Apartheid In America: The Demon of White Privilege

We reap now our own desperate heritage as white people who have yet to come to terms with the darkness of our ancestors and our present self.

We need THE conversation to begin, which means white people talking to white people about their own racism. For, as with all remarkable change, once this conversation does begin, once the silence is broken between white people and they talk about racism to each other, and especially within their families, the demon of white privilege will lose its power, exponentially. It will never return to its old, crippling self. The illusions and delusions of white privilege, its travesty against all human beings, its tragic defilement of God’s light and love, will cease to be law in the land.

In Congress, inconceivably, the Junior Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, is stalling an anti-lynching bill. Inconceivable, one might think, that this bill making lynching a crime had not been passed generations before. Inconceivable even more that he is getting away with preventing this bill from becoming law the very week of the memorial service for George Floyd, whose lynching is one more example of the toxic but unofficial apartheid still corroding the foundation of these United States.

The unholy presence of apartheid for America began four hundred years ago with slavery. We all know this. We say the words with awareness. Or do we? No. If we are white, we say the words from a safe distance. We live our lives free of recognizing the immoral underbelly of darkness embedded in the American soul because of our history of oppressing another race. And no two ways about it, we are haunted by this, our collective nightmare, even as we let it happen.

Brave people have walked together across the nation and around the world to say NO to racism in the last weeks. In the millions. Many, many of them are white. This is a revolution of action and a revelation of what can be done — evidence of a deep caring for the well-being of anyone who experiences at all levels the suffering engendered by racism.

But millions of other white people are feeding themselves with false theories or indifference or, at worst, hatred. They are the ones who are the most afraid, for whom the nightmare is EQUALITY. They live with fear that their “enemy other” should thrive, that anyone who is not white should thrive.

Those who adhere to this way of being are more dead inside than they will ever be in the grave.

A charismatic leader who places the essential worth and good of the people as paramount will offer those same people another, better way of seeing themselves. This has a domino effect. But FEAR often rules whenever leadership is corrupted. The wrong leader can induce fear at great speed, capitalizing on its sources, promoting its corrosive effect. America faces this now, though not for the first time.

A single, ordinary individual can also step up with uncommon courage when leadership falters or absconds or abandons all justice and caring. We know this well in Gandhi, in Thoreau, in Rosa Parks, and in the incredible bravery of the young teenager who dared to stand her ground and film the lynching murder of George Floyd. These people and others like them have changed the world forever, by one action.

Alas, LYNCHING, which Rand Paul is preventing from being called out and defined as a crime in Congress, is a systematic form of unofficial apartheid that white people have never fully challenged. It has been used by white people to control black people as a form of social dominance in this country up to the present day. Lynching intensified after 1835 and became rabid and rampant in the Reconstruction era after the Civil War. It is being used now in law enforcement at the local and state and even federal level.

As an example, the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” unfortunately considered a classic, glorified both lynching and the Ku Klux Klan and received wild approval by white people. It had a showing in the White House with Woodrow Wilson.

“Lynching is a premeditated extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate a group.”

That mob violence was a successful attempt to establish a white supremacy, with lynchings increasing again dramatically in the 1920s and again after WWII, and such violence has reared its gruesome head for the last three and a half years in notable, highly visible ways, exploding before us with the death of George Floyd.

In the opening to Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune, the main character describes how “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” I think of this when I think of the courage it takes to bring oneself forward for what is right and just — to not stay silent. African Americans after the Civil War have not been passive during all the years of lethal hostility and the reality of lynching that have led up to the present time. They “resisted through protests, marches, lobbying Congress, writing of articles, rebuttals of so-called justifications of lynching, organizing women’s groups against lynching, and getting integrated groups against lynching.” They did so at a time when almost none of the white population supported them. It required a courage beyond measure, and the ability to go through fear and out the other side.

What we have seen now on the streets is the vocal and steady and brilliant response of a great diversity of people who have refused to stay silent, who have refused to give in to fear. These marchers have defied the haunted legacy of the nightmare, the one that whites have created and lived in for centuries out of a repulsive and monstrous belief in their own superiority — the demon of white privilege.

