# Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Emmanuel Acho]] - Full Title:: Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man - Category: #books ## Highlights > However, the longest-lasting pandemic in this country is a virus not of the body but of the mind, and it’s called racism. ([Location 61](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=61)) > Langston Hughes writes, “O, let America be America Again / The land that never has been yet.” ([Location 99](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=99)) > Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance. —NATHAN RUTSTEIN ([Location 219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=219)) > DENIAL: Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=280)) > LBJ said it best: “You can’t shackle and chain someone for hundreds of years, liberate them to compete freely with the rest and still justly believe that you’ve been fair.” ([Location 329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=329)) > And white privilege is about the word white, not rich. It’s having advantage built into your life. It’s not saying your life hasn’t been hard; it’s saying your skin color hasn’t contributed to the difficulty in your life. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=333)) > To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. —JAMES BALDWIN ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=498)) > The upshot of these stereotypes has been to allow what I think of as an ongoing “weaponizing of whiteness.” We’ve already seen an example of this, with the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. More recently, you may have met Karen. She is Amy Cooper, who in early 2020 called the cops on a bird-watcher in Central Park because he wanted her to leash her illegally unleashed dog. When she dialed 911, she used three words that are almost a death sentence to black men: “There’s a black man who’s threatening my life.” That was a lie, and thank goodness the birder had the video receipts. She’s also Jennifer Schulte, dubbed “Barbecue Becky,” who called the police on two black men legally barbecuing in an Oakland park. “I’m really scared. Come quick,” she said, code for “Do harm to these black men.” And she is Alison Ettel, dubbed “Permit Patty,” who called the police on an eight-year-old black girl selling water in San Francisco without a license. “I need to see your permit,” she said. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=538)) > Karen is also the granddaughter of a much older figure, “Miss Ann.” Miss Ann was the name enslaved black people gave to white mistresses who exerted power over them on plantations. ([Location 548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=548)) > James Baldwin, who were reimagining just who was a nigger: “We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him. White people invented him,” Baldwin said. “I’ve known and I’ve always known … that I’m not a nigger.” ([Location 635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=635)) > IT’S TOUGH TO talk about systemic racism without sounding like a professor, so cut me a little slack for a couple of paragraphs. For starters, a definition: systemic racism is the legitimizing of every dynamic—historic, cultural, political, economic, institutional, and person-to-person—that gives advantages to white people, while at the same time producing a whole host of terrible effects for black people and other people of color. Those effects show up as inequalities in power, opportunities, laws, and every other metric of how individuals and groups are treated. Which is to say: systemic racism is making the unequal treatment of people of color the national norm. ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=739)) > I could spend the rest of this book detailing different parts of structural racism, but for now I’ll take on a few major areas: housing, schooling, and criminal justice. The racism ingrained in each of these areas of life perpetuates a vicious cycle in which certain groups, including black folks, are held down, while other groups—namely, white folks—are elevated. ([Location 744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=744)) > That overrepresentation is not an accident but the product of systemic racism. Black people are not any more criminal than anyone else (more on that in chapter 10), but they’ve been criminalized as much or more than any group in America. ([Location 791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=791)) > Ironically, some say this started with a little adjustment to the U.S. Constitution called the Thirteenth Amendment. “Neither slavery not involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Yeah, I bolded that clause for a reason. Plenty of scholars have linked that exception clause to the rise of what’s now called mass incarceration or the prison industrial complex. ([Location 793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=793)) > Remember what I said about white privilege, how you don’t even have to do anything to have it work for you? Well, it’s worked that way for as long as it’s been around, which means you’ve likely spent your whole life enjoying the fruits of systemic racism and never having to directly engage with its fallout. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=814)) > Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. —TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM ([Location 834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=834)) > Novelist Jason Reynolds does a wonderful job of expanding on the reasons why: If you say, “No, all lives matter,” what I would say is I believe that you believe all lives matter. But because I live the life that I live, I am certain that in this country, all lives [don’t] matter. I know for a fact that, based on the numbers, my life hasn’t mattered; that black women’s lives definitely haven’t mattered, that black trans people’s lives haven’t mattered, that black gay people’s lives haven’t mattered … that immigrants’ lives don’t matter, that Muslims’ lives don’t matter. The Indigenous people of this country’s lives have never mattered. I mean, we could go on and on and on. So, when we say “all lives,” are we talking about White lives? And if so, then let’s just say that. ’Cause it’s coded