The end of White Guilt-Towards a Luv based movement

Whatever. I was at a great party this weekend, in the Oakland home of my girl-Iz Fabulous. It was a bday party for one of her housemates, but it was like the New Bohemian Power Summit up in that piece.

I am always happy to be around young people and there were plenty of young beautiful people at this party. On the front porch there was a group of about one dozen Oakland youth posted on the steps talking about hip hop. They were super goofy, all that young twenties late teen exuberance bundled up and bursting through. They were rapping and dancing some, nowhere close to the beat from the music upstairs, but they were on their own vibe totally in their own cool little Oakland world, content to entertain each other with the stuff they just made up right there. They were mostly white kids and It's not that these kids were performing, they were having fun in a way that was completely natural to them. They were dancing and rapping, two things that white kids are not supposed to do well. And they were doing it well, to death as a matter of fact. They were not aping Hip Hop, those kids were Hip Hop.

It's not new. There are plenty of "white people" in hip hop, people who love it just as much as anyone else. Everyone has their reasons, but what it made me think about is the fact that this Hip Hop, this real Hip Hop is a love based movement. I am not talking about the Hip Hop that is a festival of homicide, genocide and suicide, sexism and homophobia. (though some of that music bumps too) I am talking about the Hip Hop that reaches into your heart and turns your experiences into something vibrant and real, that other people can share and take part in. Hip Hop can be a beautiful thing and at this party I saw that Hip Hop is alive and well in the hands of the Oakland Youth.

Nobody needs to come to those kids and tell them how racism is bullshit. They know, they naturally have multi racial friendships and an ability to look at race, class and gender in ways that most of us older folk have to go to college to learn. It is these kids that Dr. King was talking about when he spoke of "content of character" They take up Social Justice issues because they see what life can be like when we put our humanity before our skin color. I am not saying that race and privilege do not play a factor, but at least we acknowledge and interrogate their influences. If those kids had been mostly Black, Spanish speaking, Filipino or Polynesian youth I would have been impressed, but I was super impressed coz they were white. I know that's fucked up, but it's true.

I've spent a lot of time with these East Bay people. The Bay Area is already a special place, full of culture, education, natural beauty, history and innovation. I love it here in the Bay, especially Oakland, because it is a city of neighborhoods, people still try to get to know each other and the feel of the city is still down to earth and grounded.
Whatever, I don't know where I was going with that strain of thought, I had to get up and teach my class...I'm writing this hours after I started, but ironically, the same story is on the radio about the guy Tion Seck from Senegal on "All Things Considered" on NPR.

I started writing this installment with the intention of talking about White Guilt. White guilt is useless and self indulgent. It is not useful for building or sustaining any kind of lasting movement. We can't go very far if our rallying cry is "Blame Whitey!" Anyone who reads this blog or knows me, understands that I do not cut white America any slack at all, I really believe that the dismantling of white privilege is going to bring us closer together as human beings. Right now, white people are taught that they need to do what it takes to preserve white privilege, because keeping white people on top is what keeps all of society in such good shape. If we do not preserve and perpetuate the social and economic status of white people, all of us will suffer. yup. There have been, there are now and hopefully always will be white folks who buck against this. All of the white people that I have in my "inner circle of friends" are people like that.

Those of us who want Peace, Freedom, Equality and Justice, we want that for everyone. As a male, I believe in and fight for the liberation of women because I think the world will be better off if women are granted all the benefits and privileges that men receive. I know that we as a human race will develop by leaps and bounds if we stop praying at the altar of the "Great White God" The allegiance of a critical mass of white people is absolutely neccessary in this process, but if we as people of color just stopped treating white people like some kind of superhumans, if we stopped teaching our kids to be intimidated by them, stopped treating their women like they are the most beautiful, stopped looking to Europe for all the answers, if we just started to trust ourselves more, we will make a lot of progress in killing that mentality.

back to my thoughts about white guilt...
that shit is just not useful. Not in the long term. We cannot come together as people from making people feel like crap. The way to build a movement with white people is to find those white people who can genuinely appreciate and enjoy the humanity of all people and to use those people to educate other white people. White people need to tell other white people about their shit. People of color can call it out all day, we are probably preaching to the choir. Anyway, I just want life to be good for all people. I don't want to replace the power of white people with some black people just because "I want my turn", everyone deserves to have the best life that they can make for themselves and their community. White supremacy, sexism, classism, all those things are holding us all back from reaching our potential as human beings.

That's really enough of a ramble for today. Peace to the Peaceful.