Look, white people are racist.  All of us.  We can’t help it.  It’s really not even our fault anymore.  I certainly didn’t ask for five hundred years of colonialist schadenfreude to give me a head start and a shitty attitude toward anyone brown, but even though my parents were dedicated to teaching a belief in equality in our home, the environment of white supremacy is so pervasive that I still have to silence the remaining tinge of self-awareness that sees black and brown people as a threat, or even as slightly less.  In my deepest, darkest places, I’m conditioned to dread my daughter falling in love with a black guy.  There are other things, some involving ATMs after dark.

It’s not even just racism.  I still attribute gender roles in gay relationships to personality attributes, even as I know that’s a pretty gross assumption, and none of my business, besides.  I still call women crazy and emotional in my head.  And the reality of transgender identity issues is something I accept on faith and by testimony.  I simply don’t have a clear perception of the issues, on my own, so I seek and keep the counsel of people I trust to know better than me.

Truth is, my instinct is to be a horrible person.  I don’t think it’s genetic, but tribal knowledge can be a heredity all its own.

White people, we have to be honest about it.  The world was built for us, by people who exploited other people to build it.  Most of the things we know are lies.  Capitalism defeated communism largely because we got almost five hundred years of free labor, and they only got about 75.  A huge amount of generational wealth belongs to white people not because we earned it, but because we invented the idea of ownership and promptly claimed we owned everything.  Things like Nazi Germany simply represent periods of intense regional flare-ups – white people have been on a rampage since the fall of Rome.  We could cut all the bullshit tomorrow and coast on top for a hundred years, easy, just like America coasted on a slavery economy ’til 1980ish.  The Soviet Union was dangerous, but fear of communism isn’t a reason to behave like fascists.  You’ve been lied to a lot, and mostly because the people who decide what you’re taught have an interest in the status quo ante.

But I feel like I should say that it’s probably not your fault, either.  Nobody’s asking you to feel guilty.  No, you didn’t own slaves, and never would.  And you really don’t want to march on the world, as much as it feels like the end to your frustration.  But it’s your responsibility to do exactly what I suggest: cut the bullshit.

Seriously.

Let me give you an example of bullshit:

I think of this as my own editorial column, like the Op-Ed pages I used to read when newspapers weren’t Gannett ad circulars.  And most of these columns are spurred by a confluence of a public event and a private conversation – the ideas grow out of things I discuss with my friends.  And the other day, my friend Mike..  I’m not sure how much he wants to be identified here, so Mike it is.  Anyway, we were messaging about things that helped us start to wake up about race in America.  Mike is what I’d call a pragmatic, modern conservative – a guy who believes in conservative principles, but doesn’t necessarily agree with how they’re being applied, and has practical stances about things like the drug war, abortion and LGBTQ issues.  Genuinely believes in equal rights.

Mike texts me, “Did I ever tell you about when I got pulled over at UK in a car with three black guys?”

No.  You didn’t.  This I have to hear.

So this is the text I got from Mike, lightly edited for publication:

When I was down at UK, I was in the freshman dorm male dorm, Haggin Hall. My neighbors were two guys pledging Alpha, and at the time I was pledging Lamda Chi.  We kinda hit it off and they even introduced me to my first girlfriend down there, a girl they knew from their sister sorority.  That fell apart because her sorority didn’t like her dating a “cracker”.  True story.  

But I digress.  So, me and my neighbors and another dude were driving in Lexington when this happened.  We were coming back from a house party they took me to.  My buddy was driving an older model BMW.  His parents were both doctors.  Cop pulls us over for “failure to come to a complete stop”.  You know the drill.  When he comes to the window, he shines his flashlight in the car, sees me in the back seat and asks “Sir, are you OK?”  I ask him why wouldn’t I be, to which my neighbor’s friend in the back elbows me and gives me the knock it off eyes.  After my friend gets the citation and we pull off, my friends told me that the shit I can get away with isn’t the same as the shit they can get away with, period.  Shit was eye opening, man.

Eye opening, like a three-punch combo.  The left jab when you realize that black kids know white cops hold them to a higher standard, one that denies them the benefit of any doubt.  Another jab when you see that they’re right.  Right jab when you realize your privilege, that a cop’s default is to protect you.  Then the haymaker comes when you realize your friend sees your privilege from the other side, and he already knew what you just learned.

I’ll be honest, I was already writing this column when Mike told me that.  I was contemplating the casual, sincerely unknowing racism of our Governor, Matt Bevin.  Please believe me when I say that I genuinely believe, as a recovering racist, that Matt Bevin has no idea he is racist.  White privilege, in his case, is so strong that he’s never had to be aware of his own racism, and will likely never be.  I’m sure he believes that black men learn to play chess in prison, something I once believed.  That’s what popular culture teaches us.  I’m sure he believes in the summary of West Louisville that he gets from crime reports and the evening news.

Why would Matt Bevin know anything about West Louisville?  He’s never had to go there.  He has the privilege of not knowing.  This isn’t about geography or stereotypes.  It’s about the privilege that denies him the truth.  He’s never had to learn the truth.  Hell, he visited the West Louisville Chess Club on the east side.  Didn’t go to their place.

