Dax-Devlon Ross - Letters to My White Male Friends

I will never forget one night in Cape Town when I was out at a dance club with a group of fellow law students. My friends and I were clustered by the bar, spending our overvalued cash with an all-too-eager-to-please barkeep, talking loudly as Americans often do without even wondering if its obnoxious, when I noticed something unusual out of the corner of my eye. Picture this scene with me. The dance floor was dark and crowded, thick with grinding bodies. But there was one bodythe one that caught my attentionmoonwalking around the perimeter of the floor in its own orbit. How often do you see anyone in a club moonwalking? It isnt the type of dance that one performs alone in a club. Im not certain that it can even be classified, in the classic sense of the word, as dance; its more like a move within a dance. Something that precedes a spin and drop-down split.

I couldnt get over what I was witnessing. I nudged my friends, who looked over and chuckled before returning to their conversation. Not me, though. I decided to climb to the balcony overlooking the dance floor so I could look down on this mysterious moonwalker. Round and round he went without stopping. After his third or fourth circumnavigation, my laughter petered out and something else started to emerge. The moonwalker didnt give a damn. Whoever was watching or whatever people thought had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

Why begin these letters to you with an anecdote about a stranger I witnessed moonwalking in a club twenty years ago? What possible connection does that experience have to race?

The simplest way I can put it is that at that point in my life I believed, whether or not I was ready to admit it to myself, that there was a single standard of the successful and therefore acceptable Black man, and either I met that standard or my life was a failure. A successful and acceptable Black man had a clean record, credentials from the most prestigious institutions that would have him, and a career in a field that white America held in high regard. He rose above his race, excelling without complaint or excuse. He spoke with perfect anglophone diction and dressed impeccably though conservatively. Most important, he was always on time.

But I knew another side of that Black man.

He was, also, trapped in a role he was assigned to play in order to survive and gain some measure of stature and stability in a hypercompetitive, hyper-individualistic society. He was my dad. He was so many of the Black men I grew up around. Collectively, they were my first heroes. I just couldnt live their Black lives. For them, succeeding in newly integrated America depended on their ability to swallow racial slights with a straight face and keep climbing the ladder. It hinged on how well they tempered their Black cultural identity and mimicked the white middle-class cultural norms that most workplaces rest upon. Whatever unconventional or nontraditional life paths they might have longed to pursue had to be surrendered for the more noble cause of advancing the race on white Americas timeline.

Witnessing this as a kid, I became resentful of the stirring sense that if I wanted any kind of respectable future, I had no choice but to fit into a Black-male mold meant to manage the anxieties of white people. Doing so would have been inauthentic to my experience inside white spaces, where, for better and worse, I had been reared since middle school. No one told my white male friends that they needed to be a credit to the race. They werent taught to code switch so they could assimilate and appear competent. Rather, they were groomed to govern, treated as individuals, and assured ever so subtly that they were the standard by which everyone else was measured. And because I was there as well, right beside them, I received the same education. Consequently, comporting myself to white Americas standards of success to advance the race did not appeal to me. It would have required me to repudiate a part of my experience, blot it out, which struck me as a most vicious act of self-betrayal, a twisted kind of self-hatred.

Selfishly, I couldnt go on harboring the resentment and rage inside. I was angry with my parents generation for settling for middle-class crumbs. Angry at my Black peers for not being angry enough. And angry with white people for comfortably and obliviously wielding dominion over it all as if it were an ordained right.

Even then I knew quite well that all of that anger would eventually poison my well. Id seen bitterness ruin Black lives. Seen it sprawled on street corners, slumped over bar counters, and strewn across the entire American landscape. I knew I needed to create my own Black life that included white people not just as coworkers I joked with superficially and neighbors I waved to but distrusted and kept my distance from. I needed to be able to hold white people close as fellow, flawed travelers on an imperfect journey toward justice and healing. One that I might not live long enough to see the end of. But for that to happen, I still had searching that I needed to do, questions I needed to answer, feelings I needed to reconcile. Maybe you can relate. Maybe, friend, at a similar age you also felt as if you had to make a choice between invention and convention, between hunkering down and remaining open despite the storms ahead. For me, the mysterious moonwalker became a liberation metaphor. At critical life junctures over the next twenty years, his image reemerged to guide me on my path into the unknown. Go. Live. Take the risk. Be bold. Make your own way. It will be okay. You will be okay.

The book you are holding is not a handbook on how to be anti-racist. That book exists. This is also not an attempt to exploit anyones pity or guilt. Nor do I want to call out, humiliate, or shame anyone. To be sure, I employ my personal and professional journey to illuminate and illustrate larger societal events and trends that have shaped a generations story. My journey has placed me in proximity to the criminal justice system, recent social-justice movements, the nonprofit industry, urban development, urban education, and workplace diversity and inclusion. I have thus spent my career thinking, reporting, writing, and otherwise working to reform the inequitable systems, practices, and policies that many of you, maybe for the first time, are encountering and grappling with as parts of a broader system that protects and exalts white advantage. In my experience, this inexperience has led my white friends and colleagues to often name problems and propose solutions for Black people without understanding context or appreciating the extent to which those views and solutions stem from an unexamined acceptance of certain truths about the society we inhabit.