[Sent 17 January 2022 to my wife and three daughters]
Greetings. I trust you are safe, well, and warm. As preparation/orientation for this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day remembrance, I read Letters To My White Male Friends (2021) by journalist and social justice activist Dax-Devlon Ross. He is black. He was born to parents ready in the late 1960s to emerge from Jim Crow segregation with the intent to assimilate based on talent and hard work. He was educated at an elite private Quaker school in the DC suburbs and then at similarly elite universities.
The letter format allows Ross to address the reader as ‘you’, as if sitting together across a cafĂ© table drinking coffee, as if walking together in a park. He is quite candid about the irony that he unwittingly became complicit with and was rewarded by the systemic racism inseparable from the culture into which he had assimilated. His autobiographical confessions are complemented by penetrating analyses of Supreme Court decisions, gentrification, drug wars, gun violence, and economic disparities. I heard his choice/use of ‘friend’ with two meanings – (1) an echo of the Quaker identity laced into his elite private school education in the DC suburbs and (2) a recognition that the reader is well-intended and committed, but not yet radically insightful re systemic racism.
Ross patiently and sensitively moves with his white male friends to the demand for a verdict. How will I, how will you, how will we now respond to the sobering reality of systemic racism so deeply/pervasively present wherever we look/turn? To answer, I returned again to the last stanza in a meditation – Awakened From Peaceful Slumber -- I wrote many years ago in an effort to I hold myself accountable.
May my conscience be disturbed by the loss of dignity ‘getting rich’ and ‘staying rich’ imposes.
May my self avoid self-serving values and habits.
May my lifestyle maximize the diversity of individuals who feel welcome in my home.
May my possessions be rid of anything I value more than “one of the least of these”.
May my introspection cause dis-ease with my being materially affluent.
May my responses encourage a way of being together that humanizes rather than exploits.
Letters To My White Male Friends is artfully composed, cogently reasoned, timely published, urgently needed. I encourage you to check it out.
Doug/Dad
