Your white eyes aren’t more rational about George Floyd’s death, just less impacted

There are many pieces circulating right now begging white people to see black people as human. They have their place. I’ve written them. This isn’t one of them.

Because unfortunately, despite the cruel realities of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Douglas Lewis, there inevitably will be that guy who we work with, go to school with, are social media connected with, or just happen to know who believes he has a more “rational” perception of reality.

He’s off telling black and white people who acknowledge the pains of racism that “the odds” are low. He’s using the term “hysteria” and making analogies about “one bad apple” as if those not intervening and/or cosigning false reports and upholding policies that allow fired officers to police in other jurisdictions are not contaminated. He’s offering his best black on black stories about Chicago and ignoring most white murders are done by white people as well. He’s ultimately saying that talking about racism is divisive, instead of seeing that his denial and gaslighting are the true weapon of division.

He thinks he has the right to tell black people how to grieve, what is traumatizing for us, that the only race is the human race, and division is the creation of the media despite our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, telling us about their dehumanization before television, let alone the internet, existed. He doesn’t understand that this conversation is only new to him, that King referenced “police brutality against the negro” in the I Have A Dream speech. He doesn’t even know that the original role of American police was to retrieve enslaved runaways to captivity or simply:

Control. Black. Bodies.

Despite his confidence, he’s not more rational or educated. He’s just less impacted. And if something touches him and he sees himself in the victim, all that stiff upper lip, I don’t feel, pseudo-intellectual posturing disappears faster than a Charlotte snow on Christmas.

When the victims resemble that guy and his family, his callous use of statistical probabilities disappear. After 9/11, he didn’t say that only .00000012% of annual flights had this happen. He didn’t say it was only 0.00001% of the population who died and we were overreacting. He didn’t say this was almost exclusively in one state and the rest of us not flying there shouldn’t have to be inconvenienced.

When everyone around the country promotes how serious the opioid epidemic is, that guy doesn’t say it’s overhyped, as the 2018 overdose 12 month death number of 48,000 is less than half that of three months of COVID-19 (which he originally cared about when we thought it was those traveling on business and their families who were most susceptible, but now sees as “overblown” once new demographic data came out making him feel safe to blow off masks, distancing, and the virus altogether). That guy is different when he personally feels threatened — 80% of 9/11 and opioid victims were white — no matter the numbers, but convinces himself that his pain is “universal.”

I never feared Al-Qaeda and even went to NYC a year later by flight with annoying new protocols. Despite lacking personal opioid experience, I responded empathically when a white youth minister asked me to talk to her youth group in Matthews about it. In neither situation did I mock, downplay, or gaslight those in pain. I’ve even worked to help that guy whose demographic overwhelmingly dies the most by suicide in this nation, as I know the unfeeling “rational” façade is just that. Don’t be that guy.

This story was originally published May 29, 2020 at 11:39 AM.