Thread by @ThatShockratees

Racism is the iceberg of psychological illnesses. Dylann Roof was the peak that you can see. I'm having to take this story in small doses. Thought of Baldwin: "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
gq.com/story/dylann-r…

It's easy to see Roof as a lone diseased outlier. What's harder is to own that every subtle unacknowledged prejudiced impulse is part of the iceberg that killed 9 churchgoers. Racism killed them. Our society's iceberg of racism. Roof was the visible tip.
usatoday.com/story/money/bu…

As a white person, if I am not interrogating racism and standing up against it everywhere I find it, in myself and in others, no matter how blameless its wielder might feel, I'm building the next Dylann Roof. It's a slow build timeline, but it's getting faster.

And us white folks have two choices about the purpose-built caste systems that camouflage racism and allow it to be passed off as "realism." Either dismantle it, or keep building it.
newjimcrow.com/about

So my heroes of the week are the white folks in the Philly Starbucks, who used their privilege to stand up, speak up, and publicize one of the daily wrongs that forms the enormous hidden foundation of racism's iceberg.

Don't know who first said "Racism is America's original sin." But the Biblical view serves well. Original sin is conceived as a sin so deep and defining that it can only be wiped away by an extraordinary act of grace. America and its racism are interlocked that way.

There is no sudden moment where a person raised white in America becomes "not racist." No black friend immunity. No magic college class. It is the daily process of knowing we've been trained in a caste system, and we will always be part of it unless we expose and dismantle it.

I'm on various sides of intersecting privilege systems. As a lesbian cisgender woman, I use my experiences with anti-female systems and anti-LGBT systems to understand what my role should be. Hetero allies with privilege who supported us in the marriage battle taught me much.

Applying this to racism, I've become hyper-aware that many American white ppl have historically-ingrained beliefs in black and brown ppl as inferior, animalistic, and needing to be strictly controlled. BUT BUT BUT do not see these beliefs as "racism."

In this problematic view, which you'll see in the comments to any Philly Starbucks writeup, the cops "weren't racist" bc, e.g. 1) they were courteous, 2) they were just responding to a call, 3) the situation was consistent with their training.

And you'll see the view that "the manager wasn't racist" bc "Starbucks actually does have a rule that . . . ." blah blah blah. Kind of like the rule that you can't use or sell illegal drugs. But magically, police don't ever go stop-and-frisking through white neighborhoods.

The racism here worked like the racism in mass incarceration: you have a "rule" that is nominally color-blind, but you only ever enforce it when a black person violates it. This is why seeing one's own white privilege is so important.

I have used drugs many times, but no law enforcement officer ever frisked me or swept my neighborhood. They do those acts against the people they ALREADY BELIEVE need to be carefully controlled with jail. Not against white ppl.

Imagine if a drug sweep were conducted on Wall Street! Or in any white shoe law firm! Do you fucking know how much COCAINE they would find! Yet that doesn't fit the purpose for which mass incarceration drug laws were designed.

And if every Starbucks did a similar sweep for every person who sat at a table or used a restroom without ordering, half the white ppl would be arrested. But since there's no word about color or race in the text of the rule, we can pretend (if we wish) that no racism happened.

(Yes. I just finished "The New Jim Crow")

So we know with certainty that if that Starbucks manager had interrogated his own racist lens when making that call, he wouldn't have. He's been trained from birth to see black men as threatening, even if they're behaving exactly the same as twenty white ppl in same room.

And I can't stop thinking, in the GQ story, about how Roof's father insisted "he wasn't raised that way," over and over, and yet released his two Rottweilers to follow the mild-mannered black woman who interviewed him out of the yard.