On Systemic Racism and Rejecting White Supremacy

Note: This was originally a private post shared on Facebook on June 7, 2020. It has been edited slightly for this format.

Over the last week or two, I’ve been struck by a number of responses to the protests of Black Lives Matter movement, and the violence and looting that has occurred in some places—I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to respond to some of the things I’ve heard and seen—this is my attempt to do so.

I want to first acknowledge that I am approaching this topic as a relatively wealthy, cisgender, straight, white male living a life of relative safety and privilege. I have blind-spots and biases, some of which I recognize even though they still trip me up, and others I don’t. I also want to frame this by stating that I tend to interact with the world from a social learning perspective influenced by Gold’s contextual model of trauma and tinted by my Mormon experience, upbringing and heritage.

As I’ve been watching, reading, and interacting with people from all kinds of different backgrounds, I’ve heard things that I agree with, things I agree with, but think are a distraction from the current issues, things I disagree with, but can understand or empathize with, things I disagree with vehemently, and things that I think are downright hateful and harmful. I’ve poked, prodded, shared; I’ve even, I’m ashamed to admit, taken great pleasure in trolling.

But something kept nagging me about all the conversations I’ve been reading, something I couldn’t quite articulate—though I had a sense that it was on the tip of my tongue. And then this morning, I had an epiphany—stirred in part by a post by someone who disagrees with me, but who shared something I thought profound. I had a moment of clarity—remembered something I read in a book in a class nearly two decades ago—for those of you who understand Mormon parlance, I had a moment of inspiration.

Earlier this week I saw a video of author Kimberly Jones talking about the black experience in the United States and the social contract and how it’s been torn up by those now complaining about protests and riots. You likely saw at least a short clip on social media including her penultimate line, “They’re lucky black people are looking for equality and not revenge” . Stop right now and go watch the entire video on YouTube before you continue on. I’ve embedded it right here for your convenience.

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Watching Ms. Jones’ discussion of the Social Contract reminded me of something that Charles W. Mills wrote in his book, The Racial Contract . As I understand his premise, Mills argues that racism, rather than being an exception to the Social Contract, is fundamental to it. He says, “what has usually been taken (when it has been noticed at all) as the racist ‘exception’ has really been the rule” . This is what Jones is talking about when she uses the example of 400 rounds of Monopoly—racism is the rule.

Mills argues that the Racial Contract has its roots in the rise of Christianity and the developing distinction between believers and non-believers which, during the Enlightenment, transitioned into a distinction between Europeans and others such that,

‘Race’ gradually became the formal marker of this differentiated status, replacing the religious divide (whose disadvantage, after all, was that it could always be overcome through conversion). Thus a category crystallized over time in European thought to represent entities who are humanoid but not fully human…Influenced by the ancient Roman distinction between the civilized within and the barbarians outside the empire, the distinction between full and question-mark humans, Europeans set up a two-tiered moral code with one set of rules for whites and another for nonwhites .

While many of the written rules have been chipped away, this unwritten set of rules still remains, and “the thesis of European specialness and exceptionalism is still presupposed” in virtually every aspect of our culture. This is systemic racism. The “unwritten order of things” —a phrase my Mormon friends might more easily understand. These rules are so ingrained in our culture that white people, who have (hopefully!) never been explicitly taught this, know what calling the cops on black people will get them . As Mills says, far more eloquently,

Thus in the United States, from the epoch of slavery and jim crow to the modern period of formal liberty but continuing racism, the physical interactions between whites and blacks are carefully regulated by a shifting racial etiquette that is ultimately determined by the current form of the Racial Contract. In her study of how white women’s lives are shaped by race, Ruth Frankenburg describes the resulting ‘racial social geography,’ the personal ‘boundary maintenance’ that required that one ‘always maintained a separateness,’ a self-conscious ‘boundary demarcation of physical space.’ Conceptions of one’s white self map a micro geography of the acceptable routes through racial space of one’s own personal space. These traversals of space are imprinted with domination: prescribed postures of deference and submission for the black Other, the body language of nonuppitiness (no ‘reckless eyeballing’); traffic-codes of priority (‘my space can walk through yours and you must step aside’); unwritten rules for determining when to acknowledge the non-white presence and when not, dictating spaces of intimacy and distance, zones of comfort and discomfort (‘thus far and no farther’); and finally, of course, antimiscegenation laws and lynching to proscribe and punish the ultimate violation, the penetration of black into white spaces .

White people call the police on black people because we know what will happen. And we do. All of us. We do. We may pretend that we don’t—we may pretend that we “don’t see color,” we may pretend that we’re not racist—we might go to great lengths not to be overtly racist. But we know what will happen. In our gut. We know.

Watch anti-racism activist Jane Elliott talk about how ingrained it is into us .

Mills makes an important distinction between phenotypical or racial whiteness and “Whiteness as a politicoeconomic system committed to white supremacy” . He argues that this refutes Locke’s concept of tacit consent (as it relates to the Social Contract) and allows,

…a real choice for whites, although admittedly a difficult one. The rejection of the Racial Contract and the normed inequities of the white polity does not require one to leave the country but to speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract. So in this case, moral/political judgments about one’s ‘consent’ to the legitimacy of the political system and conclusions about one’s effectively having become a signatory to the ‘contract,’ are apropos—and so are judgments of one’s culpability. By unquestioningly ‘going along with things,’ by accepting all the privileges of whiteness with concomitant complicity in the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have consented to Whiteness .

We white people have to change the Contract. We have to change.

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