Looking back over the centuries, black thought leaders such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Randall Robinson — among many others — have repeatedly stated that the unjust conditions Americans of African descent have suffered under since 1619 cannot be improved by black citizens alone — we simply don’t have that much power in this country. Indeed, if we blacks at any point in our history on these shores actually did possess such power, the race problem would have been solved long ago.
Of course there have always been whites of goodwill and conscience who have sprung to our aid over the centuries (from Horace Greeley to Viola Gregg Liuzzo, who laid down her life in 1965 in Montgomery, Alabama, marching for justice) but never in the long, tainted history of America have so many of our white brothers and sisters — in this country and around the world — made anything close to the definitive statement about bigotry that is currently reverberating around the globe, and show no signs of abating any time soon.
The irony of my thanking whites for finally beginning to step up in large enough numbers to make systemic changes to the social and legal contracts is not lost on me: Yes, I am in fact thanking the people who have perpetrated this longest running holocaust in the history of the world for finally stepping up — and god, I wish they would have taken this action hundreds of years ago — and have to be satisfied that it’s happening now, and not in another hundred years down the road.
Certainly government at all levels should be in the forefront of the changes sweeping the land — since the dire predicament of blacks in America is entirely the making of lawmakers from the beginning — but our nation, as a collective, has never been able to fix its mouth to offer even the simplest of apologies for slavery, let along consider reparations for the damage done to citizens of color. No, it’s not going to happen, at least not in the short term.
So, for now, we have to — as Tennessee William’s Blanche DuBois said of herself in A Streetcar Named Desire: “Whoever you are… I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
For aiding in my six-year-old grandson’s safety when he begins to mature and goes out into the mean streets of America, I say, “From the bottom of my heart, thank you white folks.”
