Immediately after the George Floyd video went viral, we reached a clear national consensus that changes to policing were appropriate and necessary. Most people were interested in understanding the problems unique to black people and looking at what can be done to address them.
But now it’s been impossible to make any progress on the issue because the proposals have been either ridiculous (defund the police), vague or, quite frankly, meaningless.
Look at this one put forth by Elie Mystal, a Harvard-educated black writer at the liberal Nation magazine, who wrote on June 3 that he’s “in a rage almost all the time” living under white supremacy. “If white people want to help, they can do what I do, and go fight the racists. Fight them in public, where everybody can see you. Fight them in private, where nobody can see you. Fight them at parties where I ain’t invited. Fight them every day, at all times, everywhere.”
OK, but what does that mean? Is little blonde Becky’s confrontation with a “racist” she identified at brunch going to solve or affect in any way the “systemic racism” we’re supposed to be addressing?
Let’s check out Detroit-based political commentator Karen Dumas, who wrote on June 1 about what “role” white people should play in the Black Lives Matter movement. She proposes that whites “own up to a legacy of discrimination sustained by a structure that continues to disproportionately benefit them” and that they “respect black people enough to recognize that regardless of their level of sympathy, promoted compassion and cultural appropriation, they will never know what it is like to be black in America.”
Additionally, white Americans “must ask the hard questions and be ready for candid and painful answers. They must look in the mirror and at their counterparts and acknowledge their contributions to sustaining these injustices, and then be willing to change them even if it upsets the status quo.”
What would it mean to upset the status quo? We don’t know. After all the mirror-looking and question-asking, is there a single practical thing that can be done? The only actual, tangible action Dumas recommends is for whites to “reserve your 911 calls for true emergencies, and not your insecurities.” That’s fair, although there are already laws against false reports, and they are, thankfully, enforced.
Dana Brownlee, a black contributor to Forbes, actually wrote out 10 “actions” that she said white people could take to promote racial equality in working environments — not necessarily legal or political acts, but things people can do to create more personal connections, such as “get to know more people of color” and “join a diversity committee” and “talk to your kids about race.”
Yet these are precisely the kinds of actions that the more aggressive voices in the Black Lives Matter movement are rejecting on the grounds that they’re “performative” rather than fundamentally transformative — and yes, they really are looking for a transformation.
For example, New York Times writer Erin Aubry Kaplan wrote Monday that to speak out or adjust individual behavior is inadequate. “Being truly antiracist,” she said, “will require white people to be inconvenienced by new policies and practices, legal and social, that affect everything in everyone’s daily lives, from jobs to arts and publishing.”
Kaplan didn’t identify any specifics in her piece, although Nikole Hannah-Jones, another writer at the New York Times, has said that there needs to be an “economic agenda” to address racial inequality and that it would “have to include reparations” for the descendants of slaves.
But there’s not a single person in America who has put forth a plan for reparations that makes sense to enough people to ever pass on a national level. Hannah-Jones certainly hasn’t done it.
We’re left then with a problem that has no articulated or agreed-upon solution even among the very people who see themselves as the victims of that problem.
What do black people want? When they have an answer, everyone has shown they’re willing to listen. Until then, the anger is aimless.
