Why do whites fear blacks

Until a critical mass of white people begin and continue the work of anti-racism with their own lives, then uprisings and protests will function more as expressions of black and brown pain than as inflection points in the culture. After all, black and brown people have been resisting, uprising, and protesting in this country for centuries. If that were enough, it would have worked already.

The missing link is white people doing deep, honest, and ongoing inventories and clean-up of their own relationship to white supremacy. Phrased differently, it is white people especially progressive white people who are responsible for what happens now. Cooper, they linger in the fallacy that they could never be involved in a racist incident.

Either they accept that they have inherited this house of white supremacy, built by their forebears and willed to them, and they are now responsible for paying the taxes on that inheritance, or the status quo continues.

I hope they will become radicalized by this moment and begin to fight fiercely for racial justice; but more than that, I hope they start at home, in their own minds and hearts. As I tell my students: a white person rushing to do racial justice work without first understanding the impacts, uses, and deceptions of their own whiteness is like an untrained person rushing into the ER to help the nurses and doctors—therein probably lies more harm than good.

The answers are all around you if you are willing to look and listen. Contact us at letters time. By Savala Nolan. You can follow her on Instagram and on her blog.

TIME Ideas hosts the world's leading voices, providing commentary on events in news, society, and culture. We welcome outside contributions. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. This Cherokee is really Grant fixed up with war paint and feathers. The policy of not permitting black players went back to the years just after the Civil War ended before the sport became completely organized as a major league. Black second baseman Bud Fowler had his White teammates on the Binghamton team protest against his presence on the team.

In nine White players wrote a telegram to the front office. They threatened to strike. Clearly there was jealousy involved in this decision. The White players did not want to compete on even footing with these Black men.

Coincidentally this decade was the beginning of a surge of lynchings across the country. At least seventy blacks were lynched in and a total of were lynched across the country from This aspect of Jim Crow is rarely talked about.

Getting work, becoming homeowners, voting, getting a quality education were just a few of things Whites took for granted but denied to people of color. I argue that one man can not integrate an entire league.

He integrated one team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Hank Thompson became the first Black player on two separate teams. He spoke of the fans being openly racist. In The Brooklyn Dodgers were the first team with four Black players.

It was not until before the Dodgers were the first team with five Black players in their lineup for a game. Multiple teams were integrated by Black or Latin American players. Those Black and Latin American players who were finally given a chance to compete with major league teams became some of the biggest stars in the league for years.

Black and Latin American players were able to fill the top tiers of baseball record books as well as its Hall of Fame when they gained access to the league. Players who debuted during the integration phase set a standard of success that the White players and owners had denied them an opportunity for since before the turn of the century.

Likewise, in other professional sports like basketball and football which finally opened their doors to non-White players success also followed. When the playing field is leveled we see the results. Another place where this fear of competition is clear to me is in American education.

Keeping enslaved and free Black people illiterate was designed to ensure they could not compete freely with Whites. The much talked about, but mostly misunderstood Brown v. Board of Education decision by the US Supreme Court in can best be studied by looking at what happened after the decision came down. In the second phase of the case Brown II, the decision about implementation is significantly more important than what they said in Brown I where they decreed that segregated schools were inherently harmful to black children psychologically.

According to John Kyle Day in his study of resistance to Brown, The Southern Manifesto: Massive Resistance and the Fight to Preserve Segregation , the effort to maintain segregation and therefore an un-level playing field lasted way longer and in a much stronger way than we were taught in school. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education and the emerging Civil Rights Movement that ultimately destroyed the southern caste system known as Jim Crow.

Across the South the fight against a level playing field in schools showed up in K schools and colleges and universities. Most of us are unfamiliar with the case of Autherine Lucy. Both women were denied admission because they were Black.

Lucy challenged the decision and after three wasted years in court she was admitted but was not allowed to use the dorms or dining halls on the campus.

She had to drive fifty-eight miles from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa each day to attend classes and then drive back home at night. Hudson was not able to gain admission. The next night all hell broke loose. In my work against racism and for racial reconciliation, more and more I see people voluntarily segregating themselves.

And that leads to white people fearing black people. Yet no black people were in the audience. Why not? Then, on Dec. Jarvis is a hero among both whites and blacks as he always has written the truth as he sees it, clear-eyed, in his hundreds of columns for The Times-Picayune. A Pulitzer Prize winner and the recipient of many honors, he was not kept on as a columnist when the Advocate bought The Times-Picayune.

As a clergyman I see this segregation by choice in the three churches I attend. In white and generally liberal Trinity Episcopal, out of some 2, members, the congregation is pleased if ten black people show up on any Sunday. In my home church now, St. During the main service at the third church I claim, Christian Unity Baptist, I am usually the only white person there among the attendees. People of different colors are more than welcome in all three churches, but all seem voluntarily segregated.

I recently attended a funeral of a very liberal and close friend in Philadelphia and was surprised that there was no person of color among the or-so friends and family members who came to the service. Of the or more visitors that day, I saw only five African-American visitors, other than the staff. Last year at Southern University at New Orleans, only 54 of 2, students were white. Even the University of New Orleans, which last year was ranked the most diverse college in the state, had a black enrollment of just 17 percent UNO later reported that its fall freshmen class was 25 percent black, the highest in nearly a decade.

Why does such voluntary segregation persist, even among liberal whites and blacks? To answer this question, I believe, is to answer Mrs.