When you don’t know what to do, do what you know, even if all you know how to do is say no.
This is the advice Janaya Khan, co-founder of BLM Canada, gave last night at their talk presented through Muhlenberg’s Center for Ethics on their overarching theme of “Troubling Truth.” The name of Khan’s talk was “Black Lives Matter: Demanding Social Transformation, Justice and Equality.” Khan is rightfully given the title of the “future within the Black Lives Matter movement.” They spoke on the tendency to react to the injustices of others in terms of their own personal truths and how they define their sense of self.
Janaya describes a person’s sense of self as being active through unwillingness to disrupt self truths and what they believe to be true about themselves. On the other hand, the inactive part is the desire to maintain structures of power, wealth, and privilege. The concept of privilege is described as claiming that we have also gone through hardships, but not being able to realize that there are some hardships we are not able to experience that others do. This refusal snowballs into the ideologies of prejudice and racism, especially in the case of white people towards Black and Latino people.
The assertion that those who voted for Trump were “altruistic, poor whites and confederate hillbillies” was shattered by the statistics put forth that his voters were mostly white people with a median income of $77,000. The “popular truth” is that Democrats lost because of the focus on identity politics towards people of color, but Khan suggests it is the opposite. Trump focused his campaign on his legacy of winning, his agenda to unravel the work of Barack Obama ,and increased militarism towards terrorist groups that were not an actual threat.
A few shocking facts that Khan presented to the audience were:
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It would take Black people 228 years to have the collective wealth that white people do now (that is if white people stopped compiling wealth completely).
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In 2009, a governmental group was assembled to investigate domestic terrorism; they determined that right-wing Christian, KKK, neo-Nazi fundamentalists were the greatest threat to the nation. In turn, the department was disbanded and nothing was done to combat their findings.
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Janaya Khan contemplated the implications of the recent “deadliest mass shooting of modern US history” in Las Vegas as well as those prior. The majority of these shootings are by white males, told all their lives they are entitled to some form of greatness, wealth, attractiveness, and popularity. When this is not achieved, where do all these emotions go? Khan attributes that this turns into a deadly, dangerous mix of entitlement and low self esteem. They use this to turn on unsuspecting victims rather than the system that put forth those ideals. The capitalist society breeds individualism, greed, and racism and is a direct contributor to the militarization and radicalization of white men.
Khan’s final words to the crowd were about looking back at what we can do to combat racism and white supremacy that we have seen and experienced within our own lives. Our tendency to be reactionary instead of active in situations is our main issue. Everyone can’t know everything or have a rebuttal or explanation for every act of injustice, but claiming that we simply “didn’t know” is not a valid excuse. They encouraged each and everyone of us not to be an activist, but rather to consider “who we sit with” as to avoid being a bystander within the movement and history happening right before our very eyes. Our jobs, henceforth, are to utilize the tools we have in the 21st century to create new models of improving equality.
When you’re asked what you were doing during this time, will you be proud of your answer?