Being a "Race Traitor"

As we live with the present instance of white supremacy here in the Twin Cities, the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, I keep thinking of this Twitter thread I read yesterday. It's by Kristin Hogue, a white woman who describes herself as a Ph.D. student at UC Davis studying climate change culture, migration, and refugees. She posted before Floyd was killed but after Amy Cooper was vilified for calling the police in Central Park to report that a Black man dared to tell her she put her dog on a leash:

In 2014 we lived in a white, suburban community. My daughter attended a majority white elementary school. That school year, I discussed the systemic racism I saw in my daughter's school with another white mom. She then reported me to the principal.

The next day, I received an angry call from my daughter's principal demanding to know why I called her school racist. I calmly detailed my perspectives, to which she disagreed and said I was wrong. We ended the call calmly, though I didn't capitulate.

The next few days word spread of my "beliefs." Women - white moms - stopped talking to me. My daughter was "disinvited" to friends' homes. I was branded the white mom that called the school racist. The white fragility of the community was stunning.

Eventually, we left the school, then moved out of the community. I have NO friends back there. So that, folks, is also what we need to be discussing with the Amy Cooper incident. White women patrol other white women and reinforce each others racism.

Amy Cooper didn't act in a vacuum. If she were a white woman who calls out racial injustice instead of perpetuating it, she knows she could lose everything she enjoys - friends, community, jobs, opportunities - because other white women would ostracize her.

I guarantee Amy Cooper has a posse, maybe a mean girl group, but definitely a structure where she's required to be racist to fit in. For change to happen, white women have to be willing to lose everything. They have to understand that their "losses" are inconsequential - to the injustice and violence experienced by people of color.

This aspect of structural racism and white supremacy is under-recognized, even by people who try ("try") to be anti-racist. You give up all of your comfort when you constantly name the problem. You're always told you can't take a joke, at a minimum. You don't give up the privilege that comes with your white skin in this culture, but you come as close to that as possible and it's painful.

It helps to find other white people who are also doing it so you can reinforce each other and hold each other accountable, because it's incredibly easy to take the easy way out.