To the Editor:
This is a response, by a white man, to the letter by Pedro Arguello OC'95 skeptical of the white role in the advancement of people of color.
Liberal whites fought against white supremacism when that wasn't cool. Liberal whites went South to confront the heart of American apartheid; some of them were killed by the Klan while the cops looked the other way. Liberal whites kept up the pressure on Congress to secure the Voting Rights Act, which has produced a political revolution in that same South; and the Civil Rights Act, which knocked down barriers in the workplace. Liberal whites kept up the pressure for fair housing, which has knocked down residential barriers. In all of this liberal whites worked together with - and, as time passed and their own thinking cleared, increasingly under the leadership of - African Americans.
None of this represents a completed job. We would not be having this exchange if this were not still the Number One social problem in this country. That is no reason to deny the history of it to date - either the contributions of liberal whites, or the baggage about race that we carried into the fray and had to get rid of eventually.
Two quotes from Arguello's letter sort of jump off the page:
"It has always been strange to me that we [people of color] are always willing to thank whites for something that they gave us, while attacking each other for being lazy, not being `black enough' or not doing anything."
Absolutely right. That is an unproductive way for people of color to tear one another down. This is a problem within the community, and it will only be solved within the community, by empowering constructive voices and withholding power from the voices of division. And it is something about which whites can do little.
"[W]hy should we thank someone for support and help that should have been given to us as human beings?"
Most things we get as a result of being in a human society, of whatever color, are things we are arguably due as human beings. To withhold gratitude on that ground is to erode the glue holding together the society that makes those things available to us. It suggests a self-defeating style.
Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 125, Number 10; November 22, 1996
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