The last “recorded” lynching by hanging occurred in 1981, but again, lynching has encompassed more than a hangman’s rope. During this pandemic in 2020 a man rode up and “lynched” a dummy representing the Governor of Kentucky, Rand Paul’s home state, as a protest to something he saw as a significant threat. A hanging. Significant symbolically to the man who carried it out. And still the law against lynching is not yet passed by the Senate, is actually being argued.

Apartheid, some say, is not what has happened in America. Oh, yes, it is. As it was defined in South Africa until 1994, apartheid was the “rigid former policy of segregating and economically and politically oppressing the nonwhite population.” As it is now defined in the language, it is: “any system or practice that separates people according to color, ethnicity, caste.”

The United States has from its inception practiced a relentless position of political, social, and deliberate apartheid against the African Americans. Some events have been blazed before us recently as new awareness, such as the massacre of blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, with police cooperation, an atrocity which was not part of our school history books, and where the current president in the White House plans to campaign without regard to the fact that whites dropped bombs on black neighborhoods during that massacre. The examples are numbered beyond counting across 400 years. After Reconstruction the slave patrols, used to prevent runaways and revolts by slaves, became the work of local sheriffs against freed slaves in the South. Throughout our history, the police have favored white people. It is only in the last decade that some semblance of consciousness has begun to be raised to actually change this. Now, this week and last, of course, that practice is no secret. It has shaped a massive shift in the perception of white people, whether they have yet admitted it or not.

It is, however, so ironic that the U.S. initiated embargoes against South Africa challenging their official apartheid government when it was active, while allowing an unofficial sanctioning of the apartheid in its own land. The history of lynching described HERE makes it very clear. There is no doubt of the crimes against humanity in our centuries-long oppression of black Americans, or the ability of whites to stay silent about it. What is also interesting is that we have never been called to alter this on the world stage by the U.N. or any ally, despite the fact these crimes were and have been and are atrocities by any definition.

That itself compounds the crime, actually. Wherever such oppression is allowed to exist, by anyone who stays silent as well as by the persecutors, that is the nail in the coffin of the country, unless…

unless, once and for all, white people come to terms with their crimes of emotional and psychic and physical assault on other human beings…. unless white people find a way to let go of the toxic fear that consumes them and admit their unremitting violence is not a God-given right…. unless white people face their own darkness and choose to leave it and embrace the light of loving kindness, instead.

We may be at a turning point. We may be witnessing the death rolls of a dying paradigm. These are unusual times, more so than ever before in this country. It may be that people who think they are better than other people, superior to other people, like Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, will find themselves facing their own deep darkness at last and get to choose whether they want to stay in that darkness or instead, are willing to leave that abyss and embrace themselves as harbingers of what is good and healing for all of humanity.

White people cannot continue allowing this terrible affliction, this scourge upon the land, to go on, if the republic is to survive.

White people have to say no to systemic racism, to recognize our culpability in allowing it to exist. We need to do this, and do it now.

We need to annihilate the demon of racism that has infected our every level of life, society, culture, and above all else, we need to remove it from our own hearts.

How? White people need to be talking to other white people about racism. This isn’t done. Hardly ever. It’s like some wall of silence embedded in our upbringing. For white people, their racist behavior is the outcome of a massive abyss of perception and awareness, and this is carried on through the unspoken, but systemic, agreement to stay silent.

We need the conversation to begin. For, as with all remarkable change, once it does, once the silence is broken between white people and they talk about their own racism with each other, and especially within their families, the demon will lose its power, exponentially. It will never return to its old, crippling self. The illusions and delusions of white privilege will cease to be law in the land.

Equality is the reality, the realization of the dream, an ideal formed into matter, at last, in everyday life, the birthright of us all.

The conversation must begin.

Regina Clarke is a writer of mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. She has lived on all three coasts and in England, but has found her true home in the ancient landscape of the Hudson River Valley. The Shawangunk Mountains she can see as she writes are part of the Appalachians, the oldest on earth. She’s on Twitter @ReginaClarke1 and is the author of Voices from the Old Earth, Guardians of the Field, and MARI. Her website blog frequently explores the ideas of hope and inspiration.

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