Why I’m Listening to My Cousin Who Thinks Racism Has Ended

This is the first of a nine-part series exploring conversations I’ve had with my cousin about racism. Ben and I are both white; I’m progressive and he’s conservative. We’re trying to listen to each other with respect, even as we try to change each other’s minds.

I’m antiracist; my cousin is “colorblind.”

My cousin Ben doesn’t think racism is a big problem in America today. For the last few years, I’ve been going back and forth about this with him on Facebook.

Early in 2020, just as the pandemic was hitting, we moved our conversations to videochat. This was his idea—he was busy with a toddler, a full-time job, and grad school, and talking seemed easier than writing. Our talks have been fascinating, enjoyable, and educational for me, even though I deeply disagree with him.

A week or two after our third talk, George Floyd was killed. Suddenly the country had changed, erupting in protests as more people realized the urgent need to address racism. But on May 28th, I saw that Ben had posted on Facebook challenging the protesters with an article entitled, “At least 50 people were shot in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend.”

In his post, he wrote:

Dion Neal was murdered over the weekend. Along with him, 9 others were murdered, and 50 people shot including a 5 year old girl and 2 teenage boys, one of whom is in critical condition. Where’s the national outrage?

…Many people would say, Floyd’s death was about race. I refuse to see it that way until there’s evidence for it. Unless something comes out about the cop being a racist, how do we know he wouldn’t have done the same thing to a white guy on the ground or Hispanic guy on the ground? … The evidence will bear itself out, but I’m so tired of people jumping to the race card just because it’s a white cop and black man in custody. When you do that, you’re giving into the very prejudice you hope would end!

By now familiar with Ben’s thinking, I knew the subtext of this post. He was again dismissing the realities of unconscious bias and systemic racism and saying, as he had before, that “all lives matter” and we should just be colorblind. This is the kind of thinking the antiracism movement is working to dismantle.

I’d been trying to dismantle it in my conversations with him, too. Clearly, I had not yet succeeded.

If I hadn’t already been talking with Ben, I might have been more incensed by his post. But even though I felt frustrated, my response was not as angry as it would once have been. In this blog series, I want to explain why, and why I’m being so patient with him.

My goal is more conservative antiracists.

This nine-part series is aimed especially at white readers, because white people play a critical role in talking to each other about racism. We can help lighten this burden for people of color, who often find it exhausting to explain racism over and over to us.

My agenda in the series is twofold. First, I hope to persuade Ben and others who share his views to become antiracist.

Being antiracist is not the same as being nonracist. Nonracism is a passive stance, whereas antiracism is active. It’s the recognition that there’s work to be done, that equality of opportunity does not yet exist because of systemic racism, and that we need to change our systems in order to fix the problem.

I want Ben to understand this, and also to see that antiracism is neither unpatriotic nor even necessarily progressive.

“I don’t want to turn you into a progressive antiracist like me,” I told him once. “I know you’ll always be conservative. But I want to turn you into a conservative antiracist.”

I want racism to become less politicized, perhaps akin to poverty. Poverty is quite political—progressives and conservatives have very different views on how best to address it. But what’s not political is recognizing that poverty exists and deserves our attention. All of us are anti-poverty. I want us all to be antiracist, too.

The more we all recognize racism as an ongoing problem, the better we’ll be at solving it together.

Persuasion is most likely in an atmosphere of respect.

My other aim in this series is to help readers respect those with different beliefs about racism, even when they strongly disagree. Such respect is important because if there’s any hope of changing people’s minds on this issue, it will happen slowly. This is patient work.

David Campt, a self-described “black man who teaches white people how to be more effective anti-racists,” urges white people to talk to each other about race the way Ben and I have been talking, with compassion.

In a blog post called “Message To White Allies From A Black Anti-Racism Expert: You’re Doing It Wrong,” Campt says he is deeply troubled not only by the persistent racial divide in this country but also “by what I hear from white allies about how they respond to racially-problematic utterances.”

Responses typically fall into four categories, he says: ostracizing, vilifying, schooling, and shaming. None of these are helpful.

While understandable, responses like these are not only ineffective, but frequently counter-productive. Instead of bringing more people into the effort to meet the extraordinary challenge of systemic racism, these reactions from allies splinter our community — and sadly, white families — into warring factions. And, worst of all, they don’t help people of color. (Emphasis in original.)

When white people vilify each other around issues of race, it’s people of color who pay the steepest price, since vilification leads to so little progress.

Campt urges white allies to practice centering and calm rather than speaking to other white people from a place of anger. Once centered, he suggests we focus on curiosity, common humanity, and humility, and share stories about personal experiences.

The goal is not to eliminate the other person’s racism in a single conversation. It’s mainly to build a bridge to more sharing in the future.

Generally, I consider an anti-racism conversation between a white ally and a person with racially problematic views a success if:

1. The exchange includes you expressing your perspective about the reality of racism.

2. The other person leaves the conversation willing to talk about racism with you again.

I started engaging with Ben on Facebook in an effort to persuade him to my views, and I’m sure he engaged with me for the same reason. That hasn’t changed. Although by now I sincerely enjoy our talks, I also still hope to persuade him, and I’m guessing he feels similarly.

But we both recognize that the more respectful we are, the more likely that is to occur.

Dialogue complements activism.

There is other, less patient work happening right now too. Activists are fighting for urgent changes—things that should have happened a long time ago, like true, meaningful police and prison reform. But the deep work of changing hearts and minds is also important in the long term. These two efforts, the impatient and the patient, complement each other.

And so, some days I have stood on street corners holding my Black Lives Matter sign, or I’ve called my elected officials or signed petitions. And other days, I’ve sat down with Ben, asked him how his family is, and asked him about his thoughts on racism. And I’ve listened as much as I’ve spoken.