Regarding Baltimore: Black people have the moral authority to call for nonviolence-whites don't. [View all]

[Ken Burch]

Last edited Tue Apr 28, 2015, 04:51 AM - Edit history (2)

To any other white folks reading this:

I hope that necessary and radical change DOES arrive in Baltimore and the rest of the nation with no violence at all. That would be the best way, in an ideal world. However, in an ideal world, radical change obviously wouldn't be needed siince things would already be, well, ideal.

But, as long as the vast majority of White America continues to unquestioningly defend all police violence against people of color(not just African-Americans, but Latinos, Native Americans and Muslim-Americans of all races) then white people(and I say this AS a middle-aged white male in my fifties) are not entitled to lecture anyone about things like looting stores.

We, as a race, are obligated, before we can say anything sanctimonious about property damage, to confront every vestige of our racial hate-fears (hatred and fear are always linked) to call on all our fellow whites to stop, once and for all, seeing people of other races as a pestilence and the enemy. We are obligated to organize our own communities to work for social justice and economic and human equality for all(including for ourselves, because we can only end poverty, unemployment and exploitation of ourselves by ending those scourges for all people), and to be part of building the national, and international, movement for change that must be built in order for any of the problems we face to be solved.

Until we as whites have done that, we are morally disqualified from denouncing other people's resistance tactics-those tactics are up to them. Period.

If we, as the still-largest part of this Rainbow Republic, can join with all others in this struggle, all racism, exploitation and suffering can be brought to an end. If we don't, it will go on...and we will never be entitled to criticize anyone for anything they do to defy the continued misery we have in our power, in our very strength of numbers, to defeat.

As the great slogan of the Black Power movement reminds us:

"If You're Not Part of the Solution, You're Part of the Problem".

The time has come for us, as white Americans, to all do what we should have done then: We must be part of the solution.