In giving the author's credentials at the end of the article, the editors
omitted that Bill Ayers was a member of a radical student organization in
the 60's which, among other things, bombed symbols of the military
industrial complex, and lived underground for several years to avoid
arrest..
Miriam
Fellow White Men, Listen to the Voices You Have Ignored for So Long
Sunday, December 17, 2017
By Bill Ayers, Truthout | Op-Ed
Fellow White Men, Listen to the Voices You Have Ignored for So Long
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)
"White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of
the civil rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black
people in this country achieved the rudiments of their freedom through the
killing of whites."
-- Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power
In the quote above, Coates is referring to the bloodiest war in US history,
the Civil War, a war begun by Confederate traitors willing to blow up the
whole house in defense of a single freedom: their assumed right to own other
human beings.
That war never ended, as the afterlife of slavery included the infamous
Black Codes, chain gangs, segregation and red-lining, Jim Crow laws, and the
organized terrorism of lynching and night rides. Now the afterlife of the
afterlife abides in the serial murder of Black people by militarized police
forces, the Thirteenth Amendment and mass incarceration, separate and
unequal schools, and the creation and perpetuation of ghettos through law
and public policy, just to name a few atrocities.
Of course, there's also prejudice and racial bias, but the well-spring of
that bigotry is the structure of inequality itself, not the other way
around. That is, the reality of inequality baked into law and economic
condition as well as history, custom and culture generates racist thoughts
and feelings as justification, and those racist ideas keep regenerating as
long as the structures of white supremacy and Black oppression are in place.
Race itself is, of course, both everywhere and nowhere at all -- a social
construction and massive fiction, and at the same time, the hardest of
hard-edged realities.
Body cameras and prison reform and sensitivity training and education will
not end the racial nightmare -- even if some reforms would be welcomed.
Instead, we must face reality and courageously confront history, tell the
truth, and then destroy the entire edifice of white supremacy:
metaphorically speaking, it means burning down the plantation.
And when the plantation is at last burned to the ground, people of European
descent, or "those who believe they are white," will find the easy
privileges we have taken for granted disappearing, and along with them, our
willful blindness and faux innocence. Also gone must be the fragile,
precarious perch of superiority. White folks will have to give up our
accumulated, unearned advantages, and yet, they stand to gain something
wonderful: a fuller personhood and a moral bearing. We face an urgent
challenge, then, if we are to join humanity in the enormous task of creating
a just and caring world, and it begins with rejecting white supremacy -- not
simply despising bigotry and backwardness, but spurning as well all those
despicable structures and traditions. It extends to refusing to embrace
optics over justice, "multiculturalism" or "diversity" over an honest
reckoning with reality -- to becoming race traitors as we learn the loving
art of solidarity in practice.
There's a somewhat similar challenge facing those of us who identify as men
right this minute, and it's roiling the whole society and confronting all of
us. It, too, requires facing up to reality, examining history courageously
and thoroughly, and noting the interaction of prejudice with the structures
that uphold and spread the bias: sexism and the heteronormative patriarchal
system of male supremacy. It, too, will demand that we burn down a
plantation of sorts, and it, too, will mean the privileged -- all men --
will lose their comfortable and taken-for-granted advantages, as well as
their shaky and inherently unstable place of dominance. Just as African
Americans know white people well -- they've had to, as a matter of survival
-- women and nonbinary people know men much better than we know ourselves.
Gender, too, is a social construction, a fiction that has very real
implications for people's lives. As Simone de Beauvoir observed long ago,
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" -- and once more, a harsh
reality. This moment challenges the deeply embedded cultural practices that
have held women as inferior human beings, shackled by dehumanizing myths,
objectified and dominated by others. Women who've been manipulated and
controlled, forced to see themselves as passive objects but not the active
agents and subjects of history, are standing up and speaking out. Men who
believe in freedom must stand up as well.
When male politicians and commentators, including Mitch McConnell, declare,
"I believe the women," let's take responsibility for testing that
hypothesis. Do they believe that women, nonbinary people and trans people
should have control over their bodies, and should be able to make their own
reproductive choices freely and express their sexuality in any way they
choose? That people of all genders must receive equal pay, and have a living
wage/stipend where needed? That no one should be forced to be married in
order to access basic needs like health insurance and decent housing, as
well as free child care while attending school or job training or work?
If we are to "believe the women," we must acknowledge these structures of
inequality that oppress and exploit them. Even as we fight against
individual acts of sexism. Let's work to end the patriarchy and the
structures of male supremacy.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Bill Ayers
Bill Ayers is a distinguished professor of education and a senior university
scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired), and founder of
both the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and Society, where
he taught courses in interpretive and qualitative research, urban school
change, and teaching and the modern predicament. A graduate of the
University of Michigan, the Bank Street College of Education, Bennington
College, Teachers College and Columbia University, Ayers has written
extensively about social justice, democracy and education, the cultural
contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical
and political enterprise. He is currently the vice president of the
curriculum studies division of the American Educational Research
Association.