There are many reasons I often feel shame.

Sometimes I feel shame because I grew up in a poor white community and I now exist in a rich white community, and I feel self-conscious. I remember being five and holding an umbrella inside because my family's roof leaked so bad, and yet I also remember visiting a wealthy friend’s house for the first time four years ago, not truly belonging to it, and listening to my friend explain why a scarf was draped around the frame of a painting, "That's one of the scarves my dad got from the Dali Lama while in Nepal!" I itched my hands, a habit, nervous to look at it in fear it would somehow burst out in flames, and responded, "Oh. Neat!" It would take me two years in a new life surrounded by wealth to comprehend how neither my touch nor stare would destroy sacred, expensive things. I still feel uncomfortable in refined houses devoid of “clutter.”

Sometimes I feel shame when I think of how actual people go to get actual massages after a long day's work, and I'm so intrigued, because I'm thinking about how my mom’s hands would always be cracked and bleeding from how many dishes she'd washed, how many diapers she'd changed, how many things she’d clean. Growing up, I thought it was normal. Now, I say, "mom, why don't you try lotion? We can go buy some lotion!" And she just looks at me, smiles, and always says, "I've tried every type of lotion." And then her talking becomes rapid and she has to switch the topic. She never talks about her hands. She gets sad when she looks at them, I can tell. That's how much bleach she uses, trying to make things clean and orderly in her home. What reward? Deep bleeding cracks.

Sometimes I feel shame when a friend says, "all those racist assholes are killing the love in the world, what ignorant, hateful people. All flesh is alike." Yes, I agree to their last point, and that's why I want to object somehow to their first points, to say that everyone is a product of their environment, that everyone has many demons inside of them, and many angels, and the ones that come out are the ones our parents and opportunities coax out, but I don't. They wouldn't understand. They hadn't seen what I've seen. How could I tell them?

Sometimes I feel shame at dinner. I feel shame as I put my napkin in my lap, wondering why it's so incredibly necessary, a travesty to forget. A sit down dinner: a novel concept for many. Up until my run in with wealth at the mercy of kind and generous hands, when I left my family for boarding school at 15, I had only ever sat down for dinner with my mother and sister during Thanksgivings. Dinner every night, or most nights, together, an effort to come together and talk about the day, as my new friend’s families did, with cloth napkins and porcelain plates, how could one keep up? I feel shame missing my mom and sister, wishing I could instead be sitting with them having pointless conversations similar to those being had about wine, golf, tennis, unthankful children, thankful children, Tibetan sky burials, expensive old people, best places to travel, tribal facial paintings, which type of wine is better: cork or screw off?, moving to New Zealand to escape Trump’s fascist government, diving in Indonesia, etc., but of course the conversations would inevitably be of a different taste, and especially not the taste of: "All those racist assholes are killing the love is the world, what ignorant, hateful people. All flesh is alike."

I often feel shame because I am white, and there are so many racist white people, including many of the people I grew up around and some of my more distant family members, although they would deny such and prefer to call themselves "realists," and I wonder: are these my people? I used to think so, to feel so. I saw them do kind things, say things in terms that made our condition make sense; I bought in to a degree. And I bought out when I became educated and started reading more scholarly texts and interacting with a diverse number of people. I feel shame, because as a 19 year old female entering college as a first generation, I wonder: where do I come into the society where race does not matter in my mind but divides us in practice? How do I help, what does my white voice mean? How can I speak about racial justice when I am white, isolated from truly knowing what it’s like to feel the barbs of racism? What warrants me to speak? How can I understand? How do I insert myself into the conversation? I have been at a loss of knowing how I can make a difference or speak with understanding and credibility on topics regarding racial minorities.

Recently, however, in the shock of Trump’s election, I am just beginning to understand where I fit in and how my specific voice holds power. I am beginning to realize that my power comes in being honest to my own experience: that the shame that comes along with it is natural, and in many ways it fosters a unique perspective that can contribute to the coming together of many diverse human experiences. This article is what I can offer; it is an attempt to discuss what has left poor whites and African Americans so pinned against each other in our society.

On the winter Tuesday morning of December 13th, Elaine Brown, author of A Taste of Power, spoke in a small classroom at Colorado College about her involvement as the only chairwoman in the “notorious” Black Panther Party. I was present and eager to hear her speak, unaware that her message would inspire me to write this article and step into my role. It was clear from Brown’s tone and diction that she was an unequivocal, unapologetic, fiery speaker. I easily imagined her in the Black Panther Party of the 60s/70s questioning every aspect of elite white society and trying to protect African-American communities from police brutality.