language. ([Location 922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=922)) > I’m not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I’m one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism. And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy; all we’ve seen is hypocrisy. —MALCOLM X, “THE BALLOT OR THE BULLET” (1964) ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=975)) > That law failed because the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Kobach, a white man, “failed to prove the additional burden on voters was justified by actual evidence of fraud.” During the time the law was in effect, thirty-one thousand applicants were prevented from voting, yet the appeals court noted that no more than thirty-nine noncitizens had managed to vote in the past nineteen years. Other states, including Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, have enacted voter ID laws using claims of voter ID fraud. ([Location 1051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1051)) > “It doesn’t make any sense,” Mason said in an interview with The Guardian. “Why would I vote if I knew I was not eligible? What’s my intent? What was I to gain by losing my kids, losing my mom, potentially losing my house? I have so much to lose, all for casting a vote.” She appealed her sentence and was denied. Meanwhile, in the very same county where Mason voted that year, a judge named Russ Casey pleaded guilty to turning in fake signatures to secure a place on a Texas primary ballot. His crime was not, in any way, an accident or oversight. It was a premeditated affront to our political system. Casey pleaded guilty to committing that crime, and for his guilty plea, the Texas courts sentenced him to two years in jail—then commuted his two-year prison sentence to a five-year sentence of probation. Can you believe that? A five-year sentence upheld on appeal for a black woman versus a two-year sentence commuted into probation for a white man. The Fix was in way back when. And the Fix is in right this second. ([Location 1105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1105)) > The most important bit of context: that the majority of violent crimes against white people are perpetrated by white people. ([Location 1214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1214)) > An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System: Black men comprise about 13 percent of the U.S. male population, but nearly 35 percent of all men who are under state or federal jurisdiction with a sentence of more than one year. One in three black men born in 2001 can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime, compared to 1 in 6 Latino men and 1 in 17 white men. Black people are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate 5.1 times greater than that of white people. One in 18 black women born in 2001 will be incarcerated sometime in her life, compared to 1 in 45 Latina women and 1 in 111 white women. Forty-four percent of incarcerated women are black, although black women make up about 13 percent of the female U.S. population. ([Location 1224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1224)) > The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn’t have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river. —KERRY WASHINGTON ([Location 1310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1310)) > Many black people worked as sharecroppers, which was basically slave-master relations updated to peasant–feudal lord status. ([Location 1391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1391)) > The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ([Location 1598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1598)) > We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ([Location 1601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1601)) > As long as systemic racism exists, you can best believe there will be the need for people to protest it. Remember what they said in the Declaration of Independence: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” Protest, riots, revolts have been responses to repeated injury, and for what it’s worth, none of them has gone as far as the response the Declaration is talking about (the Revolutionary War). They’re also how some of the most healing, humane change has happened in this country. ([Location 1753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1753)) > WHY DON’T WE get started with a good working definition? This one comes from Racial Equity Tools (www.racialequitytools.org): Someone who makes the commitment and effort to recognize their privilege (based on gender, race, sexual identity, etc.) and works in solidarity with oppressed groups in the struggle for justice. Allies understand that it is in their own interest to end all forms of oppression, even those from which they may benefit in concrete ways. Allies commit to reducing their own complicity or collusion in oppression of those groups and invest in strengthening their own knowledge and awareness of oppression. ([Location 1831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1831)) > A more radical ally was John Brown, the man who said he “knew the proud and hard hearts of the slave-holders, and that they would never consent to give up their slaves, till they felt a big stick about their heads.” ([Location 1842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1842)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > When the first Africans arrived in 1619 in Virginia, there was no such thing as a white person. As far as the law is concerned, white people as a race didn’t exist until 1681, when colonial American lawmakers sought to outlaw marriages between European people and others. Before that, people were known by their nation of origin, what we might now refer to as nationality or ethnicity. Anti-miscegenation laws, the laws prohibiting Europeans from marrying (and having children with) people of African descent, forged the white race. ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=2021)) # Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Emmanuel Acho]] - Full Title:: Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man - Category: #books ## Highlights > However, the longest-lasting pandemic in this country is a virus not of the body but of the mind, and it’s called racism. ([Location 61](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=61)) > Langston Hughes writes, “O, let America be America Again / The land that never has been yet.” ([Location 99](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=99)) > Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance. —NATHAN RUTSTEIN ([Location 219](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=219)) > DENIAL: Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying. ([Location 280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=280)) > LBJ said it best: “You can’t shackle and chain someone for hundreds of years, liberate them to compete freely with the rest and still justly believe that you’ve been fair.” ([Location 329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=329)) > And white privilege is about the word white, not rich. It’s having advantage built into your life. It’s not saying your life hasn’t been hard; it’s saying your skin color hasn’t contributed to the difficulty in your life. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=333)) > To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. —JAMES BALDWIN ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=498)) > The upshot of these stereotypes has been to allow what I think of as an ongoing “weaponizing of whiteness.” We’ve already seen an example of this, with the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. More recently, you may have met Karen. She is Amy Cooper, who in early 2020 called the cops on a bird-watcher in Central Park because he wanted her to leash her illegally unleashed dog. When she dialed 911, she used three words that are almost a death sentence to black men: “There’s a black man who’s threatening my life.” That was a lie, and thank goodness the birder had the video receipts. She’s also Jennifer Schulte, dubbed “Barbecue Becky,” who called the police on two black men legally barbecuing in an Oakland park. “I’m really scared. Come quick,” she said, code for “Do harm to these black men.” And she is Alison Ettel, dubbed “Permit Patty,” who called the police on an eight-year-old black girl selling water in San Francisco without a license. “I need to see your permit,” she said. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=538)) > Karen is also the granddaughter of a much older figure, “Miss Ann.” Miss Ann was the name enslaved black people gave to white mistresses who exerted power over them on plantations. ([Location 548](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=548)) > James Baldwin, who were reimagining just who was a nigger: “We have invented the nigger. I didn’t invent him. White people invented him,” Baldwin said. “I’ve known and I’ve always known … that I’m not a nigger.” ([Location 635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=635)) > IT’S TOUGH TO talk about systemic racism without sounding like a professor, so cut me a little slack for a couple of paragraphs. For starters, a definition: systemic racism is the legitimizing of every dynamic—historic, cultural, political, economic, institutional, and person-to-person—that gives advantages to white people, while at the same time producing a whole host of terrible effects for black people and other people of color. Those effects show up as inequalities in power, opportunities, laws, and every other metric of how individuals and groups are treated. Which is to say: systemic racism is making the unequal treatment of people of color the national norm. ([Location 739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=739)) > I could spend the rest of this book detailing different parts of structural racism, but for now I’ll take on a few major areas: housing, schooling, and criminal justice. The racism ingrained in each of these areas of life perpetuates a vicious cycle in which certain groups, including black folks, are held down, while other groups—namely, white folks—are elevated. ([Location 744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=744)) > That overrepresentation is not an accident but the product of systemic racism. Black people are not any more criminal than anyone else (more on that in chapter 10), but they’ve been criminalized as much or more than any group in America. ([Location 791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=791)) > Ironically, some say this started with a little adjustment to the U.S. Constitution called the Thirteenth Amendment. “Neither slavery not involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Yeah, I bolded that clause for a reason. Plenty of scholars have linked that exception clause to the rise of what’s now called mass incarceration or the prison industrial complex. ([Location 793](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=793)) > Remember what I said about white privilege, how you don’t even have to do anything to have it work for you? Well, it’s worked that way for as long as it’s been around, which means you’ve likely spent your whole life enjoying the fruits of systemic racism and never having to directly engage with its fallout. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=814)) > Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself. Against change, against progress, against hope, against black dignity, against black lives, against reason, against truth, against facts, against native claims, against its own laws and customs. —TRESSIE MCMILLAN COTTOM ([Location 834](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=834)) > Novelist Jason Reynolds does a wonderful job of expanding on the reasons why: If you say, “No, all lives matter,” what I would say is I believe that you believe all lives matter. But because I live the life that I live, I am certain that in this country, all lives [don’t] matter. I know for a fact that, based on the numbers, my life hasn’t mattered; that black women’s lives definitely haven’t mattered, that black trans people’s lives haven’t mattered, that black gay people’s lives haven’t mattered … that immigrants’ lives don’t matter, that Muslims’ lives don’t matter. The Indigenous people of this country’s lives have never mattered. I mean, we could go on and on and on. So, when we say “all lives,” are we talking about White lives? And if so, then let’s just say that. ’Cause it’s coded language. ([Location 