White Liberals and Race, Again

Once again, a huge problem with our racial issues in this country comes from white liberals. The former mayor of Minneapolis, Betsy Hodges, had a pretty brave op-ed about her experiences in office with white liberals a week or so ago. It’s very much worth excerpting here:

As the mayor of Minneapolis from 2014 to 2018, as a Minneapolis City Council member from 2006 until 2014 and as a white Democrat, I can say this: White liberals, despite believing we are saying and doing the right things, have resisted the systemic changes our cities have needed for decades. We have mostly settled for illusions of change, like testing pilot programs and funding volunteer opportunities.

These efforts make us feel better about racism, but fundamentally change little for the communities of color whose disadvantages often come from the hoarding of advantage by mostly white neighborhoods.

In Minneapolis, the white liberals I represented as a Council member and mayor were very supportive of summer jobs programs that benefited young people of color. I also saw them fight every proposal to fundamentally change how we provide education to those same young people. They applauded restoring funding for the rental assistance hotline. They also signed petitions and brought lawsuits against sweeping reform to zoning laws that would promote housing affordability and integration.

Nowhere is this dynamic of preserving white comfort at the expense of others more visible than in policing. Whether we know it or not, white liberal people in blue cities implicitly ask police officers to politely stand guard in predominantly white parts of town (where the downside of bad policing is usually inconvenience) and to aggressively patrol the parts of town where people of color live — where the consequences of bad policing are fear, violent abuse, mass incarceration and, far too often, death.

Underlying these requests are the flawed beliefs that aggressive patrolling of Black communities provides a wall of protection around white people and our property.

Police officers understand the dynamic well. We give them lethal tools and a lot of leeway to keep our parts of town safe (a mandate implicitly understood to be “safe from people of color.”) That leeway attracts people who want to misuse it.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

The problem with police violence is not primarily the unions. It’s that whites–including white liberals–are basically fine with cops beating and killing Black people, or at least have long succumbed to War on Crime rhetoric that Bill Clinton so effectively used to rise to power. We already know plenty about NIMBYism and our urban crisis. Whites say they want equal education for people of color, but even the liberal ones won’t do a damn thing about it except vote for Democrats, which as Hodges knows, is not an answer at all. After all, little Maddie and Connor deserve THE BEST, which has all sorts of racial and class connotations.

The question in the post-George Floyd murder moment for all of us is this–How has this changed your behavior and actions? At least from what I can tell in my posts on white liberals and race, the murder of Black citizens and the broad-based protests for Black rights have changed not a single position in terms of the race-based justifications for education decisions. So I guess that’s my question. What are you going to do about it that you haven’t before, because what you have done, in most cases, isn’t sufficient to create change. And that very much includes voting for Democrats, which is necessary but absolutely minimal and something that takes no effort. Let’s go back to Hodges to close this out:

Whatever the result, a sustainable transformation of policing will require that white people of means disinvest in the comfort of our status quo.

It will require support of policy changes that cities led by white liberals are currently using the blunt instrument of policing to address. It will mean organizing for structural changes that wealthy and middle-class whites have long feared — like creating school systems that truly give all children a chance, providing health care for everyone that isn’t tied to employment, reconfiguring police unions and instituting public safety protocols that don’t simply prioritize protecting white property and lives.

On the other side of these different choices is a better world for everyone, including us. For generations, white people have been trading genuine connectedness in the human family for the poor substitute of property values and perceived superiority. Some may think we have a lot to lose. But racial equity wouldn’t be a loss for us. It would be a reclamation of our humanity.

White people, we are capable of accepting the invitation this moment has given us. If we find ways to make our actions match our beliefs this time around, the country will be far better off, and so will we.

That’s right–it takes active disinvestment in white privilege. I’m working with my union to come up with concrete demands for our campus that go beyond just words of support. That first requires listening to people of color and then not getting defensive when that might affect you. I’d like to see the university engage in at least a year of only hiring people of color, or at least creating positions where that is the likely scenario since you can’t actually say that. But in any case, the first step is to listen to (or read) the agenda of Black and Native and Latino leaders and then support that agenda around housing, around education, around prisons, around policing, around jobs.