The White Unwillingness to Address Racial Issues

My experience working in our local racial reconciliation effort called “Courageous Conversations” here in Georgetown, Texas has made me aware that conversations about racism make most white people very uncomfortable and defensive. Even in the face of continuing racial inequities and injustices that have rocked our nation in recent years, many of us prefer to relegate white racism to the distant past or to a few misguided white supremacists who have not become “color-blind” like the rest of us presume we are today. However, the defensive rhetoric of former President Trump when addressing racial conflicts, the conservative political efforts to attack critical race theory, the fixation of conservative media on white replacement anxieties, the statehouse attempts to set policies that negatively impact the voting rights of people of color, and the recent legal challenges to well-established affirmative action policies all indicate that race continues to be a contentious issue within our nation today. As one political commentator has noted, the Republican party in recent years has blatantly become “an instrument of white grievance”, even while expressing this in subtle code language that connects with resentful whites who recognize the “browning of America”.

The white resistance to acknowledging the legacy of racism in America has been on display over the past decade particularly among whites in the South with regard to the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials that were erected during the Jim Crow era to reinforce white supremacy. I have experienced this resistance first hand as a white person who has been engaged in a local effort to address issues around the legacy of a Confederate monument that has stood at the entrance of our county courthouse since 1918. I have discovered that it is hard for many white people to hear about our nation’s racist past without some emotional reaction, whether this arises out of guilt, shame, blame, or fear. This defensiveness has been on display among our local white civic leaders and the lovers of Southern heritage to the idea of removing the Confederate memorial from the courthouse lawn and placing this old racist symbol in the local museum with a contextual historical marker or putting it in the old cemetery in town where most of the Confederate veterans are buried. While other cities and universities around the deep South have decided to remove or contextualize these Jim Crow-era monuments to Confederate veterans, and indirectly to confront the ideology of white superiority, our local Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter and many white citizens have been quick to fight any suggestion that this Confederate monument has any racist connotations in it. This vehement white denial gets supported by a sanitized version of history as contained in the Lost Cause narrative about the reasons for the Civil War as well as claims that these monuments only “honor faithful soldiers and preserve Southern heritage, and not racist hate”.

What is most telling, however, is the indifference of most of the white population in our community to this issue and to other issues where racial identities and inequities can be observed. In the minds of many, dealing with old statues and war memorials has little to do with the pressing issues of today, so removing vestiges from the past isn’t worth the time and effort. In fact, some see the objections to leaving a Jim Crow era monument in a public place of honor as an attempt to re-write history. Consequently, those who view Confederate monuments as old symbols of white racism are often dismissed as being radical outsiders or anti-military veterans. Meanwhile, ignoring the legacy of these Confederate monuments allows us to keep our white virtues in place and to honor military veterans and events in our nation’s past without ever asking about their moral justification or purpose. The consternation that has sprung up all over the South in recent years about removing Confederate monuments from public places of honor reveals both a resistance by many to deal with the legacy of white racial biases in the history of this country and a desire by others to re-assess the ideals we want monuments from the past to reflect today. The struggles going on today about continuing to give these old racist symbols a place of honor in our communities or removing them reveals to me how deeply embedded white biases still are and how difficult it is to acknowledge and confront these biases.

This same resistance to acknowledging and addressing racial disparities that exist in our community has shown up in conversations with our local civic leaders regarding low academic performance in some of our public schools, in the plans to expand government facilities into African American neighborhoods, and with aggressive policing towards people of color. The denial and defensiveness about the existence of racial concerns by our white civic leaders have been painfully clear when they insist that there is no racism in our community because they haven’t heard anyone complaining vociferously. Invitations to white faith communities to join efforts and initiatives to address racial issues in our community have generally been met with silence. Now, many conservative whites are expressing resentments and anxieties about the honest history of racism being taught in our public schools, dismissiveness about any suggestion that racial inequities continue to exist in our white communities, and complaints about reverse discrimination with regard to affirmative action policies. All of these examples lead me to believe that our community here in Georgetown and America as a whole will not overcome the vestiges of racism or achieve racial justice and equity as long as we deny the realities that people of color continue to point out, blame racial minorities for the existing racial inequities, and ignore the dynamics of white racial biases and white privileges that continue to exist today. So, I am among those who firmly believe that white people created the scourge of racism and white people must bear the responsibility for eradicating the vestiges of individual and institutional racism that still exists today. I wrote my book as a testimony to this conviction.