IC Bailey - Conversations with White People: Dialogues About Race

IC Bailey

Photos by Ian Frank

Discovering Diversity Publishing

in association with

In Their Words Press

TORONTO, CANADA

DISCOVERING DIVERSITY PUBLISHING

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

in association with

IN THEIR WORDS PRESS

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Copyright 2019 by IC Bailey

Thank you for buying an authorized version of this book and respecting copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without written permission.

All opinions shared by the commentors in this book are their own. They do not represent the opinions or beliefs of the author or publisher, unless otherwise stated.

Printed in Canada

First Printing, 2019

ISBN 9781773530390 (paperback)

ISBN 9781773530406 (ebook)

Every effort has been made to provide accurate references, internet addresses, and other information at the time of publication. Neither the author nor the publisher assume any responsibility for errors or changes that occur after publication. In addition, the publisher does not have any control over, and assumes no responsibility for, authors or third-party websites or their content.

To Carmen, my mother

To Mazelyn, my mother

To Eunice, my mother

To Shirley, my mother

To Hazel, my mother

Sophia, my heartbeat

To Haille, my prince

To Melissa and Ebony, my sisters

To my unknown father

To Pastors Miller, Honeyghan, and Clarke(s)

To the God of my understanding, thank you

Almost none of the concepts, principles, ideas, or inspirations in this book were created by me. I have been blessed to hear the voices of those who came before me. I hold dear and credit those of you who have struggled for the empowerment of Black persons. I celebrate all you who struggle to end the scourge of white supremacy, which has obliterated the lives of Black people and threatens the lives of all people on the planet.

Black women committed themselves to this project with great sacrifice. While surviving the tapestry of racism and white supremacy, they gave their health, well-being, family time, and self-care to confront a tide of oppression which has damaged Black lives for the last 400 years. In this, they are the true heroes of this work!

To Monique, Sheena, Fatima, Annalissia, Talisea, Zaneta, Vivian, Kaligirwa, LaMoi, Melinda, Anna, Alteena, Fardosa, Brandi, Brittany, Omiroro, Mika,

Janessa, Nasheedah, Jessica, Carnice, Kylie, Nei Nei, Angel, Melissa, Dr. Forbes, Debowrah, Dee, Nzingha, Anna, Coyreec, Janessa, Joanna, Katrina, Tennille, Yvonnne, JJCJ, Tiffany Drake, Alexandra, Ivy, Ororo (Sasha): You are the light of our community. Brilliant and precious, your leadership is ageless.

To Prof. Glibert Morris (my big brain mentor), Blaize, Mansa (Adam), Kwanza, Moya, Faren, Ifo, Brian (DGM), Gaston, Geo, Philippe, Kwanze,

Jordan, Victor, Josh, Dexter, Dickson, Sosaia, and Tony Stone (the rock): Your encouragement and involvement was a source of strength!

My dear friend Ian Frank is the world-class, superhero photographer who sacrificed life, limb, and more to do the epic shit needed to capture the legendary photographs in places where having conversations with white people could cost you your life. When others are running away from danger, he is running towards it with a camera and a smile. See more of his work and learn more about him at http://www.thirdeyejourney.org.

Vilma, Maria-Victoria, Sharito, Terre, Yanitza, Trisha, Adria, and Kundun are powerful People of Color. Fighting their own battles, these magnificent people gave of themselves freely.

These white people gave effort, insight, self-awareness, and part of themselves in this project. They the example their kinfolk should follow: Ali, Rachel, Jessica, Alice, Eryn, Frederick (Prof. Cox), Darlene, Petra, Trista, Chris, Julie (JStarr), Darby (DMC), Tara Jean, Dr. Stephanie, Dr. Annette, Dana (Paladin), Kathy, Amiee, Patricia, Alexander (Brilliance), Duncan, Joel, Andrew, Ben, Nick, Brian (Rass), Adam (Adrat), Chris, and Stella.

I am grateful to the hundreds of people who generously gave their money so this work could come to print. Ubuntu.

Few subjects cause discourse to erupt like a powder keg set alight faster than white supremacy. Raise the subject online and watch a comment section become a battleground of emotion, recycled rhetoric, and repressed anger. Using their keyboards like cudgels, people metaphorically beat each other over the head with the same arguments they have heard repeated a hundred times, post links that affirm their biases or studies that have been purposefully misquoted to them by their chosen intellect du jour. These conversations (and I use the term loosely) become the battleground between people with centuries of repressed anger at having been colonized and oppressed, and others who stand on generations of privilege that was paid for by the blood, sweat, and tears of the colonized and oppressed.

White supremacist ideology is the social consequence of the European colonial enterprise and all of its externalities. The idea that there are innate positive qualities unique to whiteness (which itself is a construct of the colonial era) has underpinned the justification for some of the worst atrocities in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Consider this excerpt from Rudyard Kiplings White Mans Burden , a poem that both lionized the colonizer and infantilized the colonized:

Take up the White Mans burden

Send forth the best ye breed

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child...

The entire poem waxes poetic about the duty of whites to liberate the world from the darkness of its primitive heathen ignorance, which can only be illuminated by the good Christian light of Western (read: white) thought. The very definition of whiteness is exclusionary and designed to set those that fit the definition of that day above those that did not meet that definition. In the 20th Century, this manifested in the Jim Crow laws of the United States, which forced Black Americans (and other non-whites) to accept second class citizenship through underfunded schools, Whites Only facilities, laws that restricted voting, the practice of redlining, and many others.

This is not to say that those categorized as White are inherently genocidal, oppressive, and self-important, far from it. Instead, it is important to understand that the concept of a White identity was in fact born from that history and defined by the very people that carried out the atrocities in our history books. It is the genesis of the definition of whiteness and the externalities resulting from it that are the object of the ire of marginalized people. To be white is not to be a white supremacist, but white supremacy first requires a definition of whiteness as a foundation upon which to build its ideology. Whiteness defines itself as the absence of color; in the scope of this book, people not of accepted European descent. With whiteness comes access to a social hierarchy and system that upholds that distinction to the detriment of the excluded. This has manifested in slavery, the practice of redlining, gentrification, Jim Crow laws, anti-miscegenation laws, immigration quotas, reservations, residential schools, the internment and concentration camps of World War II, and even the burning of Black Wall Street in the 1920s to name a few of the atrocities used to maintain the power structure demanded by the concept of whiteness.