Racist to imagine a whites-only problem
In my mirror, I see a tanned professor who for years has educated people of all races, a member of the human race angered and grieving over George Floyd’s murder, not the heavy-kneed white supremacist Chicago Tribune columnist Dahleen Glanton imagines when she writes, “White people, you are the problem.”
Glanton defines racism as “based on the belief that one’s own race is superior,” so “black people cannot be racist” because they “have never experienced” superiority. I suggest Glanton experienced moral superiority in writing this definition, so she fits it. But immunizing one race while incriminating another is inherently racist.
Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois did not see race as a “whites only” problem. Washington worked with white leaders to educate African Americans because both races needed to repair damage slave owners did to blacks. Du Bois promoted “the talented tenth” to show blacks could equal whites, but he also complained about black criminality.
George Floyd’s murderer(s) will be brought to justice. But while racists like Glanton see whites as the problem, they see only a morally whitewashed image of their race-baiting, black-privileging selves, who are part of the problem as well.