This Is Not a Criticism of a Black Criticism

Issue 43

Apparently from a story on kqed.org titled, “The Last Black Man in San Francisco and His White Friend.”

Here is a dynamic in which I often find my Self: fully aligning politically with people/candidates/campaigns/organizations/movements who want what I want but who have very different ways of going about realizing it. For example, I want racial equity in America, but I cannot countenance being anti-anything or resisting what is or fighting with anyone as so many who also want racial equity insist on doing. I understand fully where “anti,” “resist,” and “fight” come from and I don’t judge any of it because judging is so old consciousness. I’m just on a different path.

Thus, what follows is not criticism of Michael Harriot’s view, as a Black man, of the behavior of white Americans since George Floyd was murdered one year ago. It is, rather, an informal comparison of our divergent paths up the mountain to the summit of racial equity. His is called It Turns Out, All Those Woke White Allies Were Lying. Mine is called what’s at the top of this page.

From where I sit, his path is well-worn, mine is not. His seems rife with familiarity, connection, and camaraderie. It has lots and lots of switchbacks with progress that often doesn’t always look or feel like progress. I’ve traveled it and know it well, but the one I’m on now seems more recently cleared. The mountain has been here all along, the summit of racial equity has been here all along, but this particular path is not (yet) well-known, not (yet) well-worn, and not (yet) trusted. I believe it is actually a smoother, shorter one with fewer switchbacks and more steep climbs along the way, but that’s just me.

I imagine him and me next to each other looking at the same data and circumstances. A Black American male and a white one. Of course, I would like for my perspective to be seen as more conscious human than white American, but that’s up to others to decide.

In his piece, Harriot responds to reporting by multiple sources of two facts:

1) white American support for the Black Lives Matter movement is actually lower today than it was before Floyd’s death and

2) corporations, writ large, pledged $50bn in support of racial equity last year while those same corporations, writ infinitesimal, have contributed $250k.

He calls white Americans and corporations liars. He leaves a “not all white people” crack open, but ’m not sure he’s convinced it isn’t me and all of us. Regardless, he also calls last year’s spike in white support of Black lives a fad.

I imagine him and me next to each other looking at the same data and circumstances. A Black American male and a white one. Of course, I would like for my perspective to be seen as more conscious human than white American, but that’s up to others to decide. Maybe we’re friends or maybe he’s a client. For sure, we are both eager to reach the summit of racial equity in America.

I get it about those statistics, I tell him. They’re painful. All that support seen by all the world, real and quantifiable, sustained for a moment then precipitously gone. Everything means what we make it mean and I understand to him it means white people and corporations are liars. (And worse?) It’s easy to see that through his eyes. Of course, I’d have to give my two cents that his judgments separate him from those former/potential/fake/future allies and thus could stymie forward progress, but I’m not here to convince him of anything and I’m pretty sure separate from them is exactly what he wants anyway.

I do tell him, with confidence, that soaring highs and devastating lows are a feature, not a bug, of the human pursuit of higher consciousness. I’ve had my share of personal experience with how that feels and I’d be surprised if we didn’t connect there fairly easily.

He’s talking about humans, but I prefer to talk about humanity. I prefer a wider lens from higher up through which we see can see humanity down there actually changing its consciousness. I see yet another Black man die at the hands of the police in a society where that has happened myriad times but this time, for the first time, an entirely new energy envelops the event. American humans are behaving differently! Some are doing so consciously, on purpose, while others seemingly just got caught up in the excitement. (You know, like the insurrectionists on January 6 who weren’t really insurrectionists or didn’t really care about the former president or who were just tourists who got caught up in the vibe.) I tell him that my path as a conscious politics practitioner insists that I celebrate and magnify that “spike” as evidence that what I want is in motion and to generate more of it. It’s my choice to believe that and whether it’s my whiteness, my consciousness, or both that has me there, there I am.

I would also have to, have to ask him if there was anything particularly familiar or chronic about this whole thing for him. For it’s true of all of us all day every day that we are not experiencing anything that is old and familiar without a well-entrenched set of beliefs about who we are, how things work, and what’s possible. If he were game, I know there’d be a lot of juice to explore right there.

For good measure, I’d be compelled to engage him in a little shared conversation about that thing we’re both wanting — that desire we have — for what it’s like to live in racially equitable America. Intentions, I insinuate, matter. Maybe we’d hit it off and have a good ‘ole time. Maybe I’d piss him off. Maybe he’d convince me to take his path (nah), maybe I’d inspire him to take mine, though I’m happy just to be able to let him know mine exists. Regardless, I’m pretty sure we could, at a minimum, agree on some public shaming of every one of those companies that promised what they did and then reneged. Paths could converge.

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