Hmmm, you think this isn't exactly what's happening with the CRT debate in schools? (Yes, I know that much of what's being complained about isn't technically CRT, but it's undeniably race essentialist and often anti-white.)
You think curricula like the mathematics syllabus that started this conversation isn't an attempt to impose...well, actually, to impose ethnic stereotypes on white and black children?
I don't think the issue with the KKK is just supremacy. You can find countless examples of people saying black people are superior to white people in one way or another. Some of them right here on Medium. Anti-white bigotry is completely socially acceptable right now.
The root problem with the KKK and groups like them is that they believe in the idea of race. They have swallowed the lie, like many black people have, that the colour of a person's skin differentiates their group identity in a way that can't and shouldn't be ignored. And that the mixing of these groups harms or dilutes them. This idea absolutely inevitably leads some people to believe that their group is superior.
But it's this line which I really want to focus on:
"How did I come to feel inferior to whites and to seek their approval so often as a young adult?"
This is such an insightful, important, and simultaneously heartbreaking question. It's one I wish every single black person who has ever felt inferior to anybody would ask themselves. I can say, with my hand on my heart, that I have never felt inferior to white people. This is something which I think too many black people can't honestly say. And I didn't get there by "embracing blackness" or ethnocentrism. I got there by understanding that the colour of my skin was no more defining of who I am than the colour of my eyes. I got there by understanding that it was the people (white and black) who thought otherwise who were confused.
What if constantly defining yourself as foreign to the culture you live in is what makes you feel like an outsider? What if the solution to the idea of race isn’t to hold onto it more tightly but to let it go? What if this aspect of black culture that focuses on “blackness” is a part of the problem?
Yes, most countries in the west are majority white. So yes, the people you see on TV are more likely to be white. If any colour is going to be discriminated against, it’s more likely to be black people, especially given America’s history. I’m definitely not putting the entire onus on black people. But I’ve seen first-hand, over and over agin, parents unwittingly driving the idea into their kids’ heads that they’re “less than” because they’re black. That the world is, and always will be, against them. That black people are best defined by the suffering our ancestors faced.
The reason I want to "stamp out" this idea, is that it only ever harms black people. It's the source of so much pain and insecurity within the black community. And it's one that only black people can fix. I’m not denying that white supremacy or institutional racism exist, of course not. But this is something else. It is the truest form of internalised racism I have ever seen. It's this belief that to be authentically black means to insist, in a thousand subtle ways, that it's inevitable to believe that you're less than.