922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=922)) > I’m not a Republican, nor a Democrat, nor an American, and got sense enough to know it. I’m one of the 22 million black victims of the Democrats, one of the 22 million black victims of the Republicans, and one of the 22 million black victims of Americanism. And when I speak, I don’t speak as a Democrat or a Republican, nor an American. I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy; all we’ve seen is hypocrisy. —MALCOLM X, “THE BALLOT OR THE BULLET” (1964) ([Location 975](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=975)) > That law failed because the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Kobach, a white man, “failed to prove the additional burden on voters was justified by actual evidence of fraud.” During the time the law was in effect, thirty-one thousand applicants were prevented from voting, yet the appeals court noted that no more than thirty-nine noncitizens had managed to vote in the past nineteen years. Other states, including Arkansas, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, have enacted voter ID laws using claims of voter ID fraud. ([Location 1051](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1051)) > “It doesn’t make any sense,” Mason said in an interview with The Guardian. “Why would I vote if I knew I was not eligible? What’s my intent? What was I to gain by losing my kids, losing my mom, potentially losing my house? I have so much to lose, all for casting a vote.” She appealed her sentence and was denied. Meanwhile, in the very same county where Mason voted that year, a judge named Russ Casey pleaded guilty to turning in fake signatures to secure a place on a Texas primary ballot. His crime was not, in any way, an accident or oversight. It was a premeditated affront to our political system. Casey pleaded guilty to committing that crime, and for his guilty plea, the Texas courts sentenced him to two years in jail—then commuted his two-year prison sentence to a five-year sentence of probation. Can you believe that? A five-year sentence upheld on appeal for a black woman versus a two-year sentence commuted into probation for a white man. The Fix was in way back when. And the Fix is in right this second. ([Location 1105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1105)) > The most important bit of context: that the majority of violent crimes against white people are perpetrated by white people. ([Location 1214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1214)) > An Unjust Burden: The Disparate Treatment of Black Americans in the Criminal Justice System: Black men comprise about 13 percent of the U.S. male population, but nearly 35 percent of all men who are under state or federal jurisdiction with a sentence of more than one year. One in three black men born in 2001 can expect to be incarcerated in his lifetime, compared to 1 in 6 Latino men and 1 in 17 white men. Black people are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate 5.1 times greater than that of white people. One in 18 black women born in 2001 will be incarcerated sometime in her life, compared to 1 in 45 Latina women and 1 in 111 white women. Forty-four percent of incarcerated women are black, although black women make up about 13 percent of the female U.S. population. ([Location 1224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1224)) > The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn’t have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river. —KERRY WASHINGTON ([Location 1310](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1310)) > Many black people worked as sharecroppers, which was basically slave-master relations updated to peasant–feudal lord status. ([Location 1391](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1391)) > The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ([Location 1598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1598)) > We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right. —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ([Location 1601](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1601)) > As long as systemic racism exists, you can best believe there will be the need for people to protest it. Remember what they said in the Declaration of Independence: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.” Protest, riots, revolts have been responses to repeated injury, and for what it’s worth, none of them has gone as far as the response the Declaration is talking about (the Revolutionary War). They’re also how some of the most healing, humane change has happened in this country. ([Location 1753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1753)) > WHY DON’T WE get started with a good working definition? This one comes from Racial Equity Tools (www.racialequitytools.org): Someone who makes the commitment and effort to recognize their privilege (based on gender, race, sexual identity, etc.) and works in solidarity with oppressed groups in the struggle for justice. Allies understand that it is in their own interest to end all forms of oppression, even those from which they may benefit in concrete ways. Allies commit to reducing their own complicity or collusion in oppression of those groups and invest in strengthening their own knowledge and awareness of oppression. ([Location 1831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1831)) > A more radical ally was John Brown, the man who said he “knew the proud and hard hearts of the slave-holders, and that they would never consent to give up their slaves, till they felt a big stick about their heads.” ([Location 1842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=1842)) - Tags: [[favorite]] > When the first Africans arrived in 1619 in Virginia, there was no such thing as a white person. As far as the law is concerned, white people as a race didn’t exist until 1681, when colonial American lawmakers sought to outlaw marriages between European people and others. Before that, people were known by their nation of origin, what we might now refer to as nationality or ethnicity. Anti-miscegenation laws, the laws prohibiting Europeans from marrying (and having children with) people of African descent, forged the white race. ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B08BKMV54M&location=2021))