Spaulding agreed. She said if you ask someone what their doctor looks like or what the background of their real estate agent is, or their neighbors, they might begin to see that “all of the people that they are in a genuine relationship with on a day-to-day basis are white people. That is enshrining a world of whiteness that allows for the institutionalization of white power.”
It’s a view that holds white people accountable, even for the passive ways they contribute to the status quo.
In her video response, Spaulding indicted white America “for not listening to Black people, for not heeding what we have been telling you. For years and years, we have been showing you how democracy is failing because of racism and how embedded it is in every structure and institution. You need to own it and deal with it and deal with it quickly because we will not have a country. If you do not get it together, white America, because this is what happens when chickens seriously come home to roost.”
Though the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain sparked Black Lives Matter protests that gained momentum and moved the conversation more into the mainstream over the past year, both Spaulding and Saxman agreed, we will only come closer to justice if white people take action.
Saxman said that “if white folks want to reject what they heard in what Stephany shared, if they want to distance it, if they intellectualize it,” then we won’t be able to get rid of white supremacy in the United States.
On top of that, Spaulding believes we need an official national effort to this end. She founded a group called Truth and Conciliation, which calls for a federal commission.
Her word choice of ‘conciliation’ — over ‘reconciliation’ — was purposeful.
“A lot of my white colleagues, allies, and friends want to move to reconciliation,” she said. “But reconciliation presupposes that there was an amicable agreement at the start. And there has never been in the history of what we now know as the United States through the age of colonization, there was never a place of agreement of racial harmony. So we cannot go back to that.”
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January 23, 2021 at 06:02PM
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Fighting Racism Often Starts With Accepting That America Is Not 'Better Than This' - Colorado Public Radio
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