Former Black Panther Leader Elaine Brown speaks at CC. Photo by Beau Carlborg[1]

When considering African American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article The Case For Reparations, society is reminded that with, “Two hundred fifty years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of separate but equal, thirty-five years of racist housing policy”^[2] it is no wonder why certain pocketed impoverished communities are angry, resentful, and (in the eyes of many whites) not helping their condition. When reading The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, society is reminded that during the reconstruction period after slavery was abolished, Black Codes were instituted “which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks—and eight [out of the nine southern] states [that instituted them] enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of county prisoners to plantation owners and private companies.”^[3] Society is reminded that the prison effectively became a new form of slavery. When reading Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis, society is reminded that “African Americans as a whole now represent the majority of state and federal prisons.”^[4]

To this last point, many who refute that the justice system is racialized ask, “could it be possible that there are higher levels of crime in African American communities than in white communities, so higher rates of African Americans in prison makes sense?” This question ignores historical context. In 1934, The Federal Housing Administration was created and instituted a system of redlining which prevented the intermingling of African American and white residents: because of this discrimination through the FHA, African Americans often bought homes not through mortgage but through a contract agreement. A contract agreement was a predatory agreement: “In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full. If [the buyer] missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his [...] down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.” Thus, “Contract sellers became rich. [African American communities] became... ghetto[s].”^[5]

So when the question is asked, “could it be possible that there is a higher level of crime in African American communities than in white communities, so higher rates of African Americans in prison makes sense?” the answer is that white society has created the resentment and violence that does exist in the ghetto. The intergenerational consequences of racism are massive.

After Elaine Brown’s speech, I was thinking of the violence in African American ghettos and how white society points to it and says, “This is why there is police brutality. THEY are shooting at each other and being brutal. What are WE whites supposed to do?” I asked Brown her thoughts on this standpoint and she responded, “The culture of violence is the culture that arises from poverty: angry at everyone and everything… I can shoot you because nothing matters… If I’m not expecting to live long, say my brothers only lived to early 20s, I’m probably not thinking too highly of other people either… it’s the culture of impoverished youth.”^[6] This may be hard to comprehend for those who've never faced anything even remotely comparable to this unavoidable notion of dying young and reacting to oppression through violence. So, as Brown compared, let’s say you are walking in the rain without a car, and you have some degree of resentment towards those in cars. One of the cars drives through a puddle and you get splashed. Man, you are angry now! They have something you don’t have, they have looked through you, and you’re mad.

Of course, there are outliers in this “culture of impoverished youth,” but the key is to remember the difference between a trend of a group and the outliers in the group. To point to those who rose from poverty and say, “There! Now everyone should be able to do it if one could do it!” fails to comprehend individual deviation of circumstance. This writing-off of a group because of the success of an individual or individuals who are outliers in the group can be considered a form of moral licensing, which, as described by journalist Allison Miller, “is a process through which people can do a virtuous thing, then use that one good deed to assure themselves that all future negative actions they may happen to perform will also count as good ones.”^[7] On a broader scale in a societal context, “America has elected a black president; therefore, America can’t be racist. That black person achieved great things, therefore society can’t be the problem; I can’t be the problem.”

Thus far, this article has been an attempt to communicate to those who do not connect racism and intergenerational consequences to the violence in African American communities that the media so vehemently highlights. I am trying to speak in a rhetoric that addresses claims of violence in African American communities as being inherent. To many, this is an absurd, outdated, and embarrassing claim belonging to the “stone age.” But, in reality, it is still a major argument in many circles. I grew up surrounded by this argument, and I feel a moral obligation to stand tall and correct it, to try and shake ‘my’ people awake, and I also feel a moral obligation to stand tall to my ‘new’ people and say: There is no enemy; there is only misunderstanding. I used to be the enemy of my current views. In this alone, there is hope, America. There is neither an intrinsic destiny nor an intrinsic hate. It is a lack of connection, and with a lack of connection, there is a lack of compassion. Our country, and the world at large, is suffering from an empathetic deficit. But in order to say this, to shake people awake, I have to speak in a rhetoric that allows multiple perspectives to connect. I can’t win converts from those who are already with me. I don’t want to cater to those who already agree with what I’m communicating; I want to explain reasoning on the argument basis of those who haven’t given much thought to my stance and, in this case, to African American history.

