What White Folk Want
KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS.(Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, p. 196)
What do white folk want?
Rigid accountability for other people.
License for “me” (the white view of the world is rugged individualism masking white nationalism/supremacy).
And “whiteness” never to be named, never voiced—only allowed to be embedded as an understood in “human” (“There is only one race, the human race”) or “lives” (“All Lives Matter”).
This last point is vital for the first two, in fact, and appeared recently on a Twitter exchange:
Reich is recognized as a Democrat, a progressive or liberal associated with Bill Clinton.
Yet Reich offers what he intends as a racially woke Tweet, only to expose the power of whiteness not to be named. Reich, of course, means “Black people weren’t even considered people by white people on July 4, 1776,” but omits the white context because in the U.S. whiteness is a given.
Even or maybe especially to, as Martin Luther King Jr. described, the “white CONTINUE READING: What White Folk Want – radical eyes for equity
