July 16
GUEST: Kwame Holmes, PhD, Scholar in Residence, Human Rights Program, Bard College, and author of numerous articles about race and LGBTQ rights, talks about Black Lives Matter and how local actions can create lasting change.Why Abolish the Police? - Chronogram
Scholar in Residence, Human Rights
Kwame is a delightful guest. He is able to keep his sense of humor as he talks about the prevailing racism that has plagued our society since way before the US Constitution. Ours is a nation built on the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples as well as the importation of millions of Black slaves. As a white person, what does one do? What reparations will ever make those wrongs less of a curse on our national pride? Why do whites have national pride?
Discussing all this with a Black person willing to talk about race can be anxiety producing. Am I saying racist things because my society has been awash in racist sentiments for my whole life? Or am I simply a racist because my standard of living and virtual freedom from police killings has always made my life easier. Ok, much easier. I have been a member of the chosen people in a country perpetually stained by its continued assault on people of color.
So humor makes things easier. It allows me to express my support for human rights without thinking of what I should have been doing all along. Humor makes me laugh about racist assumptions too. Assumptions that are simply stupid and small minded, like our president. But is it enough to condemn Trump? What is enough for a white man in our society?
It is a question that the Germans have asked since the Holocaust. Did they know what was going on as Jews were disappearing? Were they in the German Army, defending a state that was committing genocide? And when can Germans expect to rejoin the human race?
I don't know about white people being "fragile," the conclusion of "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism." The book is well worth reading, of course. But why not say that like the Germans who lived through World War II, white people in America are simply guilty in some degree, and that we can recover some of our lost humanity by simply being honest?
