Haha. This gave me a chuckle. I try really hard to be precise in the things I write. Sadly, in 2021, that means that some of the things I say sound strange.
I'm not trying to say that black people don't think about race. I'm saying that most people, black and white, spend most of their time (as in over 50%) just trying to live their lives. Do you spend over eight hours of every single day thinking about the colour of your skin? I certainly don't, and I write about race.
There's this sense amongst a certain type of white "progressive" today that life as a black person is this constant torment of racial suffering. Not only is this untrue, it's another way to "other" us. As James Baldwin pointed out over 50 years ago, all of this is designed to disguise the fact that black people are just people. Our issues should be treated with the same urgency as they would be if we were white. Instead, this idea of our "race" obscures the real issues.
These same progressives spend all their time screaming about microaggressions and how it "harms" black people to say "nitty gritty" or "melting pot" or whatever it is, and in the mean time black people who are far less lucky than you (I presume) or I, are living in communities that are struggling with drugs and violence and high incarceration precisely because of the effects of racist policies like redlining and the war on black people…I mean drugs.
But of course, dealing with stuff like that is hard and doesn't feel as heroic or easy as apologising for being white.
Sorry, this turned into a bit of an essay, but let me say one last thing. The comment I replied to just before yours was from a white woman who was telling me how stupid I was and how I didn't understand what black people are going through. Yet you, a black man, politely ask me why I think differently to you and invite a conversation (thanks for that by the way, I really appreciate humility in the internet age).
What I see at the moment is the rise of a bubbling "neoracism" where a certain type of white person, after reading a few trendy books on racism, thinks they know everything there is to know about black people. As if we can be boiled down into a book. I think DiAngelo is a huge part of this problem. They're all for "listening to our experience" when we say what they expect, but the second we stray from the script, all of that "respect" disappears.
The script has become; "Life is hell for black people. We need help. Racism afflicts us every second of every day. The colour of our skin defines us". I don't think that's true. Do you? Again, as James Baldwin said, white America needs to think about why it needs a "negro".