So I asked my friends.  What do you think of when you think of West Louisville?  And I got a lot of beautiful answers.  Shawnee Park.  Neighborhood corner stores.  People sitting on porches, waving to each other.  Block parties. The same thing that’s in every other damn neighborhood.  People looking out for each others’ kids.  Schools, restaurants, hangouts.  When I delivered mail in the west end, the customers donated so many non perishable food items on Dare to Care day it filled my postal truck up completely.  Folks living life.

And one more, from April, whose background is a lot like mine, just a working-class kid:

I really can’t say anything because I’ve never been past 18th Street & Broadway.  And I only went there because there was a pawnshop that had a pair of shoes I wanted.  Growing up I was always told that I had no business being in the West End. And I’ve never had any friends who lived there so I never had any reason to go.

First, shout out to Uncle Dan’s for carrying the fresh Nikes before it was a thing.  That place was an institution, the kind of urban place that’s a pawnshop, a corner store, and a place to get fitted up for Friday night.  I think there was even a barbershop next door.

Anyway, I think probably Matt Bevin grew up in a family that said things like April heard.  I don’t have any business there, and I’ve never had a friend who lived there.

I was lucky.  My grandfather made his living in the West End.  Okay.  Confession time.  My Grandpa Druck had the coolest job in the entire world.  He was a distributor for a local bakery – he drove the truck that supplied the cookies.  He was independent – his cookie truck was a one-man, one truck business where he bought cookies and other baked goods on the dock, and sold them to independent groceries, daycares, and other businesses that needed wholesale quantities of cookies.  He worked hard, but he seemed to love his job.  Everybody’s always happy to see the guy with a truck full of cookies, right?

I don’t want to saint the guy.  He said things that aren’t acceptable today.  No excuses.  But he didn’t hate anybody.  That’s just what he learned from the world around him.  Grandpa delivered to dozens of black and Middle Eastern-owned businesses in the West End.  I’d say it was the majority of his business.  He raised four kids in a nice suburban house, and was comfortable until he passed, and he never let anybody talk badly about the West End.  He would sit at the kitchen table at the old house on Bob White and do his business accounting by hand, the old-school way, and if you’d sit with him, he’d talk business.

He had this way of talking to you, with his left elbow on the table, pointing a crooked finger at you when he wanted to make a point.  And one of his favorite points was this: Boy, I made a lot of money in the West End.  You treat ’em fairly, and you’ll never have a more loyal friend, and you’ve got a customer for life.  As kids we’d occasionally get to ride on the cookie truck, on summer break, just to see what our grandpa did for a living.  I remember seeing my grandfather shake hands and do business with people of all races, in their spaces, people – including himself – just trying to make a living.  I saw how we’re all the same, even as we’re different, but more than that, people were never scary to me – nobody ever told me to be scared of ‘them.’

The difference between me and Matt Bevin is that my grandpa took me to the West End.  I never learned fear of other cultures.  I had a lot to learn about race, but I wasn’t afraid to go find out.  Wasn’t afraid to go to Central High School.  Wasn’t afraid to let the Middle East be the best part of my service.  Wasn’t afraid to make sincere, honest friends with black folks and Muslims and Hindus and people who were just plain different.  Not afraid to be honest about who I am.  I’m Tim and I was born in a world where racism is a stain to the core, and that includes me.

I don’t have to like it.  It bothers me that when I make a black friend, he can’t really trust me until he knows me better.  That’s not his fault either.  When you live in a world where people fear your skin color, you shouldn’t trust easily.  And even then, he has to account for that.  A number of years ago I spent a night carousing with a co-worker, guy named Leonard, and his girlfriend Tanika.  You’ll never get that story out of me in print, but that was the first time I’d ever been the only white guy in a black bar, among other experiences.  Eventually we ended up outside my apartment, and he was headed out.  And I genuinely didn’t realize why he was dropping me off early.

Hey man, it’s not about you.  You’re cool.  But we’re real with each other, right?  There are some places you can’t go with me.  Just like there are some places I can’t go with you.  That’s just how it is, man.

I shook the man’s hand, and got out of the car, a little more woke than before.

See, ultimately, it’s a matter of trust.  And it won’t get any better until we can trust each other.

That’s why white folks have to be honest about the world we built.  We built it for ourselves, and it’s our responsibility to fix it.  You want peace?  Treat ’em fairly and you’ll never have a more loyal friend.  Honesty means confronting all of it, from the violence of slavery to the destructive power of Jim Crow, to the attitudes you’re ashamed to talk about.  You have to confront police bias and lending bias and housing bias, and you have to confront a Governor and any other leader who thinks things like chess and jobs and love are different on the other side of Ninth Street.  And you have to confront yourself, acknowledge your fears and be rational at an ATM or a swimming pool or when your daughter would like you to meet the straight-A, college-bound kid standing on your front walk, who’s terrified about something entirely more rational than you.  That requires a level of honesty that we can all work on.

Yes, Matt, ‘they’ play chess in the West End.  They do business and they laugh and they barbecue, and they live there, and not among us, because we made them.  I know you don’t want to be racist.  You’re a kind guy at heart – you adopted a bunch of kids because you have love to give, and some of them are black, if I understand correctly.  We fear each other, not intentionally but culturally.  Not individually, but as tribes.  Isn’t it time to fix that, starting with ourselves?  We are what we are, but that means we have to fix it.

What are you afraid of?