Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I grew up in the ’60s, in a very middle-class, very white enclave in Marin County, California. And I mean very white. Exceedingly white. Like, “I can count on one hand the number of black kids in my senior class and still have my thumb available to hitch a ride”, white. Everywhere I looked it was white, white, white.

My folks, bless ’em, were were what today we’d call “allies” in the Civil Rights movement. They worked phone banks, volunteered at organizations, and such. They tried to counter the incredible whiteness of our community and educate my siblings and me about the broader world. They socialized with black families, all us kids playing together. They talked to us about race issues. They tried to instill in us a sense of “color-blindness,” so we wouldn’t treat people of color differently than we would white folks. Seeing everyone as an equal, as a default, that was their goal.

I believe they were successful in that. All of us, my siblings and I, have endeavored to treat all people equally, and to disregard race, religion, disability, gender, orientation, or anything other than “the content of their character” when dealing with other people.

But it isn’t enough.

I mean, it’s a laudable goal, a utopic “end state” where everyone treats everyone else with mutual respect and dignity, but it isn’t enough. Not by a long shot.

The “color-blind” mentality ignores reality. It gives us an excuse to do the minimum and, worse, it justifies redefining the minimum as the maximum. Quotas intended to build racial diversity on college campuses, enterprise zones and using race as a criteria for awarding loans and contracts, anything designed to counter the existing racial inequality that has been baked into American society over centuries, all of these ideas can be tossed out, argued away, even deemed illegal by those who insist that adherence to “color-blind” policies is the most we can legitimately do.

Events of the past week (and months), however, have been stark enough to knock a lot of people out of their complacency, myself included. My “color-blind” attitudes are not enough. My rejection of racism is not enough.

It is time to be actively anti-racist.

And that means, first, I need to look in the mirror.
—What do I do that allows racism to exist?
—What don’t I do that allows the same?

Second, it means I need to feel uncomfortable, not out of guilt, but out of empathy.
I need to remove the barriers I’ve purposefully put up to shield myself from the ugliness that lies beneath the American patina. I need to get out of my smug, self-satisfied “color-blind” bubble and engage. I need to acknowledge and appreciate the things that black folks have to suffer every damned day—things that I will never have to suffer—and understand how those things change them, mark them, and mold their opinions of society, of whites, and of me. I need to do this because that discomfort, even though it is only a fraction of what people of color have to face, will spur me into greater action.

And we need action.

It’s not an answer. But I think it’s a start.

k