My Commitment to Social Justice Does Not Mean I Hate White People

By Michelle Denise Jackson | Originally Published at For Harriet. September 11, 2014 | Photographic Credit; Shutterstock

I have always been good at making people feel uncomfortable by being extremely vocal about my views on political and social issues. This has also led to quite a few misunderstandings, especially with people not familiar with social justice praxis.

During my junior year of high school, I carried around a copy of The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler for an entire month. This was the beginning of my feminist awakening; and to this day, the play is one of my favorites. But at the time, I didn’t know how to articulate that I appreciated the way Ensler covered issues of sexual agency, body image, pleasure, and body empowerment with candor and humor. I just liked the book and wanted to see if the school’s administration would allow me to carry around a book with “vagina” on the cover. (They did.) Some of my teachers came up with an alternative explanation. My eleventh grade AP Language Arts teacher would later ask my best friend (after we graduated), “Hey, is Michelle Jackson a lesbian?”

My liberal arts college education included a number of classes on social justice and cultural studies. Upon moving back home after graduation, I had a lot of displaced anger about systems of power and oppression. This would often come spilling out during tense conversations with friends and family members. One night, I was playing a board game with my best friends from high school. Somehow, during our conversation, one of my friends mentioned that his white friend from South Africa told people she was “African-American.” I took offense to this, explaining that African-American has specific meaning as it relates to people descended from slaves in the U.S. I ended up making everyone uncomfortable and sounding like an asshole. At the time, I didn’t care… because I was right.

I have slowly begun to understand that how one frames and contextualizes conversations is important. I am not arguing for self-imposed respectability politics, but I do believe that how you say something often influences how people interpret it. And if you want folks to truly listen to what you say, sometimes you have to target your message in specific ways.

Right? Right. Except when you’re discussing issues of race and anti-racism on social media networks. Then all hell breaks loose.

There are many people in the world who believe that “social justice” equates to being anti-white, anti-wealth, and anti-male. (I’m not saying who those people are, but you can take a guess.) And if you dare try to have critical conversations about racism—especially the impact race plays in nearly every aspect of daily life in the U.S.—then you are just “trying to make white folks feel guilty for being white.”

Um, what? Come again? This irks the shit out of me.

It is 2014. Despite the fact that slavery ended more than 100 years ago, men and women of color are being gunned down in the streets of their own communities. There are people who actually believe that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen and is, in fact, a Muslim socialist terrorist. And somewhere in the world, Miley Cyrus and Iggy Azalea are making millions of dollars appropriating Black culture and Black womanhood… without actually caring about the history of Black women in the U.S.

Y’all, America has a race problem. And you know how problems are solved? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not by avoiding them and pretending they don’t exist. And it’s not by derailing productive conversations about race with your own feelings of self-pity and white guilt.

Too often, I have seen a person of color attempt to share their painful experience of racism, only to have a white person co-opt the conversation. And this happens in a number of ways: