You Can Love Black People and Still Be Racist

A freed slave’s letter to his former owner shows love can be blind

It’s a common refrain for people to insist that because they have Black people in their lives or even in their families for whom they love that it’s impossible for them to be racist. They say this because they view racism as a yes or no question of “Do you hate Black people?” But hate isn’t required to be a supporter of systems of white supremacy as a letter written by a freed slave, Jordan Anderson, to his former master, a Confederate Colonel, perfectly illustrates.

The letter was published in 1865 in the local paper of the town Mr. Anderson had labored in before the Civil War and was in response to his former owner, who was said to be a “good master,” asking for Mr. Anderson and his wife to return because the Colonel and his family missed them.

The letter’s grace and bitting sarcasm show Mr. Anderson wasn’t some 2D version of a person. He, like every other person held in bondage, understood the freedom he’d been denied and fully felt the horrors inflicted upon him. While mocking his former owner’s ethics as a pretense for turning down the Colonel’s job offer, one line from Mr. Anderon’s letter shows how meaningless deeply caring for a person of another race can be if you’re not willing to look at the power dynamics involved in the relationship. Anderson writes in a more sincere moment in the letter:

“It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this.”

This is telling and not just for the magnanimity it showed. As whitewashed and sanitized as America has made slavery, I think we still fail to understand how many scenes from modern life between whites and Blacks are still playing themselves out along these same dynamics of a seemingly close relationship that doesn’t really exist because of tremendous power imbalance. A person having affection or even love for a Black person doesn’t mean they’ve taken even a second to think about the nature of the relationship, exemplified by this colonel thinking his former slave might want to come back.

There was a true intimacy between some slave owners and slaves who were in their lives hours a day because, thankfully, it’s hard keeping up seething hate 24 hours a day. And what other words could be used besides intimacy to describe relationships so close that it was a common practice to let Black women breastfeed white children? (Let’s ignore that white folks allowed this while also saying Blacks weren’t even part of the same species.) There wasn’t a constant belittling and talking down to. Masters didn’t need to have their hands constantly on their whips because the “law and order” of society was already understood. If the slaves had a fair master, they could avoid the whip if they followed the rules, meanwhile everywhere around them were examples and displays of what happened to those who got out of line. Besides, constantly assaulting and berating slaves might have drawn an even sharper contrast between these people, who — down to the last one of them — would’ve said they were good Christians and the faith they claimed to adhere to.

No doubt there were shared jokes and jokes, inquiries about how each other’s families were doing, and moments of humanity during times of emergency. At the end of the day, it was human beings existing within a messed up system, and even as messed up as it was, they were in each other’s lives on a daily basis in a more real way than many people have Black people in their lives today. Moments of humanity no doubt flickered. In the case of Mr. Anderson, he’d been the Colonies’ slave for 32 years. Do you think you don’t develop an attachment and an affinity for someone you’ve known for 32 years? That’s what this letter shows.

But Mr. Anderson reminds the Colonie the true nature of their relationship and reminds the Colonel that he’d shot at him twice and that one of Colonel’s associates had sworn to kill Mr. Anderon if he ever saw him again. Mr. Anderson also mentioned that he and his wife would require back pay for their decades of free labor (minus his 3 doctor visits and a tooth pulling during that time). That this slave owner could be so clueless about the true nature and power dynamic of their relationship is right up there with me having just said slave a owner let Black women breastfeed their children as opposed to them being forced to feed them while neglecting their own children for whom their bodies were producing the milk, and left Hess Love, a woman made to do just that wishing she’d “dried up” so she wouldn’t be made to “feed [her babies’] murderers.”

This is why claims of being friends with a Black person or even loving the Black person in your family doesn’t mean you can’t still be doing things that uphold white supremacy. If a slave owner can be so clueless as to think his personal relationship with his former slave would get him to come back, or that a Black woman is happily feeding their baby, perhaps you not having a fiery hate for people of another race doesn’t mean as much as you think it does. It’s easy to care about someone who does things for you while never asking for anything in return but if your support of Black people is conditioned on us following your set of rules of polite behavior then you don’t support Black people, you support a system that forces us to cater to you in order to not be beaten. In short, you don’t love Black people, you love the position we’re in.

Brian is the author of “Stranger in a Stranger Land: My Six Years in Korea” and the upcoming book “When a Stolen Child Returns: A Black American Teen Volunteers in Southern Africa during the AIDS Pandemic.” To read an excerpt click here.