In Brown’s talk, she recalled, “There was a point where I was giving a speech about African-American history to a group of poor white males at a [...] university. The whole time they were looking at me as if they couldn’t be more disinterested. I thought to myself: Why am I here speaking to a whole bunch of white males?”^[8] To this, I asked Brown how important she thinks it is to speak to those who have different ideological standpoints. How does she go about communicating to those holding different paradigms that aren’t at first receptive to her? Her answer was surprising. “After I gave this speech, a boy stood up and asked, ‘I just don’t understand. I applied to Stanford and didn’t get in. This is because a black got the spot over me for being black. I could be in an ivy league right now. Is this fair?’ I said to him, ‘No. This is absolutely not fair.’” Brown continued to explain how affirmative action is not fair because the circumstances aren’t fair. It is a form of equity, but Brown’s point went deeper than this. The student who had asked her this question had failed to see that the system had failed them both, it wasn’t African Americans who had failed them:

Oppressed white groups [in terms of socioeconomic class] assert strength over and blame their condition on oppressed minority groups. They are convinced that being white guarantees them something. For example, a factory worker is told by the corporate power, ‘we’ll give you jobs, not blacks.’ This preferential treatment is given because the unity amongst oppressed classes would mean the end of corporate power.^[9]

In other words, the poor white student had failed to see that he was not oppressed by affirmative action; this is merely a form of reparations, but by elite white society that doesn’t promote equality for all. The student viewed equality as limited: for whites or African Americans instead of whites and African Americans.

In the United States, the corporate framework of our nation has instituted this trend. Because our country reached prosperity as a slave nation along racial lines, differences amongst humans in terms of race in the U.S. were instituted. Differences were not intrinsically pre-existing but socially constructed. The planter elite feared that poor whites and African American slaves would band together to resist the powerful planting elite along class lines, so, to prevent such, society needed to institute even stronger differences along racial lines that would prevent “interracial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite.”^[10] This was a racial bribe: “Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves.”^[11] But it is important to note that “the racial bribe was primarily physiological.”^[12] In reality, “[white’s] own plight had not improved by much, but at least they were not slaves.^[13] The lowliest white person at least possessed his or her white skin, a badge of superiority over even the most skilled slave or prosperous free African American.”^[14] Martin Luther King noticed this phenomenon at the end of his career and began focusing his efforts towards integration along class issues, “planning to descend Washington with an army of poor to shake the foundations of the power structure and force the government to respond to the needs of the ignored underclass.”^[15]

“Othering” people, putting them in one category and us in another along racial lines, has been a political tactic since the beginning of slavery, and it exists today and has been a major factor in determining demographics in the Republican and Democratic Parties. Starting with Nixon’s platform, the appeal to the anti-black voter, and this appeal’s success in gaining votes, brought out this trend: if the Republican Party could win over the anti-black voter, it could gain more poor, white votes, and “this would drive into the Republican Party precisely the kind of anti-negro whites who would] help constitute the emerging majority.”^[16] The Republican Party began to paint the poor in shades of division: “Competing images of the poor as ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ became central components of the debate… the racialized nature of this imagery became a crucial resource for conservatives who succeeded in using a law and order rhetoric in their effort to mobilize the resentment of white working-class voters.”^[17]

It is of importance to note that it was mainly affluent white liberals who championed civil rights for minorities, but they, of course, didn’t have to worry about competing for jobs with African-Americans as poor whites did. It was because of this that liberals became painted as “out of touch with ordinary working people” and “largely immune to the costs of implementing minority claims,” and these claims are not inaccurate. However, is the conservative platform anymore in touch with the needs of the working class? Regardless, conservatives were able to “persuade poor and working class voters to join in alliance with corporate interests and the conservative elite.”^[18]

