What White People Need to Understand

Last night, I listened to David Remnick’s New Yorker podcast interview with James Comey to hear what he had to say about our 45th President, but what disturbed me more was what he had to say (at ~13:30) about the phrase “mass incarceration.”

“It connotes an intentionality,” Comey explained, “but there’s nothing mass about it. Everybody was charged individually, represented individually, and everybody appeared in front of a judge. I think you can talk about those systemic problems without making it sound like there was an intentionality where law enforcement decided it was going to round up huge numbers of black men.”

Riiiiiiiiiiight. . .

Then, this morning, another white man on the radio made me cringe. This time, it was National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, who was on NPR to talk with Steve Inskeep about a new book, but who ended up talking (at ~3:30) about the recent incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks in which two Black men were arrested for, well, being Black at a Starbucks.

“If it’s bad to reduce two black guys in a Starbucks to members of a category I distrust — it’s also bad to say that I’m responsible for the stupid mistake of a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia,” Goldberg opined. “Identity politics reduces people’s lived identity to these thin abstractions.”

“And you don’t like being blamed for that as a White person?” Inskeep asked.

“I don’t like thinking of myself as a White person,” Goldberg countered.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiight . . .

Thank God, then, for the Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt (also White), who wrote a piece in today’s paper that underscores what both Comey and Goldberg — and millions of other White Americans across the country — are unwilling or unable to see.

Hiatt’s column was an informal review of the new Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which opens later this week, and which features a stirring, disturbing outdoor memorial to the thousands of African Americans who were lynched in American towns and cities (both North and South).

The museum and memorial, Hiatt suggests, offer “an alternative, and overwhelmingly coherent, arc of the history of white supremacy” — a history that runs from the advent of slavery right up to and through the arrest of those two men at Starbucks. Until we as a country can confront the full weight of that history, says the Museum’s founder, Bryan Stevenson, we will never be able to transcend it.

In fact, in Stevenson’s view, the modern legacy of white supremacy is best seen in the inequities of our criminal-justice system. “Blacks were — and are — more likely to be suspended from school, denied parole and when freed from prison denied benefits, kept out of public housing, blocked from employment or professional licenses and, once again, prevented from voting,” Hiatt writes.

Are you listening, Mr. Comey?

Plainly, the color of one’s skin is still an arrestable offense in America, as we saw in Philly last week. So while it’s nice that Jonah Goldberg doesn’t want to be thought of as White, the reality is that we all inhabit a world that was built on these foundations, and in which those “thin abstractions” are all too real for too many of us. As Henry Louis Gates famously said, “I know race is an abstraction, but I still can’t catch a cab in New York City.”

In short, there are forces at play that benefit white people (#whiteprivilege), and forces that place black people at risk, and there always have been.  “There was this hope that this race stuff would just evaporate over time,” explains Stevenson, “but it doesn’t work like that. It is a serious disease, and if we don’t treat it, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t go away.

“We’re not doomed by this history. We’re not even defined by it. But we do have to face it.”