It's an hour you should watch. (There is a flaw in the upload, stick with the black commercial here space and the rest of the film is intact.) Many of the people in this film are alive. Their children are alive. Pay particular attention to the last third, where fear is used to control the poor white population. As white people, we talk in coded language we don't really understand. What struck me most during Booker's Place was how little the difference is between things my neighbors say and things the 1966 Mississippian said. To some extent, this makes sense. After all, we were all alive in 1966 and we still are today. Race in America is an ongoing struggle. The current election is bringing a conversation about fear. People are afraid, without explanation of what they fear. They need to Take America Back, but to what? Which America? Racism is hereditary. It is something handed down in the things we know, the things we believe and the things we say. The myths we perpetuate in the white community are simply untrue. They are lies we tell ourselves and our children, lies we prop up with our collective reaffirmation that none of us are bad people. We are good people. We are fair minded people.
When you open the door to a conversation about race reality in America you ask your fellow white person to consider they they are not good or fair minded people. The challenge is to undertake revelation without blame. Booker talks about always smiling. He's not wrong. I have found the only effective way to bring people to the table is to agree with their major racisms while undermining the minor ones. With the murder of Trayvon Martin there is a previously unavailable opportunity for me to discuss race with the whites around me. While one of the workers on our property was murdered without much attention being paid to him, they do care about the innocence of George Zimmerman. Like Booker Wright, I have to keep that smile. I have to Yassir my way through the conversation. I've given up on those over 55. (Get called N'rlover enough times, and you get cynical.) It's easy to pretend this is due to my living in the South but 90% of my neighborhood is Northern transplants. Talking to the residents in their 20's, 30's, and 40's the same racism is present, the same arguments are made. Only the words change.
"The greatest trick the Devil ever played" is a common phrase used in the South. I think the greatest trick he ever played was the deliberate destruction of the black economy. Through the murder of successful black businessmen and the burning of black infrastructure, the black main street is largely gone. Black America is subject to a lack of eduction, human trafficking and exploitation in a way white America largely is not. We make the same arguments about black America we ever did. We have the deserving blacks and the underserving. If I make the argument to to my neighbors that George Zimmerman was mistaken in his assumptions about Trayvon Martin, the conversation continues. If I make the argument that Trayvon had a right to self defense, the conversation ends. Trayvon does not have the basic human rights (in the minds of my white neighbors) that George Zimmerman does. In fact (without fail) when I begin to make ground with them about Zimmerman's murder of Martin, the claim is quickly made. "Zimmerman isn't white you know." Because the conversation is getting too close to what we cannot acknowledge. Black Americans are still not counted as full humans. They are not considered worthy of the same rights as white Americans. Transgressions against them are always justified, by the mere fact of their being black.
Of course, your white neighbors will tell you, racism is wrong. Of course it's wrong that the income, education and employment disparity between whites and blacks is so deep. But... There is not a lot of difference between what the whites of 1966 say and the whites of 2012. We word it differently, we speak less openly, we are less self aware, but the roots of racism run deep and are not gone. We have it in all of us. The challenge is to find it and discuss it without triggering the kill switches of guilt or blame. Like Booker Wright said, you've got to keep smiling.
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