San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
White allies can do more than rallies
East Oakland activist John Jones III has a request for white people who want to show their support at demonstrations against racism: “Don’t hold up a sign that says, ‘I can’t breathe.’ This is not about you. I’m the one who can’t breathe.”
It’s not that Jones doesn’t appreciate the effort. But he said white people who want to be longterm allies of his fellow African Americans can leverage their privilege in more helpful ways, like leading protests in their own suburban communities about police brutality. Or demanding that political candidates not be allowed to receive money from police unions.
“There is a vital role for white allies. It’s crucial and essential if we’re going to change these things we’ve been protesting about,” said Jones, community engagement director at Just Cities, an Oakland social justice organization.
“Protesting,” Jones said, “is just a step.”
Becoming a strong white ally doesn’t happen overnight or after taking a class, though many exist and are often aimed at helping white people see the privilege they were born into.
Longtime advocates say becoming an ally involves a lot of work. And time. And a willingness to become vulnerable.
Shakirah Simley, director of San Francisco’s Office of Racial Equity, said friends and acquaintances have been texting her in recent days asking, “‘What is the one thing I can do?’
“Well,” Simley said, “you’re dealing with 400 years of oppression.” It starts by “trusting the people who are close to the pain.”
Rep. Barbara Lee, DOakland, told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast that “we have not had the type of alliances that we need to really shatter these chains of systemic racism.”
“Understand that being an ally of the African American community to address systemic racism affects you also,” said Lee, who introduced legislation last week to create a racial truth and healing commission. “This is a struggle that should be a struggle for everyone with everyone.”
Community advocates suggested some ways to start:
“It’s not about you”: To get in the right mind frame to be ally, Simley suggests white people “decenter” themselves.
“When people start to do this work, they’re often caught up in feeling guilt and shame,” Simley said. “That’s part of the process, but it’s not productive. It’s not about you.”
She and others suggested learning about the history of black oppression. Simley shared a reading list that includes Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” and recommends Ava DuVernay’s film “13th.”
Smiley said white allies have to be responsible for their cultural education so they are not “burdening black and brown people with educating” them.
But they have to make an effort. Emmy Awardwinning comedian and CNN host W. Kamau Bell of Berkeley said that “right now, a lot of white people are frozen by the (feeling), ‘I don’t know what to do, so I’ll do nothing.’
“That’s why black people get brutalized by police officers over and over again, because white people go, ‘That was so bad, I feel so bad.’ But then a couple of weeks later (they say), ‘Back to my yoga classes,’ ” Bell told Conan O’Brien on his TBS show last week.
“It’s really about how are you in your personal life, because if your personal life is correct, your public life usually is more correct,” Bell said.
Get out of your comfort zone: Bay Area residents may pride themselves on living in a diverse place. It’s diverse, but it was more segregated in 2010 than it was in 1970, according to a study last year by UC Berkeley researchers.
One racial equity leader suggested that prospective white allies find ways to “desegregate their life.”
“To be a strong white ally, you must assume racism is everywhere, every day, all the time,” said Debra GoreMann, president of the Greenlining Institute, a racial equity organization.
“Some people say, ‘That sounds exhausting.’ Well, welcome to being black.”
That immersion process could begin by sitting next to a black person on a bus and chatting with them on the way to work, or talking to someone of another race while in line at a store, GoreMann said.
She suggested joining a local organization focused on social action such as feeding the poor.
“They tend to have more people of color in them and you can start to make connections,” GoreMann said. “If you’re not comfortable with the dialogue and the conversation, you have to start there. You’ve got to start working on that uncomfortable feeling.”
Focus on an issue: The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police has shined the spotlight on police brutality more broadly than anything in a generation. There have been demonstrations in every state and more than 600 cities since his death, including places that rarely see protests like Los Gatos, which is 72% white.
A Monmouth University poll found that 3 out of 4 Americans — including 71% of whites — felt racism was “a big problem.” That’s up from nearly half who felt that way in 2015.
Public pressure driven in part by the recent multiracial protests has broadened the conversation to include how police departments are funded and how much power police unions have over government officials.
On Thursday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed said she would direct some funds from the city’s police budget to the African American community. State State Sen. Scott Wiener, DSan Francisco, said he would no longer accept campaign contributions from law enforcement unions, a stance also adopted by his November election opponent, Jackie Fielder.
Jones, the Just Cities activist, said white allies will be key to spreading the “defund the police” message to predominantly white suburbs.
“We need white allies to demand that no elected officials or candidates get money from the police union,” Jones said. “Go to Orinda and Lafayette. Organize your neighbors and family members and coworkers. We have to expand the paradigm.”
Hold other white people accountable: That can start by transforming neighborhood watch groups into something different, said Zach Norris, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in San Francisco.
Law enforcement organizations often describe those neighborhood groups as “the eyes and ears of the police,” Norris said. “But people have more than eyes and ears. We have hearts, we have minds. Maybe that means (the group can) look into ways to offer a previously incarcerated person a job.
“Too often,” he said, “people are calling the police and expecting them to solve the problem.”
That’s what happened to Floyd last month in Minneapolis. A store clerk called police to report that Floyd had allegedly tried to use a counterfeit $20 bill to buy cigarettes. Four police officers responded, and Floyd was killed when white police Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
That scenario could repeat itself because of coded racist language often used on neighborhood message boards, said Simley of San Francisco’s racial equality office.
She said that someone on her neighborhood’s Nextdoor.com message group recently wrote that they saw a young black man walking around “like he was casing homes.” Simley worried that the warning could cause someone to see her 26yearold brother walking home and mistake him for a burglar.
“White people need to hold people on Nextdoor accountable so it is not maintaining unwritten neighborhood codes,” Simley said. “Otherwise, you have people saying, ‘You don’t belong here so I’m going to surveil you.’ ”
Bell, the Berkeley comedian, hopes white people are still interested in being allies after outrage over Floyd’s death subsides.
“It’s easy to change your Twitter (avatar) .... to Black Lives Matter, but eventually you’re going to turn it back to that wacky picture,” Bell said on O’Brien’s show.
“We need white people to not only do the work but show their work,” Bell said. “Fighting white supremacy, being an antiracist, should be a selfish act. Because if the world is more equitable and just for black people and people of color, it’s automatically better for white people. This is truly the rising tide that lifts all boats.”