White progressives could be doing much more to confront racism

By Tom Krattenmaker

USA Today, November 29, 2018

White progressives like me can usually be counted on to call out racism on Facebook. Unlike Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, we consider the nation’s growing diversity a strength. We assure ourselves we would never discriminate against a black, Latino or Asian job applicant at our workplaces. We proudly display “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on our lawns and “Fight Racism” bumper stickers on our cars.

It might appear we’re the good ones when it comes to race. And, relative to a lot of people on the other side of the aisle, we are.

But the uncomfortable truth is that we are not as woke as we tell ourselves and don’t go nearly as far as we could to undo racism. As the country argues over race amid travesties such as the police killing E.J. Bradford at an Alabama mall, and Mississippi Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith blithely saying she’d attend a public hanging in a state with a history of lynchings, white progressives are compelled to match our words with action in confronting the nation’s original and most pernicious sin.

What are we actually doing about racism?

There is no cause for complacency and no justification for the piousness and superiority that white progressives frequently exude around race. True, our mouths, hearts and votes are generally in the right place. But our “money” often isn’t — our decisions on where we live, worship and send our kids to school, whom we include in the communities we form, and how we leverage the advantages of our white majority status for the benefit of others.

White progressives should ask ourselves what we are actually doing about racism. A lot of it, we’ll see, falls under the heading of “Easy Stuff.”

For example, “Hate Has No Home Here” signs have been appearing in overwhelmingly white suburbs of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. As columnist J.D. Mullane appropriately asked in the Bucks County Courier Times, “Why preach ‘diversity’ and ‘tolerance’ when you choose to live in a town that’s 95 percent white?”

Not that these progressive white folks in Bucks County harbor any hatred of immigrants and people of color. What is questionable, though, is how much they’re willing to risk, and give up, to undo the systemic racism that keeps their picturesque suburbs virtually minority-free.

White progressives benefit from — and thus perpetuate — racism’s subtle machinations when we sequester ourselves in communities and neighborhoods with good schools and high property values that happen to have few if any people of color. We do the same when we casually accept the benefit of the doubt we tend to get from law enforcement without challenging the burden of doubt borne by our nonwhite fellow citizens.

We often voice (or feign) concern about pain in predominantly black communities while acting as though there is nothing much we can do about it. The mentality was captured perfectly in Chicago resident Emmie Bailey’s comments to NBC the day before the Laquan McDonald verdict last month. In a largely white community 6 miles from McDonald’s neighborhood, as police braced for riots in the event the jury acquitted the officer who killed him (thankfully, it did not), Bailey said of the case: “I haven’t kept up with it that much, unfortunately. It’s such a sad thing, I wish I was more involved.”

Those of a Tucker Carlson bent have an obvious suggestion for how white progressives can close this gap between our words and deeds: Stop harping about race all the time.

I have a better solution: Keep talking about race. Keep calling out politicians like Hyde-Smith when they glorify Confederate history and use language that is grossly insensitive at best and condones racial violence at worst. Keep spotlighting racial disparities such as the fact that white families have 10 times the median wealth of black families.

And while we keep harping about racism, we can take more forceful on-the-ground action against it.

What you can do about racism short of moving

Willie Jennings, a professor at Yale Divinity School (my employer), points the way in his award-winning book, “The Christian Imagination.” Those committed to a racially just society, he writes, must “transgress the boundaries of real es­tate, by buying where we should not and living where we must not, by living together where we supposedly cannot, and being identified with those whom we should not.”

Most people are not ready to sell their house, pull their kids out of school, and move to a predominantly black neighborhood. But there are other ways to achieve this kind of proximity, such as: attending racially segregated churches, joining volunteer projects in nonwhite parts of town or activist efforts for racial justice, and having conversations and forming friendships with people of different races.

Racially awakened whites intent on living out their values can find helpful resources on the internet on websites such as The Mash-Up Americans and Bitch Media. One particularly valuable experience for me was the weekend my wife and I spent at “Undoing Racism,” a workshop offered by The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond.

White progressives already accept the reality of racism and believe in an inclusive and fair society. If we could better match our rhetoric and action, our anti-racism voice would carry a lot further.

Tom Krattenmaker, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, directs communications at Yale Divinity School. His latest book is “Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower.” Follow him on Twitter: @tkrattenmaker