sisters, not to mention a mutual responsibility for what is the white race problem. While always resisting and opposing racist behavior, and serving as an ally of our POC sisters and brothers, we do so without denying the white person we are, or disowning other members of our race.

And while were at it, we might read The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, available at Brooks Memorial and Rockingham libraries, and local book stores. Its a great antidote for our racialized ignorance!

Tim Stevenson is a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions from Athens, and author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (2015, Green Writers Press). The opinions expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect the views of Vermont News & Media.

Originally posted here:
Stevenson | Living with the Long Emergency: The intractability of white supremacy - Brattleboro Reformer