Given this context of “othering,” the election of Donald Trump now seems predictable and inevitable. One of Trump’s main platforms was his Mexican Immigration Policy. Build a wall. Keep THEM out. THEY take jobs. The poor white following that Trump had acquired, however, seemed entirely contradictory. Here was a rich, white male who understood little to nothing about the plight of the poor white worker. In fact, as a corporate head, he benefits from lower pay and fewer benefits to the working class. The Democratic Party, by comparison, has its platform resting on helping the poor and working class. So why would someone ever vote contrary to their economic interests? It’s because the oppressed whites in our society (in socioeconomic terms) are conditioned to believe that any amount of their success is a competition among immigrants, minorities, and “others,” and that liberals are out of touch with this reality. As The New Jim Crow notes, “following the collapse of each system of [racial] control– there has been a period of confusion–transition–in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals… It is during this period of uncertainty that backlash intensifies and a new form of racialized social control begins to take hold.”^[19] It can be argued that this is what has happened with the election of Trump after having an African American president; Trump championed how he would help the working class by kicking out illegal Mexican refugees and requiring legal Mexican-Americans to provide proof of citizenship on their persons.

When I asked Brown how she thought this “othering” played out in Trump’s election, she responded:

The saddest thing is that I tried to talk to poor white people. I tried to talk to poor white people in Chicago. These people want jobs, family, and a life. Everybody does. I say to them: You have to know, we–and when I say we I mean minorities–can’t be your enemy because we’re not in a position to change anything in our country. It’s impossible because we have no power over your condition. Look into how this has happened. Why are you poor? Have an understanding that this is a result of a social construct. Every one of us oppressed is in the same boat.^[20]

Our society fails to see that the elitist structure of our society has constructed this competition among the oppressed, afraid to have mass wealth toppled and all of the underclass comfortable. It is incredibly easy to forget historical context. It is incredibly easy to ignore the history that lends testament to Mexican immigrants, that “In 1846, the U.S. incited Mexico to war. U.S. troops invaded and occupied Mexico, forcing her to give up almost half of her nation, what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California” and that “restitution, to this day, has never been made.”^[21] It is easy to not question the role the United States has had in making Mexico what it is today, a place where illegal immigrants (no: refugees) flee back to the land that was once theirs. It is easy to ignore the intergenerational effects of slavery, Jim Crow, Black Codes, racism, housing discrimination, but where does this get us? It gets us to the idea of them, of the other, when in reality we are one sacred flesh. We remember this, our sacred flesh, when we give ourselves the historical contexts when reading texts like The New Jim Crow, Borderlands, Are Prisons Obsolete, History and You, and The Case For Reparations. We must listen to people, like Elaine Brown, tell their stories, and we must be honest to our own stories. We must find a way to integrate our individual experiences and add to the global archive of empathy. We must begin to admit, and be humbled by, where our experiences come to an end. We must find a path, the way true to all of us, to become less the other so we can come together.

If the world was simple, we could divide it in terms of good people and bad people, but the reality of it is that the black and white world does not exist. There was a ten-year-old racist brewing in me, grabbing on to anything that made me feel secure or superior, justified, but look at me now. There is an inner fight brewing in all of us; it starts at the beginning, and it is between the intrinsic love in our hearts and the fear socially accepted constructs carve into us. But you and I? I refuse to believe that we came from anything but a mutual love; so whatever we have become, I have hope that we can remember the love we have written between us.

Our path is love.

"Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love."

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Footnotes:

[1] Beau Carlborg. Former Black Panther Leader Elaine Brown speaks at CC. Digital image. The Catalyst. December 17,

2016. Accessed December 23, 2016. http://catalystnewspaper.com/archive/elaine-brown-discusses-black-activism-oppression/.

[2] Ta-Nehisi Coates, . "The Case For Reparations." The Atlantic. October 4, 2014. Accessed December 20, 2016.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.

[3]Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press,

2010. 28.

[4] Angela Y. Davis. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Elaine Brown. "Black Panther Party." Lecture, Black Panther Party: A Taste of Power, Slocum Commons, Colorado Springs, December 13, 2016.

[7] Allison Miller. "History and You | Allison Miller." The Baffler. October 03, 2016. Accessed December

22, 2016. http://thebaffler.com/blog/gladwell-podcast-miller.

[8] Brown. "Black Panther Party."

[9] Ibid.

[10] Alexander. The New Jim Crow. 34.

[11] Ibid. 25.

[12] Ibid. 35.

[13] Ibid. 25.

[14] Ibid. 27.

[15] Ibid. 39.

[16] Ibid. 44-45.

[17] Ibid. 46.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid. 21.

[20] Brown. Black Panther Party.

[21] Gloria Anzaldua. Borderlands La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. 29.