– Front Porch for Amandala-

by Simon

Tuesday, May 27, 2025

Some years ago, a young black Jesuit priest in the United States described his depression and frustration. He lives in an overwhelmingly white religious community and works in overwhelmingly white institutions. 

He was exhausted with having to constantly explain to white colleagues and friends the legacy of racism he and other blacks endure day after day.

“Why?”, he demanded plaintively, does he have to explain the entrenched racism and its effects to those who have benefitted from white privilege and white supremacy?

Why did the family of George Floyd and black America have to explain to white America the pernicious legacy of racism which led to a white police officer suffocating a black man with his knee with brutal lethality 157 years after the so-called emancipation of slaves?

After Floyd’s killing, a dear older white friend in her late 70s who lives in New York State, not far from the infamous Sing Sing Correctional Facility, participated in a memorial for George Floyd and other victims of racism.

Along with others, she knelt for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, the suffocating amount of time that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck.  She felt physical pain in her older knees, a very slight and passing glimmer of the pain felt by Floyd.

A perennially offensive question is: “Why are black people so angry?” A former activist had to explain to a white Irish American priest his outrage about the legacy of slavery and white supremacy when the latter expressed concern at how angry was the young black man fighting for racial equality in his country.

Many people living outside the U.S., including people of various ethnicities, do not understand the racial history of America, often parroting the racial prejudice and insipid memes and lies of white supremacy. 

One particularly nauseating response to the Floyd killing was from those who complained that he was a “thug” and reportedly had prior criminal convictions. Does this justify his killing or devalue the ferocious response to his death?

A good number of white people who ask for so-called explanations as to what is going on, know full well the bounty of white privilege they enjoy. 

The calls for explanations are oftentimes self-serving, condescending, an attempt to placate and a denial of responsibility for the attitudes and structures which dominate blacks.

Amy Cooper, the white woman in Central Park who called the police on the black bird-watcher, Christian Cooper, after he asked her to leash her cocker spaniel, understood all too well the power of her white privilege.

In a video of the incident posted by Christian Cooper on Facebook, Amy Cooper said calmly and deliberately:

“I’m taking a picture and calling the cops … I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”  Imagine if the black man’s dog was unleashed and threatening her. The meme would have been: “These black people can’t obey the rules.”

In his “The Other America” sermon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., explained some of the economic basis of inequality:

“While white America refused to do anything for the black man at this point, during that very period, the nation, through an act of Congress, was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and mid-west, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

“Not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges for them to learn how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming, and went beyond this and came to the point of providing low interest rates for these persons so that they could mechanize their farms. And today, many of these persons are being paid millions of dollars a year in federal subsidies not to farm; and these are so often the very people saying to the black man that he must lift himself by his own bootstraps. …

“Senator Eastland, incidentally, who says this all the time, gets a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, not to farm on various areas of his plantation down in Mississippi.

“And yet he feels that we must do everything for ourselves. Well, that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich, and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor.”

Just as other civil rights activists have had to explain throughout American history, activists like NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick were still explaining, denouncing and articulating to America that racism still rages in America.

He was pilloried by many white players and Americans, and sidelined by the League because during the playing of the U.S. National Anthem he protested against racial inequality and police brutality.

Kaepernick endured the threadbare excuses of aggressive indifference and protected privilege: He was told he was too radical and unpatriotic, that change takes time, that things weren’t so bad in America. It was language familiar to that decades ago.   

The white British anonymous artist and political activist Banksy wrote in response to the global protests in the wake of Floyd’s killing:

“I thought I should just shut up and listen to black people about this issue. But why would I do that?  It’s not their problem; it’s mine.

“People of colour are being failed by the system. The white system. Like a broken pipe flooding the apartment of the people living downstairs. The faulty system is making their life a misery; but it’s not their job to fix it. They can’t; no one will let them in the apartment upstairs.

“This is a white problem. And if white people don’t fix it, someone will have to come upstairs and kick the door in.”

Meaningful change will only prevail if many more white people stopped asking for explanations about the brutality of white supremacy and start to understand and acknowledge the pervasive racism which still haunts America and the world, and that they must join wholeheartedly in the struggle to dismantle this historic evil.

(AMANDALA Ed. Note: I like that analogy of the leaking upstairs apartment. It reminds me of the massive outcry against, and condemnation of, the October 7, 2023 atrocity committed against Israeli citizens by Hamas militants; while little attention was focused on the question of WHY? Whatever could the Israeli authorities have done before October 7 to their Palestinian people to so aggrieve and motivate the Hamas terrorists to unleash such a violent and murderous response? Or were they just some crazy, barbaric monsters who would kill a thousand people for no reason? And if killing a thousand makes them barbaric monsters, what does killing over fifty-three thousand and counting, 60% being women and children, make of the Israeli army and their weapons and ammunitions suppliers?)