Facing White Fears of Blackness and Taking Action to End White Supremacy

[KamaAina]

http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/08/michael-brown-and-ferguson/

But first, let’s be honest with each other: White fear of Blackness isn’t just something that racist extremists experience. It’s a core part of white consciousness and how structural violence and inequality are maintained.

I remember a few years ago, opening my front door and seeing five unfamiliar Black teenage boys on and around my front porch. With my baby in my arm, my initial reaction was fear – fear that these teenage boys would reenact countless scenes of racialized crime and violence that I’ve consumed since I was a little kid.

It’s not the kind of experience someone who has been doing anti-racist work for 25 years likes to admit having, but this isn’t a time for false pretenses to protect our egos. This is a time for white people to recognize that our irrational fears of Blackness are the result of the logics of white supremacy, which are intended to concentrate power into the hands of the few by creating and maintaining structural violence and inequality.

Throughout my life, I have routinely experienced fear of Blackness, particularly working class and poor Black men, as it has been intimately and relentlessly weaved into my subconscious through images, everywhere, of dark-skinned people doing bad things to light-skinned people, and in my consciousness through political, economic, and cultural attacks, everywhere, on Black communities.

[upaloopa]

1. As a white male I agree with this.

I don't like that at times I have fear when in certain situations but it is there. It isn't in every case but in some. I catch myself and can admit to myself I have no real reason to feel that way but at times it is there.

[KamaAina]

3. What?!

[OneGrassRoot]

4. While her experience is not mine at all...

and so I can't relate to this fear, I very much appreciate that more voices are speaking up in the hopes of shaking white people out of their complacency and/or complicity.

K&R

[rjj621]

5. I occasionally have the same problem

and I've never denied it. When I was a teen in Virginia Beach I received many beatings by several black teens in groups because I was white and alone, essentially an easy target for thuggery. Here outside of DC in my 20s I experienced the same thing, on two occasions being threatened on a bus because I looked over at a black guy who was with his friends, being loud and belligerent regarding white people on the bus and then I was followed off the bus and attacked at my stop. My discomfort is a result of confrontations in my past, now, sadly I expect trouble.