The global fury unleashed against police brutality and anti-Black racism in the United States continues unabated. As poet Gil Scott-Heron once said, “America is once again in shock! America leads the world in shocks. Unfortunately, America does not lead the world in deciphering the causes of shocks.” The country has been forced, once again, to do some soul-searching intended, presumably, to decipher the cause of this shock.
It is unlikely that this exploration is deep. One reason that our country does not seek to probe too deeply into its soul is its fear of what it knows is waiting there: a pattern in which Blacks continue to be denied full citizenship in America’s space, from when it defined them as three-fifths of a person at its founding to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25. I have seen this reluctance to delve on display again by my colleagues in academia. We enact this reluctance as we eagerly proclaim our solidarity with Black people in the wake of Floyd’s killing.
This message is for my white, liberal, progressive, conservative, and whatchamacallit colleagues. In your response to the ongoing protests and the killing of a Black man by state agents that triggered it, please, for the sake of common decency and humanity that we all share, stop telling me you “stand with me,” or “stand with our African American community,” or “stand with Black communities,” or whatever variant of those responses you are inclined to share with me in person or at any of those meetings we hold now to comfort one another and which you, our institutions, and even our corporations, take advantage of to proclaim how you are “standing with me.”
I beg of you: Don’t stand with me! Stand in your lane and stand with humanity. George Floyd’s death is a loss for his family first, his friends and associates next, and, ultimately, for humanity. The manner of his death indicts the society that, by its contempt for Black humanity, brokered it. You are a part of that society. When you act as if you need “my stories” of “my being profiled by the police” or otherwise being at the receiving end of the anti-Black racism that is woven into the fabric of American life to realize that Black life does not mean squat in this society, it is bad faith, par excellence.
Let me bring it closer to home. If you are in a department that, in this day and age, still behaves as if no Black person is qualified to be on its faculty, please work to correct that rather than gawk at my stories. If your department always looks to twist your dean’s arm to get a “Target of Opportunity” position, a.k.a. “Affirmative Action” hire, please show that your Black prospects are worth a regular position that count against your future lines and treat them as the qualified hires that they are. Don’t stand with us when you give us the impression that one is too many!
Do your children go to schools where Black teachers are a rarity and often caught in a revolving door of entry and exit, because of a hostile atmosphere that leaves them feeling isolated as the lone representative in a large staff? Please, stay in your lane and change that situation. Your sympathies do not do anything to change that situation. Teachers of color that show students that Black teachers are not “special” might make future graduates think routinely of Blacks as humans, warts and all, across the entire spectrum as all humanity and not special cases.
Stand in your lane and get your family members, friends, and associates, to spare a moment to ask themselves why there is still so much room for dubious “Black firsts” in our country. Did Black people suddenly start getting smarter or more competent in sundry areas of life recently? If someone told you that since 1787, only two Black men have had the brains to sit on the Supreme Court, would you seriously consider the claim? Stay in your lane and get your folks—they have the power—to stop thinking that Blacks must be exceptional to be considered for what are otherwise routine remits.
As we say in my original homeland, sharing is no fun when one side brings nothing to the table. Work to ensure that we all bring something to the table and let us celebrate our shared humanity—its good, bad and ugly. Stand with humanity by ensuring that segments of it are not permanently beggared as the rest of us assuage our guilt by gawking at their stories in the name of standing with them.
Photo: On June 1, 2020, protesters at the “Justice for George Floyd” march in East Baltimore, Maryland. (Photo by Elvert Barnes Photography via Wikimedia Commons)
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A. He has taught at universities in Canada, Nigeria, Germany, South Korea, and Jamaica. His research interests are wide and varied.
